I can see that argument but beating 1 team makes it hard to be considered a good coach when he has been a coach for over a decade and his team hasn’t ever challenged for anything meaningful. All of the fired SC coaches accomplished more than Shaw.
wtf? we’ve had quite a few great running backs … irrespective of race
Unfortunately Shaws accomplished just enough to keep his job. Some good seasons, a lot which should have been better
I am not trying to say Shaw is a terrible coach at all. I get that it’s hard to recruit to Stanford. But as a dude who is familiar (not me personally but a classmate) who had offers to essentially anywhere. His parents made him choose Stanford because the Ivy League doesn’t offer scholarships. So it is hard to recruit there, but it isn’t as extremely hard as people like to pretend. Harbaugh was a great coach who coached up a 2nd tier HS QB in Pritchard that turned the program around by knocking off SC. And Shaw got to live off of that and that the entire west coast went to a spread so all of the TE’s went there.
I agree with you that Shaw's reputation vastly exceeds his reality, and I don't understand it other than it's a backhanded complement to a nice program at a nice school with a nice coach which was nationally relevant year in and year out decades ago. Harvard was at some point as was Yale. Stanford is a mid tier performer in a mid tier conference that can occasionally make a statement in a game or conference or nationally. It's a nice narrative.
Socially wise, if a 4 plus star athlete on the west coast that has two parents will force their child to take a Stanford scholarship over any other. Obviously it is harder than that but I can’t think of a single athlete in my state who had chosen Wazzu or UW over Stanford when they had two parents.
He faces the problem that at Stanford the players must be real students in order to play there. Most other top schools don’t have that problem. They’ll take anyone and say “we are giving this under privileged kid a chance for an education” when in reality there is no goal to get them graduated, just win football games
Yes but it’s so unusual these days that it actually looks strange
I think Stanford will always be an institution of education over one of sports and that is to their credit
He is a very accomplished black coach whose players respect him and that counts for something
Maybe he’s happy where he is. How do you know he hasn’t received other offers?
I doubt Riley wanted to embarrass David Shaw, so he didn't do much in the second half . No use putting more on film than he had to.
It looks like a different era at SC this year
Yeah certainly more excitement. But the defense is not going to get better so this season its about how far the offense can take them. They need another year of recruiting and transfers to start getting the linemen on both sides to compete with the Ohio States ,Georgia, Bama and Clemsons.
I think you are exactly right but to me the biggest difference is you no longer see the dead ball personal fouls and foolishness that caused so much trouble for this team the past few years
Yeah, that was a pleasant surprise. It was so frustrating to watch them burn time outs early in the first quarter or do stupid penalties to halt drives. Every season the same thing. They were certainly more buttoned up in both games.
Or stupid penalties to extend drives for the other team. They need to clean up the pass interference penalties. I think they had six, but at least those are effort penalties not personal fouls from losing their composure.
