11-23-2021, 02:04 PM
To reiterate Teejers' first point: yes, it is just college football, and there are weightier matters in the world. The sport is fantastic and entertaining, but it is ultimately an endeavor of 19-23 year-old young men playing a game. My father was a power 5 athletic director and stated on various occasions that his career and job security depended upon how a group of 20 year-old kids played on any given Saturday, so there's that.
There have been a few posts about whether the current situation evokes anger or sadness. In my case, the overriding emotion is disappointment. One of the most salient statements Shaw made when he took over from Harbaugh was that there was no truth to the notion that sustained success was impossible at a university with Stanford's high academic standards. Further, he was insistent that the program was larger than any one player or coach. And for the first part of his coaching tenure, he proved the skeptics wrong. Harbaugh, Fangio and Taggart left, and 2011 was an enormously successful season (if we exclude the last minutes of the Fiesta Bowl). Luck left, and Shaw won a Pac-12 title and a Rose Bowl in 2012. Stepfan Taylor and Pep Hamilton left, and in 2013 Stanford again won the Pac-12 and went to the Rose Bowl (again, let's forget the last minutes of that Rose Bowl). 2014 was a bit of a negative blip, but 2015 was perhaps Shaw's best team ever, even after losing Derek Mason after the 2014 season. In short, Shaw was proving that the program could continue at a high level and was not dependent on any single player or coach. I was never more sold on Shaw than after the team trounced the Hawkeyes on January 1, 2016. Three Pac-12 championships in his first five years, 4 BCS bowls. The man had committed and delivered. Rivals in the Pac-12, like Petersen and Mora, often referred to the "Stanford System" and how effective it was. It was perhaps not flashy nor entertaining, but it won games and had quite a few admirers.
Then things started slowly trending down. The D was now "bend-don't-break"; the O-line could not open holes for McCaffrey; there was the controversy at QB; we were 4-3 after 7 games in 2016 and were out of the race for the north. Clearly, the "System" was showing cracks. And my overriding criticism of Shaw is that he appeared to believe that the "System" was self-sustaining: recruit a decent class, promote in-house assistants to coordinators, dress everybody in Cardinal red and white, and the dominance remains. Yes, the program was larger than any one player or coach. But if you lose enough players and coaches and fail to reload the team AND staff with individuals of equal caliber, you begin to lose. Even in the year of Bryce Love's single season Stanford rushing record, the decline continued: our differential of rushing yards per game vs. our opponents declined from +126 in 2011 to only +33 by 2017. The next year, it finally flipped to negative.
And this slow decline has been profoundly disappointing. Shaw has been at Stanford since 2007 and has lived through 15 seasons. Nobody has been associated with the program longer. And nobody should know better what it takes to field a winning team at Stanford. Yet here we are, and I can't explain it. Is it complacency on his part? Is it fatigue? Is it lack of creativity, fire, will-to-win? I can't answer that. All I know is that we are where we are, and only dramatic change (a la 2007) is going to bring about a positive upward trend again.
But, yeah, when all is said and done, it's just football.
There have been a few posts about whether the current situation evokes anger or sadness. In my case, the overriding emotion is disappointment. One of the most salient statements Shaw made when he took over from Harbaugh was that there was no truth to the notion that sustained success was impossible at a university with Stanford's high academic standards. Further, he was insistent that the program was larger than any one player or coach. And for the first part of his coaching tenure, he proved the skeptics wrong. Harbaugh, Fangio and Taggart left, and 2011 was an enormously successful season (if we exclude the last minutes of the Fiesta Bowl). Luck left, and Shaw won a Pac-12 title and a Rose Bowl in 2012. Stepfan Taylor and Pep Hamilton left, and in 2013 Stanford again won the Pac-12 and went to the Rose Bowl (again, let's forget the last minutes of that Rose Bowl). 2014 was a bit of a negative blip, but 2015 was perhaps Shaw's best team ever, even after losing Derek Mason after the 2014 season. In short, Shaw was proving that the program could continue at a high level and was not dependent on any single player or coach. I was never more sold on Shaw than after the team trounced the Hawkeyes on January 1, 2016. Three Pac-12 championships in his first five years, 4 BCS bowls. The man had committed and delivered. Rivals in the Pac-12, like Petersen and Mora, often referred to the "Stanford System" and how effective it was. It was perhaps not flashy nor entertaining, but it won games and had quite a few admirers.
Then things started slowly trending down. The D was now "bend-don't-break"; the O-line could not open holes for McCaffrey; there was the controversy at QB; we were 4-3 after 7 games in 2016 and were out of the race for the north. Clearly, the "System" was showing cracks. And my overriding criticism of Shaw is that he appeared to believe that the "System" was self-sustaining: recruit a decent class, promote in-house assistants to coordinators, dress everybody in Cardinal red and white, and the dominance remains. Yes, the program was larger than any one player or coach. But if you lose enough players and coaches and fail to reload the team AND staff with individuals of equal caliber, you begin to lose. Even in the year of Bryce Love's single season Stanford rushing record, the decline continued: our differential of rushing yards per game vs. our opponents declined from +126 in 2011 to only +33 by 2017. The next year, it finally flipped to negative.
And this slow decline has been profoundly disappointing. Shaw has been at Stanford since 2007 and has lived through 15 seasons. Nobody has been associated with the program longer. And nobody should know better what it takes to field a winning team at Stanford. Yet here we are, and I can't explain it. Is it complacency on his part? Is it fatigue? Is it lack of creativity, fire, will-to-win? I can't answer that. All I know is that we are where we are, and only dramatic change (a la 2007) is going to bring about a positive upward trend again.
But, yeah, when all is said and done, it's just football.