[Goose]

"I think it's important for us to know, important for our players to know, what our core is. We have to fight my longevity here and all the things we've done, all the things we can reach back and call up in our playbook. That's not what's important. What's important is what are our guys good at and what are we committing to?"

By definition you can't be great at everything. So 100 different plays can't possibly be executed as well as 10.  But when you have those 10 down, you can do things off of them that break tendencies or otherwise can fool a defense.

David Shaw has done some self-reflection, exposed himself to different ideas, and become better. He's done the hardest thing for anyone to do.  He's gone from following a philosophy that worked, to changing his approach against his comfort zone, to get better. Nick Saban did this at Alabama. Before him, Gary Patterson did it at TCU.

Now if he'll just start allowing Spring official visits...

"I told our offensive staff earlier I'm Ok with building a tendency, that means you're good at something. If you're good at something you do it well and then you break your tendencies when you want to break your tendencies. That's what I want to make sure we're doing."

It is really interesting to me that we read the same information and see different things. I see a David Shaw who is invoking a "back to basics" approach, where you see a David Shaw who is evolving into new areas. I interpret his statements as saying that Stanford got too "cute" with it's schemes, and that we first and foremost want to be true to our core competencies. The area where Shaw may have evolved is that he isn't targeting the core towards what he would prefer it to be, but rather more towards what the players are best able to do. Perhaps both interpretations are true. However, I still expect lots of running plays called early in the game against Northwestern.

I do worry quite a bit when our defense is doing so much better than our offense. The "normal" progression is the offense catching up to the defense, but so far that hasn't been reported. In the recent past, the inability of our OL to perform against our own defense has translated into a similar inability against other teams defense. I hope we aren't in for a repeat performance of this trend.

[Goose]

"I think it's important for us to know, important for our players to know, what our core is. We have to fight my longevity here and all the things we've done, all the things we can reach back and call up in our playbook. That's not what's important. What's important is what are our guys good at and what are we committing to?"

By definition you can't be great at everything. So 100 different plays can't possibly be executed as well as 10.  But when you have those 10 down, you can do things off of them that break tendencies or otherwise can fool a defense.

David Shaw has done some self-reflection, exposed himself to different ideas, and become better. He's done the hardest thing for anyone to do.  He's gone from following a philosophy that worked, to changing his approach against his comfort zone, to get better. Nick Saban did this at Alabama. Before him, Gary Patterson did it at TCU.

Now if he'll just start allowing Spring official visits...

"I told our offensive staff earlier I'm Ok with building a tendency, that means you're good at something. If you're good at something you do it well and then you break your tendencies when you want to break your tendencies. That's what I want to make sure we're doing."

It is really interesting to me that we read the same information and see different things. I see a David Shaw who is invoking a "back to basics" approach, where you see a David Shaw who is evolving into new areas. I interpret his statements as saying that Stanford got too "cute" with it's schemes, and that we first and foremost want to be true to our core competencies. The area where Shaw may have evolved is that he isn't targeting the core towards what he would prefer it to be, but rather more towards what the players are best able to do. Perhaps both interpretations are true. However, I still expect lots of running plays called early in the game against Northwestern.

I do worry quite a bit when our defense is doing so much better than our offense. The "normal" progression is the offense catching up to the defense, but so far that hasn't been reported. In the recent past, the inability of our OL to perform against our own defense has translated into a similar inability against other teams defense. I hope we aren't in for a repeat performance of this trend.