Yays, Nays and OKs for 1-3 Stanford football

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 30, 2023

It’s hard to know what to make of Stanford’s 21-20 home loss to Arizona. A one-point loss to a mediocre Football Bowl Subdivision team seems more respectable than a seven-point loss to even a very good Football Championship Subdivision squad. Indeed, given the thinness of Stanford’s defense, letting up only 21 points is a modest accomplishment. However, the Cardinal offense has been maddeningly inconsistent, and scoring just 20 points at home is not a formula for winning football.

Yays

• Tiger Bachmeier, wide receiver. The freshman could be a star in the making. He set career highs last weekend with four catches for 93 yards, the latter of which led all receivers in the game, and made a fantastic 35-yard catch on the run while closely guarded by a defensive back. The Lake Elsinore, Calif., native entered the game with four receptions for 12 yards.

• Sedrick Irvin, running back. Irvin is another freshman who made a big impression on Saturday. He entered the game with five runs for 21 yards, including four rushes for 22 yards (and a 20-yard long) at USC. On his first touch against Arizona, in his first collegiate start, Irvin shook off five defenders for a 45-yard run that set up the first points of the game. Irvin later scored his first touchdown. He finished the day with 10 runs for a team-high 66 yards, plus a five-yard catch.

Arizona ekes out a 21-20 win at Stanford Stadium behind a substitute quarterback

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 30, 2023

Stanford football dropped a 21-20 decision to visiting Arizona on Saturday night as the Troy Taylor coaching era continued to have a rocky start.

The challenges will only get more difficult going forward for the Cardinal, which fell to 1-3 overall and 0-2 in the Pac-12. Of the remaining eight opponents on Stanford’s schedule, five are ranked in the top 25, while two others — Colorado and UCLA — got enough votes in the most recent Associated Press poll to rank among the top 30 teams in the nation. (All of the opponents except Cal placed in the top 25 the previous week.)

Arizona, now 3-1 after winning its conference opener, rallied behind backup quarterback Noah Fifita for a go-ahead touchdown and then used a combination of defense and offense to keep Stanford out of the end zone in the one-point decision. The Wildcats also benefited from a pair of misfires from an unlikely source. The Cardinal’s best player, senior placekicker Joshua Karty, pushed a pair of 51-yard field-goal attempts wide right by perhaps five combined feet. The two straight misses broke a streak of 26 consecutive made field goals dating back to the start of the 2022 season.

Yays, Nays and OKs for 1-2 Stanford football

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 19, 2023

Sacramento State 30, Stanford 23. That was a tough outcome for Cardinal boosters.

Yes, Sac State is a good team — but they’re a Football Championship Subdivision team. FCS squads are supposed to lose when they go up against Football Bowl Subdivision teams such as the Cardinal.

Bottom line: We may be in for a long, long, long, long, long, long, long, looong, loooooooooooooooooong season.

Yays

• Elic Ayomanor, wide receiver. The sophomore from Medicine Hat in Alberta, Canada, had a career night and paced the Cardinal with four catches for 89 yards and a 51-yard touchdown. Those were all personal bests and team highs in Saturday’s game. Over the first two games, Ayomanor had four catches for 38 yards.

Sacramento State Hornets sting Stanford, 30-23

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 18, 2023

Kaiden Bennett racked up 379 total yards and two touchdowns Saturday night to lift Football Championship Subdivision power Sacramento State (3-0) to a 30-23 upset victory over Stanford.

In falling to 1-2 against a lower-division team, the Cardinal instantly sparked debate on the social-media platform X about whether this was the team’s worst loss of the 21st century and whether this is the worst Stanford team of fans’ lifetimes. The only comparable defeat in recent times was a 20-17 home loss to UC Davis, a new member of Division I-AA (now FCS). That outcome denied then-new Stanford coach Walt Harris bowl eligibility in his first season, when the team recorded a 5-6 record.

The better question may be whether new coach Troy Taylor, now guiding Stanford in his second stint as a head coach after helping lead Sac State to prominence, will be able to exceed the 1-11 record that Harris’s second and final Stanford club recorded in 2006. All of Stanford’s opponents in the remaining nine games, which include potent clubs such as Oregon, Colorado, Washington, Oregon State and Notre Dame, will have more talented rosters than the Hornets.

Yays, Nays and OKs for 1-1 Stanford football

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 16, 2023

USC scored seven touchdowns in the first half of Saturday’s home rout over Stanford. Seven touchdowns. Seven! The Cardinal had never before given up so many points in a first half.

