Two immortal college football coaches — you can debate which one said it first — popularized the notion that three things can happen when you pass, and two of them are bad.
That saying from Woody Hayes (or was it Darrell Royal?) did indeed apply to the Arizona Wildcats in the 2012 college football season… and it forms the backdrop for this weekend’s most intriguing and important Pac-12 game.
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It was the first Saturday of October… just as it will be this Saturday night in Palo Alto, Calif. Stanford hosted Arizona in a game that would shape the 2012 season far more than anyone could have known at the time.
Arizona took a 48-34 lead in the fourth quarter and appeared well on its way to victory. Even when Stanford trimmed the deficit to 48-41 and was driving, Arizona still owned leverage. When Cardinal quarterback Josh Nunes — desperately trying to tie the game in the final minutes — launched a pass over the middle of the field near the goal line, two of a pass’s three potential outcomes were bad…
… for Arizona.
The Wildcats didn’t want a touchdown, sure, but they also didn’t want an incompletion. Nunes’s throw on this play went right into the mitts of an Arizona defender… and was dropped. The Wildcats quite genuinely had the game in their hands, but couldn’t hold on — to the interception or the game itself.
Nunes and Stanford tied the game shortly after the dropped pick, forging a 48-48 tie with 45 seconds remaining. In overtime, Stanford did not miss its chance to intercept a pass, and when the Cardinal scored a touchdown a few plays later, they had pulled off the kind of Houdini which marked the remainder of their 2012 season.
Stanford, buoyed by that escape against Arizona, later found ways to somehow win in Oregon despite scoring only 14 points in regulation against the Ducks, and to beat Oregon State after the Beavers — controlling the run of play well into the second half — dropped a first-down-bearing third-and-five pass deep in Stanford territory. Stanford didn’t dominate in 2012, but when opponents left the door open a tiny crack with a second-half lapse, the Cardinal regularly pounced on the opportunity. The odd-shaped ball — in a sport which offers two bad possibilities out of three on a forward pass — bounced Stanford’s way in 2012.
The Cardinal, to their credit, made sure those bounces mattered.
Yet, for all the bad breaks Arizona has received throughout its largely snake-bitten history (the Wildcats remain the one program from the old Pac-10 Conference to have never reached the Rose Bowl, and they would have broken that streak last year if the Granddaddy hadn’t been a College Football Playoff semifinal), the 2014 season gave Rich Rodriguez’s group a one-year vacation from bad luck.
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In 2014, Arizona needed the one good result of a forward pass on a Hail Mary against California… and received it, finishing a 36-point fourth quarter while the stunned Golden Bears tried to comprehend what had just happened to them.
Later in the season, Arizona was a dead duck at home against Washington, trailing with under two minutes left while the Huskies had just gained a first down. Arizona wasn’t out of timeouts, but Washington was in position to take a knee three times and punt with around 12 to 15 seconds left. Yet — in a gaffe akin to Butch Jones saying his internal research said he should not have gone for two against Florida this past Saturday — Washington coach Chris Petersen refused to take three knees. He later said that his own research said he should not have taken a knee.
In true Joe Pisarcik fashion, the Huskies fumbled when trying to run out the clock. Arizona needed just 15 yards to get into field goal range. It got more than 15, and when the kick sailed through the uprights, the Wildcats had stolen a 27-26 victory.
The bounces of the ball Stanford received in 2012, Arizona gained in 2014.
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There’s a problem with getting the bounce of the ball to go your way: Sooner or later, the ball bounces the other way. This is what the Wildcats and the Cardinal are facing when they meet on Saturday night in the Bay Area.
Stanford won so many close games in 2012 and 2013, but in 2014, the pendulum swung the other way, as the Cardinal absorbed five losses. This team lived on the edge a lot, but that tendency was not sustainable — at least not without interruption. A flat 2015 opener against Northwestern served as a powerful reminder that Stanford couldn’t merely “be the same” as it had been in previous years. This team had to dramatically improve its level of play, carrying itself beyond thin margins of error. Winning at USC by 10 points (and not three) represented the very step this team needed to take under coach David Shaw.
Now, though, the margins remain small for the Cardinal. Their defense is young, with very few returning starters from 2014. It played better in the second half of last Friday’s win at Oregon State, but Arizona’s offense has more than enough athletes to expose Stanford’s limitations. Stanford wouldn’t prefer to play another 54-48 game at home against the Wildcats, but if U of A quarterback Anu Solomon is reasonably healthy at kickoff time, the Cardinal have to be ready for a supreme challenge.
As for Arizona, this season has already been marked by horrible injury luck. Solomon is merely a small part of this reality. Scooby Wright’s absence from the lineup represents a massive loss in this game. His run support would have been essential against Stanford’s bread-and-butter attack between the tackles. Arizona’s depth has been thinned out, making this gauntlet of UCLA and Stanford in consecutive weeks that much more daunting. If the Wildcats can’t find a way to leave the Bay Area with a win, their Pac-12 South title defense would exist in highly critical condition before the midpoint of the season.
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Stanford and Arizona both know that two of the three possible results of a forward pass are bad. They both know how fleeting fortune can be, guided by the fickle finger of fate. They both know that the bounces of the odd-shaped ball won’t always go their way, and that they have to be a lot better in order to withstand yet another stroke of bad luck.
The winner this Saturday night will feel that the remainder of the schedule can be conquered. The loser will sit in an extremely precarious place and lose what’s left of an already small margin for error.
In other words, it’s just another week in the Pac-12 Conference… and it’s only the ver beginning of October.
