Offense misfires again (and again)
For a team that averaged 38 points a game last season, Stanford is scoring points at an unsteady drip this year.
It failed to score a touchdown Saturday for the first time since that awful 2015 opener against Northwestern. Against Pac-12 upstart Colorado, it had to scrounge for five points, two of which came on a conceded safety.
The Buffaloes made a second-quarter touchdown stand up for a 10-5 win and became bowl eligible for the first time since 2007.
Stanford running back Christian McCaffrey returned to action after missing the Notre Dame game with an injury. He gained 92 yards on 21 attempts but was pretty well kept in check by the Buffaloes.
“Offensively, we’ve got to score more than three points,” said Stanford head coach David Shaw, whose Pac-12 defending champions dropped to 4-3 overall and 2-3 in the conference. “There are a lot of things we have to do better, and there are some things we have to look into tweaking. We’re not going to talk about those here.”
One of those things might be a change at quarterback for next week’s game at Arizona. Ryan Burns had probably his worst game Saturday. He completed 16 of 29 passes for 170 yards and threw three interceptions, two of them late in the game, thwarting Stanford’s efforts to take the lead. He also had a fumble and would have had two except that when he lost control of a snap at the Colorado 4 in the fourth quarter, it was recorded as a “team fumble.’’
“Bottom line is we need more production from the quarterback position,” Shaw said. “We’re not going to have that conversation about who’s going to start and who’s not going to start.”
Backup Keller Chryst played in the second quarter but got only a few snaps. For the first time this year, Stanford tried alternating quarterbacks during a botched series in the second quarter. After one first down and three penalties, it punted on 4th-and-46.
A loud chorus of boos came from the Reunion Homecoming crowd, which appeared to be only about 30,000 although the paid attendance was listed as 44,535.
“If you could see me on TV, I might have been one of those booing,” Shaw said. “It’s not good enough.”
Colorado (6-2, 4-1), under former San Jose State head coach Mike MacIntyre, moved the ball up and down the field, as Phillip Lindsay rushed for 131 yards on 12 carries before sitting out most of the second half with a sore left ankle.
“When you beat the Rose Bowl champ ugly and you haven’t won many Pac-12 games as we have,” MacIntyre said, “to do that on the road is very, very special.”
Field goal kicking remains an adventure for the Buffs. Diego Gonzalez injured his Achilles tendon Sept. 17 in the Michigan game, and backup Davis Price missed Saturday’s game with an illness. Chris Graham, the third-stringer, missed two field-goal attempts, and Alex Kinney, the punter, also missed one. Finally, Graham hit a 22-yarder with 2:13 left.
Stanford’s Solomon Thomas was credited with a safety when Buffs quarterback Sefo Liufau ran out of the end zone with four seconds left rather than risk a punt or a turnover from deep in his own end.
Isaiah Oliver’s interception with 1:37 left secured the win for the top defense in the Pac-12. Colorado scored its first win over Stanford since 1990; it had lost five games to the Cardinal since then, three in Pac-12 play.
Stanford was assessed seven penalties for 60 yards. “We had a lot of self-inflicted wounds, a lot of penalties,” center Jesse Burkett said. “All we can really do is keep working.”
Outside linebacker Joey Alfieri, who had a team-high eight tackles and 1½ sacks, said, “We just need to dig deeper. We’ve got to figure out how to reduce those points to zero.”