The central story of the Stanford Cardinal’s 2015 season can be framed in these terms: It is the attempt to regain something that was lost in 2014.
Stanford had reached four straight BCS (now New Year’s Six) bowls, beginning in the 2010 season, but in 2014, the ride abruptly stopped. Stylistically, Stanford didn’t look that different from past incarnations, and on defense, the Cardinal performed well enough to win at the same high level that marked the 2010-2013 glory years. However, disastrous red-zone and third-down efficiency rates doomed the Trees, cutting them down to size. An 8-5 record and a fourth-tier bowl berth did not meet the standards coach David Shaw has set for his program. The 2015 season is a struggle to recapture a winning edge.
Beyond Stanford and Shaw, however, the upper tier of the Pac-12 in 2015 is essentially a competitive theater in which every coach has a lot to prove.
Go through the coaching profiles of Mark Helfrich at Oregon; Steve Sarkisian at USC; Jim Mora at UCLA; Rich Rodriguez at Arizona; Todd Graham at Arizona State; and Kyle Whittingham at Utah. Including Shaw, most of the men in this group have achieved something highly significant in their collegiate coaching careers. Moreover, Mora has reached an NFC Championship Game in the NFL with the Atlanta Falcons.
Only Sarkisian’s resume is noticeably barren in that group of coaches, and with Helfrich making the College Football Playoff Championship Game last season, it’s clear that the coaches of the Pac-12’s more competitive programs stand on different planes of achievement. They don’t face equivalent situations on a narrow level, that’s for sure.
However, they are all united in a larger and more expansive sense: Their legacies and reputations exist in tenuous, in-between states at the moment. Shaw’s situation at Stanford embodies this reality as much as anyone else’s.
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Not all FBS coaching jobs are created equal, but on the long and winding road of college football history — nearly 150 years of it — we have seen plenty of examples of coaches who, in the first two years of their tenures, either inherited a lot of riches or harnessed forces which worked in their favor.
Lou Holtz won a national title at Notre Dame through a steady upward build, but at Arkansas, he turned his first year in Fayetteville into his best year. Holtz, entrusted with the program by former coach-turned-athletic director Frank Broyles, lost only one game in the 1977 season. When his Razorbacks trounced No. 2 Oklahoma, 31-6, in the 1978 Orange Bowl, Holtz could not have known that was going to be the height of his career at Arkansas. His 1979 team came close to matching the feats of the 1977 group, but a loss to Alabama in the 1980 Sugar Bowl dashed that dream.
Holtz’s career endured, and it’s not as though he fell off the map at Arkansas — he continued to produce good to very good teams at the school — but greatness on a large scale eluded him after year one.
At Auburn, Gene Chizik took over for Tommy Tuberville and, in two short years, turned Auburn into a 14-0 national champion. Did he get just a little bit of help from Cam Newton and Gus Malzahn? Of course he did. Still, a perfect season was hardly expected from Chizik when Auburn brought him aboard; that the sparkling achievement occurred so quickly represented an even bigger jolt to college football’s pundit class.
However, while Chizik rose higher than his peers within a two-year framework, the departure of Newton left his coach without the kind of player who could mask all sorts of weaknesses. Auburn quickly crumbled after the 2010 national title, and this time, Malzahn came to the school as a head coach, not a coordinator. Speaking of Malzahn, he reached the national title game in year one, and he’s now trying to sustain what he began on the Alabama Plains.
One coach from the past 10 years who successfully maintained what he put in place was Chris Petersen of Boise State. In his first season as the Broncos’ head coach, Petersen led the team to a perfect season and that immortal win over Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl. Petersen continued to crank out one great autumn after another, and because of his work, Bryan Harsin was able to come home to what was already a brand-name program, something much greater than what Dan Hawkins had handed to Petersen in 2006.
Holtz. Chizik. Petersen. Three coaches traveled in three very different directions after tasting success at a very early point in the lives of their programs.
The question becomes, “Which direction will David Shaw travel in 2015?”
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In 2011, Shaw inherited Andrew Luck, and in both 2012 and 2013, he fielded a veteran defense which greatly simplified the Cardinal’s task each gameday: Run the ball. Protect the ball. Make the simple plays without committing crushing mistakes. The defense will take care of us.
It certainly did so against Oregon in 2012 and 2013. The Cardinal rode those twin triumphs to Pac-12 championships and Rose Bowl appearances.
In 2014, though, the music died on The Farm. Red-zone failures, third-down deficiencies, and kicking problems all contributed to a subpar season. It could be an aberration, a mere bump in the road, but college football history is replete with examples of coaches who started like a house of fire at a program, then lost momentum… and could never get it back.
Shaw will try to regain what he lost last season, but there’s no guarantee that he will. Regardless of what you might think or predict, the drama is rich: Shaw could either reassert himself as a star in the coaching business, or Stanford as we have known it for most of the past five years could recede into the middle of the Pac-12. Shaw won’t become a bad coach if this season goes south on him, but the chance to be remembered as a giant within the larger history of West Coast football would diminish, if not evaporate.
For Shaw’s brother coaches in the Pac-12, this season is similarly and precariously perched on the fence: Success would do wonders for the portfolio, while failure could push a college football career into dangerous territory.
Rich Rodriguez will always have the 2006 Sugar Bowl as the head coach of West Virginia against Georgia; no one can ever take that moment away from him. Yet, if Rodriguez can lead Arizona to its first Rose Bowl ever, he will attain an entirely different — and far more exalted — place in the college football coaching pantheon.
Todd Graham has won a Pac-12 South title at Arizona State, Whittingham a Sugar Bowl at Utah, Mora a division title at UCLA. Yet, if any of them can win the Pac-12 championship, they’ll be remembered on a much higher plane, both locally and regionally.
Mark Helfrich has quieted the critics (this one included) who were unsure of his leadership capabilities. Now, though, life after Marcus Mariota will test his coaching acumen in a new way. In this sense, what Helfrich is confronting in Eugene is not that radically different from what Shaw is facing in Palo Alto. If Helfrich can’t win with a new quarterback, he could be seen as yet another coach who won quickly on the job but didn’t sustain a program over the long haul.
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Steve Spurrier, Nick Saban, Urban Meyer, Bob Stoops, Les Miles — these and select others have won so much that the events of single seasons are not going to reshape the way we think about them… at least not in a negative way. In the Pac-12 coaching realm, however, that’s not quite the case, since longevity at a school isn’t something the major players in the conference have established just yet.
The 2015 season might make or break the career of Steve Sarkisian, but for the others mentioned above, the coming autumn won’t possess that degree of finality. What it will do, though, is change the way we remember these coaches and shape how we regard them heading into 2016. The stakes might be highest for Sark as the season arrives, but they’re still quite considerable for David Shaw and the Stanford Cardinal.
