One last dance for Stanford QB
It’s the last roundup for Kevin Hogan, and this cowboy has seen plenty of them. No other Pac-12 quarterback is as experienced as the fifth-year Stanford senior, who’s 24-8 as a starter.
“It’s definitely a little weird being the old guy around here now,” Hogan said. “It feels like just yesterday I was in my first camp.”
Winning the Pac-12 title and getting to the Rose Bowl are the objectives, as usual. “It would be a disappointment to fall short because I think we have all the pieces to get there,” he said.
The Cardinal fell considerably short last season (8-5), and the season was extremely painful for Hogan in particular. He lost his father to cancer in December. It wasn’t until the final three games of the season that he played exceptionally well.
Thinking about a loved one’s illness “definitely takes an effect on you,” he said. “But I think overall, there was a lot of stuff with our team that we should have (handled) better.
“We should have handled the adversity better. We were put into a hole many times. We should have figured out ways to bounce back and get out of that hole.”
While considering entering the NFL draft, he was told by an NFL panel that that he would have been “anywhere from the third quarterback, from the late second (round) to the fifth or sixth,” he said. That’s quite a range, but Hogan also thought there were many reasons to come back to school. For one, he and his teammates hadn’t met their objectives. Now, there’s one more chance.
“We definitely have a feeling of urgency,” he said. “We need to take advantage of every second of practice, every second of meetings, wring this place like a sponge and get everything out of it that we can.”
In the offseason, he said, the coaches “made it really hard on us” in skull sessions and spring drills. “We’re ready to handle anything this year.”
Rather than face the stress of starting a master’s program, he decided to lighten his academic load in the spring, allowing him to take just two courses to earn his degree in science, technology and society in the fall quarter.
At this point, Hogan is practically a coach on the field. “He’s very comfortable with everything we’re asking him to do,” head coach David Shaw said. “He’s at the fine-tuning stage right now, the way he finished last year and all the way through spring football, just tweaking and fine-tuning. ... When he plays at a high level, he’s as good as anybody.”
He’s without last year’s leading receiver, Ty Montgomery, but the Cardinal are well stocked in targets for Hogan: from rangy Devon Cajuste (currently nursing an ankle injury) to speedsters like Michael Rector, Francis Owusu and tailback Christian McCaffrey to a quartet of promising tight ends.
Hogan is looking forward to seeing three or even four tight ends on the field at the same time. “If a defense lines up with big bodies, we can split (the tight ends) out,” he said. “If they line up with little bodies, we can run the ball. I’m excited to see what those kinds of packages look like.”
The offensive line, though without tackle Andrus Peat (now in the NFL), is stocked with experienced players. “They’re communicating much better than I’d seen them do last year,” Hogan said. “They feel much more comfortable.”