[msqueri]

Just me or did it seem like 2021 was a brutal year injury-wise across the conference?  There are 23 teams that have missed more than 3 players per game, and 5 of them were 2021 teams:
Washington, ASU, Oregon, Cal, and Stanford.

As bad as we were, we were pretty much in the middle of the PAC last year for injuries.

Turley’s injury luck doesn’t seem to have transferred to Colorado, who had a greater than average number of injuries.

BC

I'm glad you mentioned this. I had meant to highlight something like it in my post. The Pac-12 North (RIP!) was really snake-bit last season. While Stanford is counting on a reversion to the mean, so are almost all of the teams we aspire to compete against (even true for USC).

I can perhaps get into this in more detail when I look at the relationship between injuries and wins, but I'd be skeptical of anybody putting too much stock into health as a principal driver for a resurgence in Stanford football. Other teams will presumably get healthier too and, most fundamentally, our crappiness in 2019 and 2021 stemmed from an inability to compete in the trenches, which was only partially due to injuries in 2019 and not even in the least due to injuries in 2021.

Injuries are less of an issue when you have depth, which is a function of recruiting & development. When those are lacking, the impact of injuries is bigger, as are the odds of them occurring because your starters are taking more snaps due to the lack of competent backups.

Stanford's 2019 experience clearly tells this tale. While it was bad luck to have the confluence of OL injuries we had, it wasn't injuries that made us start numerous true freshmen. We had to rely on Rouse, Miller, and Hornibrook because we had recruited OL so lightly the previous years. With a sane pipeline, there'd be a layer of linemen in between the veterans and the newcomers, but we didn't have a sane pipeline. Similarly on defense ILB had to rely on position switches because we had gone multiple years neglecting that position on the recruiting trail.

I don't think 2021 fits as neatly into either the Shawpologist narrative or the Shaw-critical narrative focused on recruiting. That year it's harder to make a case that all the injuries did us in because the trenches stayed healthy yet that was where the primary problems were. And quality depth was certainly not a problem for Stanford at WR, nor could the season be blamed on DB play, the two positions where injuries were concentrated.

I do think the "development" shortcoming is a generally accurate one to pin our lack of resilience to injuries on in the sense that when certain position groups are particularly beleaguered it falls on other position groups to pick up the slack, and our development in general across the roster hasn't been great. I think this is the fundamental issue. It's not so much that Stanford lacks depth but that we lack quality. I think the recent Shaw teams have actually been quite deep by Stanford standards (e.g., think about drop-offs from first to second string compared to past teams) but they lack dudes. Our problem is we haven't had big-time difference-makers, which you need when adversity requires that some part of the roster really pick up the slack.

[msqueri]

Just me or did it seem like 2021 was a brutal year injury-wise across the conference?  There are 23 teams that have missed more than 3 players per game, and 5 of them were 2021 teams:
Washington, ASU, Oregon, Cal, and Stanford.

As bad as we were, we were pretty much in the middle of the PAC last year for injuries.

Turley’s injury luck doesn’t seem to have transferred to Colorado, who had a greater than average number of injuries.

BC

I'm glad you mentioned this. I had meant to highlight something like it in my post. The Pac-12 North (RIP!) was really snake-bit last season. While Stanford is counting on a reversion to the mean, so are almost all of the teams we aspire to compete against (even true for USC).

I can perhaps get into this in more detail when I look at the relationship between injuries and wins, but I'd be skeptical of anybody putting too much stock into health as a principal driver for a resurgence in Stanford football. Other teams will presumably get healthier too and, most fundamentally, our crappiness in 2019 and 2021 stemmed from an inability to compete in the trenches, which was only partially due to injuries in 2019 and not even in the least due to injuries in 2021.

Injuries are less of an issue when you have depth, which is a function of recruiting & development. When those are lacking, the impact of injuries is bigger, as are the odds of them occurring because your starters are taking more snaps due to the lack of competent backups.

Stanford's 2019 experience clearly tells this tale. While it was bad luck to have the confluence of OL injuries we had, it wasn't injuries that made us start numerous true freshmen. We had to rely on Rouse, Miller, and Hornibrook because we had recruited OL so lightly the previous years. With a sane pipeline, there'd be a layer of linemen in between the veterans and the newcomers, but we didn't have a sane pipeline. Similarly on defense ILB had to rely on position switches because we had gone multiple years neglecting that position on the recruiting trail.

I don't think 2021 fits as neatly into either the Shawpologist narrative or the Shaw-critical narrative focused on recruiting. That year it's harder to make a case that all the injuries did us in because the trenches stayed healthy yet that was where the primary problems were. And quality depth was certainly not a problem for Stanford at WR, nor could the season be blamed on DB play, the two positions where injuries were concentrated.

I do think the "development" shortcoming is a generally accurate one to pin our lack of resilience to injuries on in the sense that when certain position groups are particularly beleaguered it falls on other position groups to pick up the slack, and our development in general across the roster hasn't been great. I think this is the fundamental issue. It's not so much that Stanford lacks depth but that we lack quality. I think the recent Shaw teams have actually been quite deep by Stanford standards (e.g., think about drop-offs from first to second string compared to past teams) but they lack dudes. Our problem is we haven't had big-time difference-makers, which you need when adversity requires that some part of the roster really pick up the slack.