11-07-2021, 02:49 PM
The point of it was to challenge the notion that Shaw doesn’t change his offensive philosophy year to year. That’s demonstrably false, and it is annoying that this lazy trope keeps surfacing.
More broadly, Shaw (and for that matter even someone like Nick Saban) is only going to be as good as the players he recruits and develops. The play calling matters much less than anyone here thinks. Yes, Stanford would have sucked on Friday no matter what Shaw called. But the converse is also true. They might not have hung 50 on us, but does anyone here think that against our defense, Utah couldn’t have dismantled us slinging the ball around?
Shaw needs to up his recruiting and player development game, no matter what offensive philosophy he chooses to pursue. Shaw has shown he can win playing phone booth football, if he has the horses. Without the players, Shaw has shown he can lose trying to run the ball, and trying to pass it. So it seems to me that instead of complaining that Shaw doesn’t run the offensive system that we each individually think he ought to run, that we are better off focusing our useless consternation on the lack of player development. We better all hope that he follows up the good 2022 recruiting class with another solid, balanced effort, instead of his penchant for taking a year off between solid recruiting classes. We better hope that Shaw fixes whatever is wrong that his coaches can’t get the players to tackle, block, or position themselves properly, and can’t get the players to build strength and endurance so that they are not physically manhandled in the trenches.
To the extent that I am bearish about the next couple of years of Stanford football, it’s not because I think that Shaw is stubborn and can’t come up with a game plan that puts his players in a position to win, it’s that he has left his players soft, and fixing that is a multi-year process that starts with recruiting and requires sustained player development, which we lack at the moment.
BC
More broadly, Shaw (and for that matter even someone like Nick Saban) is only going to be as good as the players he recruits and develops. The play calling matters much less than anyone here thinks. Yes, Stanford would have sucked on Friday no matter what Shaw called. But the converse is also true. They might not have hung 50 on us, but does anyone here think that against our defense, Utah couldn’t have dismantled us slinging the ball around?
Shaw needs to up his recruiting and player development game, no matter what offensive philosophy he chooses to pursue. Shaw has shown he can win playing phone booth football, if he has the horses. Without the players, Shaw has shown he can lose trying to run the ball, and trying to pass it. So it seems to me that instead of complaining that Shaw doesn’t run the offensive system that we each individually think he ought to run, that we are better off focusing our useless consternation on the lack of player development. We better all hope that he follows up the good 2022 recruiting class with another solid, balanced effort, instead of his penchant for taking a year off between solid recruiting classes. We better hope that Shaw fixes whatever is wrong that his coaches can’t get the players to tackle, block, or position themselves properly, and can’t get the players to build strength and endurance so that they are not physically manhandled in the trenches.
To the extent that I am bearish about the next couple of years of Stanford football, it’s not because I think that Shaw is stubborn and can’t come up with a game plan that puts his players in a position to win, it’s that he has left his players soft, and fixing that is a multi-year process that starts with recruiting and requires sustained player development, which we lack at the moment.
BC