Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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32 OCT. 15, 2022 BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED BY TYLER HORKA S o m e t i m e s p rog ra m s j u s t go stale after a period of prolonged success. It doesn't matter what they do to combat the complacency. They can try to recruit better. Or bring in new blood on the coaching staff. Or even revamp their social media presence and perception of the program from an out- side view. And sometimes programs don't do much of any of that. Or, enough of it. Take Stanford for example. Recruiting? Stanford has not ranked inside the top 20 of the On3 Recruiting Team Rankings since 2017. The Cardi- nal's average class ranking for the last five years is 30.6 with a high of 21 and a low of 46. Programs ranked in the 40s just don't win big. Ask Virginia Tech, which has never won a national title. Or Iowa State, which hasn't won one ei- ther. Or Nebraska, which just fired head coach Scott Frost. Those teams ranked Nos. 40, 41 and 42, respectively, in the 2022 On3 Team Recruiting Rankings. New blood among coaches? David Shaw has been the head coach since 2011. Lance Anderson has been with Stanford for 16 seasons and has been the defen- sive coordinator for the last nine. Tavita Pritchard is a 2009 graduate of Stanford and has been on the coaching staff since he walked the stage. He has been the of- fensive coordinator for half a decade. A revamped social media presence? The official Stanford football Twitter account has 107,700 followers. Notre Dame's has 647,000. Notre Dame also has a Fighting Irish Media team that is up there with the best in-house opera- tions in the country. Just go look at the Shamrock Series uniform reveal video from July. Stanford isn't putting out that sort of stuff. And that sort of stuff matters in 2022, the era of name, image and likeness (NIL) and so many more possibilities for the student-athlete. We've gotten this far without even acknowledging the most dishearten- ing facts of all for Stanford. After 10 consecutive winning seasons from 2009-18, the Cardinal have had two losing seasons in their last three and are on their way to a third in the last four. Stanford is simply not the program it was when Jim Harbaugh gave way to Shaw after the 2010 season. It's not even anything close to the program that went 9-4 with a 14-13 win over Pittsburgh in the Sun Bowl in 2018. What happened? Not enough of ev- erything mentioned above. And defi- nitely not enough on-field execution. It seems the game has passed Shaw and Stanford by. It's not easy to win for long stretches of time at a place like Stanford. See: Tyrone Willingham. He went 35-33 in his first six seasons at Stanford and yet, somehow, one 9-3 campaign with a 24-14 loss to Georgia Tech in the now-defunct Seattle Bowl was enough to land him the highly coveted Notre Dame job in 2002. What Shaw did in leading Stanford to 11-plus wins in three straight seasons from 2011-13 and to another 12-2 run with a 45-16 win over Iowa in the Rose Bowl in 2015 was remarkable. Shaw is responsible for five of the nine double- digit-win seasons in Stanford history. But what's transpired in the last handful of seasons juxtaposed against the previous successes has made the current situation all the more difficult to observe and endure, even from an outsider's perspective. Shaw would never chalk it up to any- thing other than not executing on the field. And that's exactly what he did; he said his teams have just not been consis- tent enough of late. He knows what good teams look like. This is not one of those. "Our good plays, our good drives — offense, defense, special teams — are really good," Shaw said. "And our bad plays are really bad. Sometimes it's hard to rectify. The same group is out there. "But it's not just the players. Some of the things we are asking them to do, some of the positions we are put- ting them in, some things we need to GAME PREVIEW: STANFORD Head coach David Shaw is responsible for five of the nine double-digit-win seasons in Stanford history, but the last several years have not been up to that standard. PHOTO BY BOB DREBIN/STANFORDPHOTO.COM DOWNCAST CARDINAL Once a proud program less than a decade ago, Stanford is struggling in the current climate of college football