[81alum]

The game was dreadful.  Recruiting seems down.  I never used to turn games off--for decades.  But I have done it several times in the last few years.  Hope springs eternal each season but the game has a grim way of encouraging reality to intrude.

Despite the awful results, Shaw remains the winning-est coach in Stanford football history, he is an ethical man, a wonderful role model, and an alum who truly understands academics at Stanford as no outsider ever will.  It is hard to give up on such a man.

I wonder, as an honest question, if there is an alternative hypothesis to the decline of Stanford football other than the coaching of David Shaw? 

Hypothesis:  Stanford historically has always been at a disadvantage in this game.  In fact, half our coaches have been failures or mediocre while here at Stanford.  Think of the illustrious names of Harris, Teevens, Wiggin, and Curtis.  Even Denny Green was 16-18 and never won a bowl.  Jack Elway had a losing record.  Jack Christianson had a winning record and pro credentials, but was fired after a quarterback controversy.  Many of these "losers" were smart, experienced coaches who flopped at Stanford.  I offer it as a theory only: success at Stanford is far more difficult to attain and even more difficult to sustain than at schools that lack all of our profound differences.  And as college sports become increasingly professionalized (corrupt, in my view) these differences will grow ever larger. 

So perhaps the reason for our profound disappointment is that Stanford, for a number of years, greatly overachieved its historical trajectory, and we fans were utterly deluded to think this could be sustained, given the modern, corrupt, professionalized college football environment.  I'd like to believe otherwise--that it is all Shaw's incompetence--since that would mean things could be easily turned around with a coaching change.  But, "the game has a grim way of encouraging reality to intrude."

Here is my prediction:  if Shaw is fired, we will run through several coaches as bad as our historical stable of losers before we find--if we ever do--someone with the EUTM to turn things around.  We might be in Div III by then.

[81alum]

The game was dreadful.  Recruiting seems down.  I never used to turn games off--for decades.  But I have done it several times in the last few years.  Hope springs eternal each season but the game has a grim way of encouraging reality to intrude.

Despite the awful results, Shaw remains the winning-est coach in Stanford football history, he is an ethical man, a wonderful role model, and an alum who truly understands academics at Stanford as no outsider ever will.  It is hard to give up on such a man.

I wonder, as an honest question, if there is an alternative hypothesis to the decline of Stanford football other than the coaching of David Shaw? 

Hypothesis:  Stanford historically has always been at a disadvantage in this game.  In fact, half our coaches have been failures or mediocre while here at Stanford.  Think of the illustrious names of Harris, Teevens, Wiggin, and Curtis.  Even Denny Green was 16-18 and never won a bowl.  Jack Elway had a losing record.  Jack Christianson had a winning record and pro credentials, but was fired after a quarterback controversy.  Many of these "losers" were smart, experienced coaches who flopped at Stanford.  I offer it as a theory only: success at Stanford is far more difficult to attain and even more difficult to sustain than at schools that lack all of our profound differences.  And as college sports become increasingly professionalized (corrupt, in my view) these differences will grow ever larger. 

So perhaps the reason for our profound disappointment is that Stanford, for a number of years, greatly overachieved its historical trajectory, and we fans were utterly deluded to think this could be sustained, given the modern, corrupt, professionalized college football environment.  I'd like to believe otherwise--that it is all Shaw's incompetence--since that would mean things could be easily turned around with a coaching change.  But, "the game has a grim way of encouraging reality to intrude."

Here is my prediction:  if Shaw is fired, we will run through several coaches as bad as our historical stable of losers before we find--if we ever do--someone with the EUTM to turn things around.  We might be in Div III by then.