By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Oct. 26, 2018
After having lunch with a friend in Northern Virginia, I wrapped up an eight-day trip by driving back to Durham on Thursday, Oct. 18. Since it was late in the afternoon when I arrived and I wanted to get in some exercise, after hurriedly unloading my car I headed back out and hit the pavement. Ultimately, I walked more than 3.5 miles before coming back home to shower, groom myself and dress in Cardinal apparel.
I’d hoped to get in a little bit of pinball action before the football game, but the walk and doing some overdue shaving ate up most of the time available to me before kickoff.
I headed down to my usual Durham Stanford-watching spot but left before the final gun because the place was nearly empty and preparing to close. However, when ASU scored a fourth-quarter touchdown with several minutes remaining in the contest, I realized that I needed to get to a television. I wound up at the same establishment where I’d watched the Cardinal’s disastrous loss to Washington State in 2016. Fortunately, this time the result was much happier for me and other Stanford faithful.
• The Bad
Stanford netted 127 rushing yards on 43 carries against the Sun Devils, which works out to a hair less than 3.0 yards per attempt. Remarkably, for a team that returned the nation’s second-leading rusher and four-fifths of its starting offensive line, this was only slightly worse than the Cardinal’s season-long average of nearly 3.1 yards per carry.
