Fans can find no reason to watch
The collapse of Stanford’s football season has been conspicuous and unsettling, but never more so than during Saturday’s 10-5 loss to Colorado. A lifeless team is one thing, but this one came with booing at Stanford Stadium and outright vacancy in the stands.
A noon start should be welcome on any Pac-12 campus, especially in perfect weather, but Cardinal fans had apparently seen enough in those back-to-back conference losses to the Washington schools. The place was virtually empty minutes before kickoff. It barely reached the half-full stage in the second quarter. By the start of the third, the scene resembled some juniorcollege tilt between a pair of lost causes.
It was rude and it was
shocking, and it would never happen in a hotbed of the collegiate game, but this Stanford team does not deserve a vibrant audience. Who could see it coming after a 3-0 start, with consecutive wins over USC and UCLA? Certainly not head coach David Shaw or a team that looked pretty inspired at that point. But that is undeniably where we are now, a level of absolute mediocrity that even Christian McCaffrey can’t fix.
McCaffrey returned from his never-identified injury and rushed for 92 yards, carving out a few nice gains on sheer will power, but there will be no immediate repairs to Stanford’s offensive line. Games are won and lost in the trenches, and the Cardinal have been seriously overmatched. Unquestionably the best running back on the field was the Buffaloes’ Phillip Lindsay, who gained 131 yards on just 12 carries.
Before the game, some press-box pundits were trying to figure out a way Stanford could sneak into the Rose Bowl. Some key wins here, a Washington State malaise there ... well, forget that. Stanford is 2-3 in the conference, headed for one of those postseason matchups of little consequence. The Rose Bowl could also be Washington’s destiny; given the increasing skepticism over this year’s Pac-12, the Huskies will probably have to go undefeated to reach the four-team College Football Playoff.
The real story in this conference is Colorado, a team so miserable over the past four seasons, it managed just three Pac-12 wins total. Now 4-1 in the Pac-12 under esteemed coach Mike MacIntyre, the Buffaloes feel they can do just about anything.
“I’ve been around these guys for four years now,” said quarterback Sefo Liufau, who threw for just 135 yards on a terribly erratic day but connected with Shay Fields for a 15-yard touchdown in the second quarter. “Nobody quit. Nobody transferred. Nobody left. Everybody believed in where we were headed. We told ourselves we’d be something special, and here we are. This is just one step toward our ultimate goal.”
Lindsay spoke effusively about the Buffaloes “being gritty, having that swag.” Not so long ago, Stanford exuded such conviction, personified in the classy, hard-working, unstoppable McCaffrey. Now you have to wonder whether Stanford even has the edge over Cal, so absurdly flawed defensively but always game for a 50-point outburst.
Think about that Big Game for a moment (Nov. 19 in Berkeley), and the stunning contrasts involved. Stanford entered the Colorado game having scored just one offensive touchdown in each of its previous four games — and then couldn’t manage even that. team can score against Cal, probably including a couple of Pop Warner outfits in the East Bay.
The Bears are an offensive machine, led by quarterback Davis Webb, and over the course of an FBS-record 118 plays against Oregon on Friday
night — a 52-49 win in double overtime, for you folks who weren’t up for the near-midnight finish — they didn’t commit a single turnover. Colorado invaded Palo Alto with a vaunted offense but fell routinely short on crucial downs, Shaw calling it “a great day on the defensive side. And I don’t know if there’s a better defensive player in America than (defensive lineman) Solomon Thomas.”
Random moments aside, it was a horrible show from start to finish, and things really bottomed out during a secondquarter stretch in which Shaw alternated his quarterbacks, Ryan Burns and Keller Chryst, during a sputtering “drive” of utter futility. Ask any veteran of Stanford home games; booing is extremely rare. You might hear a smattering at times. This stretch brought some full-throated disgust.
We don’t often see Shaw in the midst of catastrophe, but we know he handles it admirably. Asked about a team that has fallen so awkwardly from grace, he answered, firmly, “I can take it. This is football, the sport that I love, with a coaching staff and kids that I love. I see this as an opportunity to grow, to learn. That’s what’s ahead of us now. Next week.”
It’s another one of those regrettable bits of Pac-12 scheduling, an 8 p.m. start Saturday night at Arizona. Shaw can take it. So can his players. The fans have moved on for now.