11-10-2019, 01:17 PM
(11-10-2019, 01:00 PM)lex24 Wrote: Brickity - a large crowd is 100,000 screaming lunatics. You simply cannot compare Northern California football crowds to anything in the south or for that matter the Midwest when it comes to college football. Both Stanford and Cal DOWNSIZED. Considerably. Because a half to two-thirds empty stadium is not good.
quote="Brickcity" pid='260450' dateline='1573415166']
(11-10-2019, 11:43 AM)Farm93 Wrote:(11-10-2019, 08:10 AM)cardcrimson Wrote: So, if I read your comment correctly, Shaw is not a top tier coach in your opinion. If he were great or top tier, he would have wanted to challenge himself at the highest level, either at other programs or the NFL. Since Shaw has not, he is happily complacent at Stanford and mediocrity.
Fair point indeed.
(11-10-2019, 07:41 AM)Farm93 Wrote:
Shaw is different. He has ties to Stanford. He is a top tier coach. If he were to leave. Stanford would need the following things to happen.
A top tier football mind.
A coach capable of recruiting athletes out of the South to play in Northern California
A coach willing to tolerate coaching in front of 20,000 fans in the 2nd & 3rd quarters of games, and as few a a couple of hundred fans at the end of a game if the 4th quarter is played after 9PM.
A coach willing to accept a job with few chances to get the product promotional money common in other areas of the USA
Oh, and a coach willing to navigate Stanford's very restrictive administration standards.
Based on that list Stanford's next coach will be an unproven coach and/or an alum.
The catch is if the unproven coach is successful even for a year, then they immediately will be able to command a 2X or 3X increase in salary, additional fame and prestige by going to SEC or BigTen or NFL. They will leave. (see. Harbaugh, Green, Walsh). The more likely scenario is they will not succeed because of the reasons above, and be fired after 2 or 3 years. (see Football 2002-2007, or basketball)
So for Stanford to get an great, or amazing coach, and keep that coach for many years that coach needs to have links to Stanford. Essentially the only applicant that would match or exceed the hire of David Shaw 2011 would be David Shaw 2020.
To put it a different way, if David Shaw was at Northwestern, or Duke or Rice with the success he has had over the last 8+ seasons we would likely be screaming at the administration to take advantage of this down year and get him coaching at Stanford.
The grass is always greener....
While it's true that it wouldn't be easy to find a top-notch coach and keep him, do remember that Stanford is certainly capable of drawing large crowds. Both in football and basketball. The formula is pretty simple: WIN. We saw as recently as 2015 that the crowds were good at Stanford Stadium when the team is competing for a conference championship.
Regarding the hypothetical re if Shaw had had similar success at Northwestern, or Duke or Rice: I think we all know that he wouldn't have had a ton of success at any of those places. Why? Because Harbaugh wasn't previously the head coach at any of those places. Look, I'll gladly give Shaw credit for maintaining what Harbaugh built - for a few years - but I think what you're seeing now is the type of "success" that Shaw likely would have had from the get-go if he were at any of those other schools.
I should have defined what I meant by "large." I mean large by Stanford's historical standards. Obviously, we can't put more than 50,000 people in the stands because that's the stadium's capacity. But, I doubt most coaches really care. What they likely to care about is seeing a stadium that's near capacity. The atmosphere at Stanford Stadium from 2010-2013, as well as 2015, was great.