06-03-2022, 12:25 PM
Excellent piece. Very nice job by the reporter, Daniel Wu. Fields, as we knew and like Isaiah Sanders before him, seems like a very neat young man. I'm glad he ended up at Stanford and am looking forward to seeing him on the field.
Now, on this quote: "Fields is fitting well into the culture of a Stanford program that, by his observation, is big on player leadership and developing players’ football IQ. Oklahoma, by contrast, felt “old school in a lot of ways,” Fields said. “Stuff was simple. We were gonna push sleds, run fast, lift heavy weights… our practices were very intense, like crazy.”
Lack of intensity compared to a winning program is concerning. Also maddening is the perennial trope about how Stanford develops football IQ. COACH SHAW, PLEASE STOP WITH THIS BULLSHIT! Football is not a sport in which you need to be smart or in which being smart is a big advantage. To the contrary, it's about pushing sleds, running fast, lifting weights, being intense, being crazy. It's modern day gladiators. You need to impose your will on the other team. You need to harness aggression (with "aggression" more operative than "harness"). You need to play fast.
Our coach is a nerd whose pride in his own intellect and that of the players around him is foundational to his identity, so he concocts a vision of football built around football IQ, but it's a vanity project rather than what's actually important to succeed in football. Our offense takes years for a quarterback to truly master. Every player on our offense has to have numerous plays in their head when they get to the line of scrimmage because every play is a pop quiz on how the defense is lined up and what play we should audible into rather than trusting a good play call and trying to play with any sort of tempo or surprise the defense. Our defenders talk incessantly about "keys" and "eye discipline" and other football IQ virtue signalling. True freshmen rarely make big impacts on either side of the ball.
There are so many tells on how all this BS is a vanity project. Very little of the above traits reflect what's actually successful in football. Watch the best offenses and see if any of them take as long at the line of scrimmage or change up the plays as much. Listen to the best defensive players talk and tell me if any of them talk about the mental side of the game so much. Look at other offenses and see if the effectiveness of the offense is so closely tied to the seniority of QB1.
This all would be bad enough if it only contributed to us being less competitive in football. Alas, it also has the effect of making the football less fun to watch. I think I'm like many fans in that when I watch my team play I want to see them actually play rather than just watch time run off the clock. Alas, out of 130 teams in the full seasons Shaw has coached our plays per game rankings (excluding the short 2020 season when we were #68) have been #129, #95, #127, #128, #120, #111, #109, #120, #93, and #45. Spot the outlier? This list is in order of recency, so #45 was with Andrew Luck at QB as a fourth year human computer. Without Luck (or fellow NFL starting QB Mills in his fourth year getting us to almost average tempo), it's been slow as molasses. Nobody gets to watch their team less than a Stanford fan. On defense, I think I'm like many fans in that when I watch my team play I want to see, sorry if it's uncouth, violence. The defenders who spark joy, always, are the ones who are described as "playing with their hair on fire" or exhibiting "reckless abandon" or who, to use the Stanford phrase, party in the backfield. It's about hitting people, not calculating how to react or what your one eleventh on that play is.
I've given versions of this rant many times but this insight from Fields put me over the edge. We heard happy talk all spring about how intense and focused the team is and in particular how the defense has a newfound aggression. Then, the very player who our coaches and players alike habitually tout as teaching our players how to win and how to have a winning mentality reveals that all the happy talk is BS. Fields was trying to pay Stanford a compliment and I have no reason to believe he doesn't think it's a compliment. But that makes it all the more revealing. Even when the coaches have ostensibly focused on intensity, Fields' takeaway is that we are more cerebral and less intense than the winning program he came from. The identity Shaw has built around this team is hard-wired at this point. It's about Stanford Men excelling in all walks of life and, to the extent there's a theory of the case about how it translates to winning football, it's about finding comparative advantage in the intellect of our players. The team's identity is a lie they tell themselves that being smart is helpful to football.
Now, on this quote: "Fields is fitting well into the culture of a Stanford program that, by his observation, is big on player leadership and developing players’ football IQ. Oklahoma, by contrast, felt “old school in a lot of ways,” Fields said. “Stuff was simple. We were gonna push sleds, run fast, lift heavy weights… our practices were very intense, like crazy.”
Lack of intensity compared to a winning program is concerning. Also maddening is the perennial trope about how Stanford develops football IQ. COACH SHAW, PLEASE STOP WITH THIS BULLSHIT! Football is not a sport in which you need to be smart or in which being smart is a big advantage. To the contrary, it's about pushing sleds, running fast, lifting weights, being intense, being crazy. It's modern day gladiators. You need to impose your will on the other team. You need to harness aggression (with "aggression" more operative than "harness"). You need to play fast.
Our coach is a nerd whose pride in his own intellect and that of the players around him is foundational to his identity, so he concocts a vision of football built around football IQ, but it's a vanity project rather than what's actually important to succeed in football. Our offense takes years for a quarterback to truly master. Every player on our offense has to have numerous plays in their head when they get to the line of scrimmage because every play is a pop quiz on how the defense is lined up and what play we should audible into rather than trusting a good play call and trying to play with any sort of tempo or surprise the defense. Our defenders talk incessantly about "keys" and "eye discipline" and other football IQ virtue signalling. True freshmen rarely make big impacts on either side of the ball.
There are so many tells on how all this BS is a vanity project. Very little of the above traits reflect what's actually successful in football. Watch the best offenses and see if any of them take as long at the line of scrimmage or change up the plays as much. Listen to the best defensive players talk and tell me if any of them talk about the mental side of the game so much. Look at other offenses and see if the effectiveness of the offense is so closely tied to the seniority of QB1.
This all would be bad enough if it only contributed to us being less competitive in football. Alas, it also has the effect of making the football less fun to watch. I think I'm like many fans in that when I watch my team play I want to see them actually play rather than just watch time run off the clock. Alas, out of 130 teams in the full seasons Shaw has coached our plays per game rankings (excluding the short 2020 season when we were #68) have been #129, #95, #127, #128, #120, #111, #109, #120, #93, and #45. Spot the outlier? This list is in order of recency, so #45 was with Andrew Luck at QB as a fourth year human computer. Without Luck (or fellow NFL starting QB Mills in his fourth year getting us to almost average tempo), it's been slow as molasses. Nobody gets to watch their team less than a Stanford fan. On defense, I think I'm like many fans in that when I watch my team play I want to see, sorry if it's uncouth, violence. The defenders who spark joy, always, are the ones who are described as "playing with their hair on fire" or exhibiting "reckless abandon" or who, to use the Stanford phrase, party in the backfield. It's about hitting people, not calculating how to react or what your one eleventh on that play is.
I've given versions of this rant many times but this insight from Fields put me over the edge. We heard happy talk all spring about how intense and focused the team is and in particular how the defense has a newfound aggression. Then, the very player who our coaches and players alike habitually tout as teaching our players how to win and how to have a winning mentality reveals that all the happy talk is BS. Fields was trying to pay Stanford a compliment and I have no reason to believe he doesn't think it's a compliment. But that makes it all the more revealing. Even when the coaches have ostensibly focused on intensity, Fields' takeaway is that we are more cerebral and less intense than the winning program he came from. The identity Shaw has built around this team is hard-wired at this point. It's about Stanford Men excelling in all walks of life and, to the extent there's a theory of the case about how it translates to winning football, it's about finding comparative advantage in the intellect of our players. The team's identity is a lie they tell themselves that being smart is helpful to football.