Bad-Ugly-Good: Taking stock of 2-2 Stanford

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 28, 2021

The Pac-12 Networks — a national feed and six regional feeds accounting for Southern California, the San Francisco Bay Area, Arizona, Oregon, Washington and the mountains of Colorado and Utah — are notoriously hard for sports fans to find. DirecTV, one of the leading satellite television providers, doesn’t carry the network; nor do a number of major cable TV providers.

For most of my 17 years in North Carolina, I did not have a TV at home. When I had Internet service, it always came from a cable television provider (TimeWarner, which became or was absorbed by Spectrum). But I never subscribed to cable television programming. Nor did I subscribe to an Internet television streaming service.

This year, the Vanderbilt game was broadcast on ESPNU, which is not available in the house where I’m staying. I listened to the game on KZSU, the Stanford radio station; it wasn’t expected to be a very competitive contest, and I didn’t feel like jeopardizing my life by going out to a bar to watch the game.

UCLA Bruins out-tough Stanford, 35-24, in the Cardinal’s return to campus

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 27, 2021

Dorian Thompson-Robinson passed for 251 yards and two touchdowns and ran for another two scores to lead UCLA to a 35-24 victory at Stanford on Saturday afternoon.

Thompson-Robinson played through pain in the second half to hand the Cardinal football team its fourth straight home loss in the hosts’ first performance in front of home fans since Nov. 30, 2019. Stanford played five of six games on the road in 2020 and was coming off of a school-record seven game road swing, including three straight to open 2021. The Cardinal, now 2-2 (1-1 in the Pac-12), has not won on campus since defeating Arizona, 41-31, on Oct. 26, 2019.

Zach Charbonnet ran for 118 yards and a touchdown and Kyle Phillips made five catches for 120 yards and a pair of scores. The Bruins (3-1, 1-0) had 340 rushing yards as UCLA’s defense limited the Cardinal to 67 yards on the ground.

Even so, a feisty Stanford squad overcame early mistakes to climb back into contention. Sophomore quarterback Tanner McKee threw for 293 yards and three touchdowns, both career highs, as he helped the Cardinal tie the score early in the fourth quarter. Unfortunately for the home fans, the defense allowed touchdowns on both of the Bruins’ next two possessions.

SEC streaking: A Stanford history

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 23, 2021

As noted in a recent post, the Stanford football team is 6-1 against members of the Southeastern Conference, including a six-game winning streak. Here are the details:

• Jan. 1, 1935, Pasadena, Calif. (Rose Bowl): Alabama 29, Stanford 13. Alabama was a charter member of the SEC, which formed in 1933.

• Sept. 23, 1961, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford 9, Tulane 7. Tulane was another SEC co-founder. This is the Cardinal’s only home game against an SEC team.

• Sept. 21, 1962, New Orleans: Stanford 6, Tulane 3. According to the invaluable Sports Reference website, this was a then-unusual Friday game.

Bad-Ugly-Good: Taking stock of 2-1 Stanford

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 22, 2021

Stanford’s road trip to end all road trips ended on a high note Saturday with a 41-23 dismantling of the Vanderbilt Commodores. After opening 2021 with three straight road games, the Cardinal will head back to campus to welcome No. 24 UCLA (2-1), who were ranked 13th nationally before losing a dramatic 40-37 game against the Fresno State Bulldogs.

The Cardinal will be playing only its second home game since it finished a dismal 4-8 season with a dreadful 45-24 loss to Notre Dame Dame on Nov. 30, 2019.

Stanford hosted Colorado on Nov. 14, 2020, in the second game of that pandemic-altered season for both teams; the Buffalo prevailed, 35-32, at least in part because a false-positive Covid-19 test kept Cardinal quarterback Davis Mills out of practice most of that week. Like all Pac-12 games in 2020, that contest was played without paying fans.

Stanford railroads Vanderbilt, 41-23

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 19, 2021

Stanford scored three times in the last two minutes of the first half and never looked back in beating Vanderbilt in Nashville on Saturday evening. The Cardinal moved to 2-1 on the season with a 41-23 victory in the first meeting between the schools on the football field.

Vanderbilt, which went 0-9 in 2020 and has four victories since the beginning of the 2019 season, was not expected to be a formidable foe. However, the 1-2 Commodores kept the score close for most of the first half. They also squandered multiple opportunities to make the game competitive in the second half, in which Stanford scored just 14 points.

On the opening drive, running back Austin Jones popped through a big hole that his blockers created on the right side of the line, evaded senior safety Dashaun Jerkins and was racing for the goal line when junior linebacker Anfernee Orji pushed him out of bounds at the home 2-yard line. The 61-yard run was a nice addition to the season stat line for the Stanford junior, who entered the game with 19 carries for 38 yards with a long gain of six.

