Stanford football has looked like a world beater in the last two games, and Cardinal fans can take a breath. After the customary worries about a new team in a new season, most people’s anxiety has faded: we are truly in the calm before the storm.

A calm before the storm requires, of course, a storm, and the scheduling gods have provided approximately the 10th “Game of the Century” of the century. The Oregon Ducks loom, just as they have loomed for the past 10 months. As soon as last year’s Stanford team won the Rose Bowl, the storyline for the next season was already clear: Oregon. All the writers and pundits were thinking about Oregon. Stanford and Oregon will take the field on Nov. 7, and that night in Stanford Stadium, the two kings of the Pacific Coast will play a one-game season.

As it turns out, there are other teams on Stanford’s schedule. The Pac-12 is 29-4 out of conference, with depth from top to bottom. In an age when scheduling nonconference cupcakes is commonplace, that’s impressive. But even as a resurgent Pac-12 displays a depth it hasn’t enjoyed in years, the subtext of the conversation is all Oregon. Not to disparage the other teams on Stanford’s schedule, but it is expected that the Cardinal will beat them.

College football is not about the teams you beat but about the teams you don’t lose to. Twice in the last seven years, Boise State has faced schedules against which at least half of all major conference teams would go undefeated, and they have been rewarded with BCS bowls. They have typically acquitted themselves in these bowls, but that is not the point: To get into contention, you have to play to not lose. Why shouldn’t SEC teams schedule as many directional state universities as they can?

The doctrine of playing to not lose wilfully ignores the fact that scheduling matters. There is some truth to that point; even among major conferences, teams go up and down. Schedules are set many years in advance. When Oregon played Tennessee, people laughed about the Ducks scheduling poorly, but back when Oregon secured the matchup, who would have ever thought that the mighty Volunteers would have cratered as they have? Did Notre Dame ever imagine that Stanford would become a powerhouse when it scheduled a series with the Cardinal?

Consider, most of all, the rise and fall of Lane Kiffin. As Pete Carroll’s ace coordinator, he rode the USC dynasty to national prominence; his failure in Oakland took him to a respectable year in Tennessee, which he left as ruined as he found it. Kiffin’s tenure at USC was dizzying in every respect; after a return to national prominence in just two years, he coached the most embarrassing collapse in football history the season after, and is now the first fire of 2013.

To someone like me who grew up with USC on top of the world, its implosion is proof that truth is stranger than fiction. Many smart people would have considered Stanford and Oregon being on top of the football world an impossibility itself. But all of these things happened. Teams go up and down. That’s the argument: schedules vary, so why should they matter?

But it is a shame that, as it is, the quality of Stanford’s competition seems irrelevant. The depth of the Pac-12 is irrelevant. All that people focus on is the one game that presents Stanford’s biggest chance to lose. And while that’s fair — for all the talk about the SEC’s depth, the same rules apply to LSU and Georgia as to Stanford and Oregon — I’m not too sure it makes sense.

Depth matters. It’s not easy to navigate a tough slate of games, but we don’t reward tough schedules the way they should. Even if you call Oregon a coin flip and assume that every other team can only beat Stanford 10 percent of the time, Stanford only has a 15.7 percent chance of running the table. A more realistic list of chances would be 5.3 percent. Pac-12 aside, any BCS conference team making the national championship game is an achievement. Oregon has a better chance than anyone of beating Stanford, but that’s not to say that Oregon is the only team that can beat Stanford.

Playing Washington matters — for heaven’s sake, they beat Stanford last season! Stanford-Oregon may well be the defining game of the season, but let’s not get too hasty. The Cardinal has other games to play first.

 

Remind Winston that UCLA is also a big part of the Cardinal’s stormy schedule, which doesn’t include any “cupcakes” at wshi94 ‘at’ stanford.edu