Stanford is preparing to take on Sacramento State, a Football Championship Subdivision program that Troy Taylor — now heading the Cardinal — coached to FCS prominence in recent years. As we count down to kickoff, Cardinal fans may be wondering what to make of their team. Here are some thoughts.

Yays

• Rushing offense. Stanford netted 209 yards on the ground on 41 attempts for a 5.1 yards-per-carry average. On a night when most things went wrong for the Cardinal, this phase of the game seemed at least somewhat passable. The leading carrier by rushes was backup quarterback Justin Lamson, who ran 16 times for 32 yards with a one-yard touchdown plunge that helped make the final score of 56-10 seem infinitesimally less pathetic. Senior running back Casey Filkins was the top runner by yards; his 59-yard sprint paced a five-carry, 63-yard night. Stanford’s rushing numbers in the first half, by the way, represented just about the only respectable performance by the Cardinal in that stretch. The team had 19 carries for 93 yards, a hair shy of 4.9 ypc.

No joy for Stanford against a soon-to-be-former league rival as USC demolishes the Cardinal, 56-10

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 15, 2023

USC steamrolled Stanford, 56-10, on Saturday night at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in the first game of the final Pac-12 Conference football season.

Coach Lincoln Riley showed that the talent gap between his starters and Stanford’s was astronomical as the Trojans easily ran out to a 49-3 halftime lead. That was the most points ever surrendered by a Stanford defense in any first half in the 128 seasons that the school has played the sport. In the second half, Stanford struggled to put points on the board as Cardinal starters essentially played to a draw against USC second-stringers.

Never before had a Trojans team scored as many points against Stanford. The previous high mark was 54 points in a 54-7 beatdown of the Card in 1952. That 47-point decision was one of only two times when the Trojans exceeded Saturday’s margin of victory, the other being a 49-0 flattening in 1977. With the exception of 2020, the Pac-12’s only private schools had played every year since the World War II gap years of 1943–43.

Yays, Nays and OKs for 1-0 Stanford football

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 8, 2023

Stanford’s 2023 football season opener was aired by CBS Sports Network, which apparently is not available to viewers who wish to purchase a stand-alone streaming subscription. After puzzling over the matter, I wound up not watching the game and instead listening to the KZSU 90.1 Stanford student- and volunteer-run radio station broadcast of the event.

I still have seen very little of the game, although I have watched a few highlights. The Matthew Loves Ball YouTube channel prepared an extended highlights package, as it does for scores of televised sporting events, but I haven’t viewed it due to some personal obligations. 

With that said, let’s dive into the high points, low points and meh points. 

Yays 

• Defense, part 1: Overview. This probably won’t be a good Stanford team, and this team probably doesn’t have a good defense. Still, Yays are all about celebrating, and the defense did plenty to be proud of against Hawaii. The Farm gridders held the Rainbow Warriors to 20 points — pretty good, especially on the road — and 350 yards — meh. But given where this unit has been in recent years, this is an accomplishment. 

• Defense, part 2: Run defense. I can’t leave it there. New defensive coordinator Bobby April’s group absolutely stifled the hosts’ ground attack. Per Stanford sports information, the Warriors’ minus-5 rushing yards were the fewest collected by a Cardinal opponent since the team held Washington State to minus-26 yards in 2014. 

The Cardinal overpowers the Warriors, 37-24, as the Troy Taylor coaching era begins at Stanford

By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Sept. 2, 2023

Stanford football cruised to a 37-24 road win over Hawaii in Troy Taylor’s first game as head coach at the Football Bowl Subdivision level.

Sophomore quarterback Ashton Daniels was 25 for 36 with 248 yards, two touchdowns and no picks in his first start, which also saw him gain 42 yards on 11 rushes. Senior tight end Benjamin Yurosek, Stanford’s most established player, caught nine balls for a career-high 138 yards and one score, while senior running back Casey Filkins had a team-high 67 yards on six carries, including a 47-yard run. On the defensive side, sophomore David Bailey confirmed his status as an emerging star by making three sacks, a tackle-for-loss and two other stops.

The game began hours after the Cardinal joined Cal and Southern Methodist University as newly admitted members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, thereby assuring Stanford’s place in an elite athletic conference but further diminishing the chances that the Pac-12 Conference will survive in even a reduced form. The 108-year-old collegiate athletic league is down to two members, Oregon State and Washington State, who will effectively become homeless when 10 current Pac-12 universities decamp for the Big Ten, the Big 12 and the ACC next summer.