05-12-2020, 11:37 AM
To answer the question in the OP...
Not much can be drawn from 2019 because the OL and QB injuries were a significant anomaly. You have to look back to 2018 and to the '19 and '20 recruiting classes to assess the current Shaw offense.
Recruiting more mobile QBs, all-purpose RBs, and WRs, combined with fewer TEs and FBs, suggests no more "let's win in a phone booth" offense. Whether whatever the offensive style is will continue to be relevant in the NFL can't really be answered since we haven't seen it, but the evidence suggests the answer is yes, with a caveat.
In 2018 we saw KJ Costello winging the ball around, but Bryce Love was still involved and not given very many opportunities as a receiver, and Costello is not a real running threat.
It would be great to see Stanford adopt the Niners zone running offense and run play-action off it, but based on the QBs that have been recruited (and Mills is a decent runner too), it seems we're more likely to see zone read options and RPOs out of shotgun, like pretty much everyone else does now. This would suggest Stanford's offense will have evolved to whatever Pro Style is these days, but Stanford will no longer have some unique claim to run a Pro Style offense like 5-10 years ago. The caveat to all this is rather than being able to leverage offering a highly valuable playing style few others offered, Stanford is just keeping up with the Joneses rather than becoming a dinosaur.
Not much can be drawn from 2019 because the OL and QB injuries were a significant anomaly. You have to look back to 2018 and to the '19 and '20 recruiting classes to assess the current Shaw offense.
Recruiting more mobile QBs, all-purpose RBs, and WRs, combined with fewer TEs and FBs, suggests no more "let's win in a phone booth" offense. Whether whatever the offensive style is will continue to be relevant in the NFL can't really be answered since we haven't seen it, but the evidence suggests the answer is yes, with a caveat.
In 2018 we saw KJ Costello winging the ball around, but Bryce Love was still involved and not given very many opportunities as a receiver, and Costello is not a real running threat.
It would be great to see Stanford adopt the Niners zone running offense and run play-action off it, but based on the QBs that have been recruited (and Mills is a decent runner too), it seems we're more likely to see zone read options and RPOs out of shotgun, like pretty much everyone else does now. This would suggest Stanford's offense will have evolved to whatever Pro Style is these days, but Stanford will no longer have some unique claim to run a Pro Style offense like 5-10 years ago. The caveat to all this is rather than being able to leverage offering a highly valuable playing style few others offered, Stanford is just keeping up with the Joneses rather than becoming a dinosaur.