Quote:Well, the fact that he transferred from the Air Force Academy probably also contributed. He was behind a current starting NFL QB last year and likely a future NFL draftee. I’m not entirely sure what we could have done with him other than moving him in front of Jac West sooner.
BC
Thanks for the kind words earlier BC! Hopefully I can continue posting here, started lurking again a week ago and am glad to be in the mix.
To me what was weird and annoying about the Isaiah Sanders' usage was our complete refusal to let him play quarterback. He had started multiple games as a major college football starting quarterback and could have been viewed as a legitimate backup. Yes, Air Force is a different beast, but if you look at his starts against UNLV and Boise State he played great and racked up a ton of yards, including through the air. We could have let him be a backup QB. Instead we insisted on wildcat only, even to absurd extremes in the Utah and Oregon State games. One absurd extreme: we literally subbed in and out West and Sanders mid-series and telegraphed whether it was going to be a run or pass play. Another absurd extreme: we played Dylan Plautz at QB in a Pac-12 game.
The way things played out with Sanders was really a head-scratcher. I see two possibilities:
(1) Shawvita closed-mindedly and unstrategically decided long ago that Isaiah Sanders was a certain kind of weapon, in large part because it's very rare for a team to have to go to a third string QB or worse and because Shawvita love specialization and "personnel packages." Plays in that narrow package are all that Sanders was taught/practiced. When we experienced dire straits in terms of QB depth Sanders did not have the full offense at his disposal and a combination of necessity and stubbornness compel;ed our brain trust to look to QBs who have not been pigeonholed into specific "packages," like West and Plautz.
(2) Sanders had an upper body injury that made him a fundamentally different QB than the guy who racked up 390 yards of offense in defeating UNLV and then one week later exchanged haymakers with 10 win Boise State to get over 300 yards against a very good defense.
Sanders' two years on the Farm felt like a guy who came to Stanford for personal/academic/career reasons and got to play football as a bonus but wasn't part of the football team's plans. Because our coaches are so obsessed with the years-long training in our offense for QBs, they viewed Sanders as a good locker room guy, stellar community leader who would reflect well on the program, and niche/gadget wildcat option. I don't think we really viewed him as a legitimate QB and that ended up having really ugly results by the end of the season, which was frustrating because he was a proven legitimate QB at another school.