Following a false start, sophomore quarterback back Tanner McKee veered into the end zone on a play-action keeper. His seven-yard touchdown put the visitors on top, 7-0, in the Cardinal’s first football game against a Southeastern Conference foe since 1978.

From the depths of despair to the heights of ecstasy: Evaluating all of Stanford’s loss-win pairs since 2007

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 18, 2021

When was the last time a Stanford football team responded to a demoralizing loss with a win as resounding as their 42-28 victory at USC last weekend?

The obvious answer is 2007, Jim Harbaugh’s first year as Cardinal head coach, when Stanford bounced back from a 41-3 home loss to No. 23 Arizona State on Sept. 29 by mounting what’s been called the greatest upset in college football history, the infamous 24-23 defeat of No. 2 USC at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. (As I’m fond of pointing out, however, an arguably even more shocking upset was Stanford’s 36-31 win at top-ranked Notre Dame in 1990.)

Stanford, incidentally, finished the season 4-8 and was ninth in the Pac-10 with a 3-6 conference record. USC tied Arizona State for the conference title with a 7-2 league record and ultimately wound up third in the nation after a 49-17 Rose Bowl victory over Illinois completed an 11-2 record. Arizona State, which lost out on a chance to play in the Rose Bowl by virtue of its 44-24 home loss to the Trojans on Nov. 22, sustained a 52-34 loss to Texas in the Holiday Bowl to finish 10-3 with a No. 16 ranking.

That shocking 2007 defeat of USC helped forge Harbaugh’s reputation and is a signature win both for him and the Stanford football program.

I think the best two rebound wins by far came against USC in 2007 and USC in 2021, in that order. I came to that conclusion after compiling a list of all loss/win sequences in the Harbaugh and David Shaw coaching eras. (I did not consider season-ending losses followed by season-opening wins.)

Bad-Ugly-Good: Taking stock of 1-1 Stanford

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 15, 2021

When was the last time a Stanford football team responded to a demoralizing loss with a resounding win like the Cardinal’s 42-28 upset of 14th-ranked USC last week?

The obvious answer is 2007, Jim Harbaugh’s first year as Cardinal head coach, when Stanford bounced back from a 41-3 home loss to No. 23 Arizona State on Sept. 29 by mounting what’s been called the greatest upset in college football history, the infamous 24-23 defeat of No. 2 USC at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. (As I’m fond of pointing out, however, an arguably even more shocking upset was Stanford’s 36-31 win at top-ranked Notre Dame in 1990.)

That 2007 shocker helped forge Harbaugh’s reputation and is a signature win both for him and the Stanford football program. Still, I thought I’d check whether there was another loss/win sequence in the Harbaugh and David Shaw coaching eras to rival that two-game sequence.

The short answer is no. Under Harbaugh and Shaw, an unranked Stanford team that sustained a bad loss — or any loss at all — only went on to defeat a ranked team twice: USC in 2007 and USC in 2021. No. 13 Stanford did upset No. 9 UCLA in 2013, but those clubs were somewhat evenly matched based on the rankings.

QB Tanner McKee deals darts and CB Kyu Blu Kelly intercepts USC to lead Stanford to a 42-28 win in Los Angeles

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 12, 2021

Visiting Stanford recorded a stunning 42-28 victory over 14th-ranked USC Saturday night in the conference opener for both teams, potentially upending expectations for the young Pac-12 football season.

First-time starter Tanner McKee, the highly touted sophomore quarterback, led a Cardinal offense that looked completely different from the often confused and sluggish unit that had taken the field a week earlier in a season-opening 24-7 loss against Kansas State. The Corona, Calif., native threw for two touchdowns and ran for another without committing a turnover, compiling 234 yards while completing 16 of 23 attempts.

The teams played relatively evenly through the first 16 and a half minutes. Junior running back Nathaniel Peat opened scoring with an electrifying 87-yard touchdown run for unranked Stanford in the first quarter. The Trojans (1-1, 0-1 Pac-12) tied the game early in the second on a two-yard touchdown rush by Keaontay Ingram following a goal-line scrum somewhat reminiscent of USC’s infamous 2005 “Bush push” at Notre Dame.

The game started to change on the very next drive. Stanford (1-1, 1-0) moved from the visitor 25 to the home 9 with relative ease, mainly thanks to a 25 yard reception by senior wideout Brycen Tremayne and a 16-yard pass-interference penalty assessed against USC on a McKee throw to sophomore receiver John Humphreys. When a stout Trojans run defense left the Cardinal facing goal to go on fourth down at the 7, Stanford head coach David Shaw sent sophomore kicker Joshua Karty on to boot a 25-yard field goal to reclaim the lead. The kick was not very strong, but it cleared the uprights, appearing to give the visitors a 10-7 advantage.

Reflecting on a day of mourning, and questioning whether certain deaths should matter more than others

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 11, 2021

I have not written very much on this blog about the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. By the time I launched the site, in 2012, that terrible day was more than a decade in the past.

A lot of innocent people died on Sept. 11, and millions if not billions of others were terrified by the sight of buildings collapsing after being hit by hijacked civilian airliners. Thousands of people were mentally scarred by what they saw either on 9/11 or in the aftermath, as rescuers searched for survivors in the rubble of the World Trade Center — an effort that was primarily in vain. Many of those who tried to help 9/11 victims suffered physical ailments as well, often because the collapsed towers coated a great deal of Lower Manhattan with toxic dust.

Whether you consider 9/11 to be completely unavoidable or a massive intelligence failure, there is no question that it gave Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and a group of highly placed United States government officials an excuse to launch a military operation they’d long desired: One that would topple Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq.

The links between Hussein and the four civilian airline hijackings that comprised the 9/11 attack were spurious. Qaeda, the Islamic terrorist group that planned and executed the Sept. 11 killings, consisted of fervent Islamic worshippers who harbored radical interpretations of their religion, while Hussein’s embrace of the faith was inconsistent and largely opportunistic.

The neoconservatives in President George W. Bush’s administration weren’t too bothered by this discrepancy. They soon began arguing that Iraq posed a threat to global security because of the regime’s weapons of mass destruction. This arsenal of deadly nuclear, chemical and biological weapons existed more in the imaginations of top Bush officials than it did in reality.

Geekery: Noodling with IFTTT, WordPress and Google Sheets

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 10, 2021

More than three years ago, I set up an applet on the invaluable Web service that I still think of as If This Then That. The service, actually known as IFTTT, lets users create simple programs that run automatically.

My inelegantly titled “Log your #wordpress blog posts in Spread sheet” applet was set up no earlier than Sunday, May 13, when I wrote about the Durham County, N.C., primary election, and no later than Thursday the 17th, when I posted about updating passwords for my myriad Internet accounts.

Ever since May 17, 2018, IFTTT has faithfully logged every post on this blog on a Google Sheets spreadsheet stored on my Google Drive cloud account. I rarely refer to the spreadsheet, but the other night, I decided to take a peek and make some modifications.

The first change was easy: I inserted the label “Days since previous post” atop the fifth column. The first four columns are, in order, “Date-Time,” “Title,” “Full URL” and “Category, tags.” Then I fiddled around with some spreadsheet functions in order to convert the first column into a number.

Bad-Ugly-Good: Taking stock of 0-1 Stanford

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 6, 2021

David Shaw is now in his 11th year as Stanford’s head coach. His record in season openers over that stretch is a wretched… uh, 8-3.

Here are those 11 games:

2011: 57-3 win vs. San Jose State.

2012: 20-17 win vs. San Jose State.

2013: 34-13 win vs. San Jose State.

2014: 45-0 win vs. UC Davis.

2015: 16-6 loss at Northwestern.

2016: 26-13 win vs. Kansas State.

2017: 62-7 win vs. Rice in Sydney, Australia.

2018: 31-10 win vs. San Diego State.

2019: 17-7 win vs. Northwestern.

2020: 36-14 loss at Oregon.

2021: 24-7 loss vs. Kansas State in Dallas.

Now there have been plenty of times when the Stanford football squad has come out of the gate not playing to its full potential. The offense in particular has been maddening for its tendency to struggle with substitutions, squander timeouts and sustain delay-of-game penalties, a habit that was on full display this weekend.

Purple daze redux: A discombobulated Stanford offense contributes to a demoralizing 24-7 season-opening loss to Kansas State

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 5, 2021

The Stanford football team slept-walked through the first half in dropping a 24-7 decision to the Kansas State Wildcats in Arlington, Texas, on Saturday afternoon.

The game was reminiscent of the team’s 16-6 loss at Northwestern Wildcats to start the 2015 season in a game that also kicked off at 11 a.m. Central Time, the equivalent of 9 in the morning on Stanford’s West Coast campus. As in that earlier contest, Stanford quarterbacks threw for exactly 50 more yards than the opposing purple-clad ball-slingers but were outrushed by more than 140 yards.

The key differences between that six-year-old contest and Saturday’s event were that the latter was played at a neutral site, AT&T Stadium, the home of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys, and that the Cardinal entered and exited the game with questions about the identity of its starting quarterback.

Cardinal head coach David Shaw announced this week that senior Jack West would start the game under center but that sophomore Tanner McKee would also play. Early returns were unpromising, as West threw three times for 16 yards on the first drive and handed off three times on the second one. Both ended in punts.