Apparently there is a minimum talent level required to activate the “Cardiac Cardinal” mode of Stanford football, and Cal is nowhere close to that point.
We all knew coming into Saturday that the most important part of the weekend for the Cardinal would happen outside of Stanford Stadium, but I’ll be the first to admit how wrong I was in predicting which games would matter.
Fortunately for Stanford, which saw none of my key outcomes for securing an at-large BCS berth come true, Oregon shocked the country by laying an absolute egg in Arizona. Amazingly, with two losses at unranked opponents, Stanford is in the Pac-12 Championship Game.
While it’s hard to truly judge Stanford’s performance Saturday, there were some positive takeaways — even given the lack of competition — and they start with the play of junior quarterback Kevin Hogan.
No one embodies the up-and-down nature of this football season better than the team’s signal-caller. On Saturday, Hogan was great. Cal’s game plan was obviously to sell out to stop the Cardinal’s rushing attack and make Hogan win the game, and he really stepped up.
It’s not surprising that Cal did everything it could to try to stop the run, but it is surprising how well Cal was able to execute that plan. For a team that has struggled to tackle all season long, Cal was able to corral senior running back Tyler Gaffney pretty well. But that came with a cost: one-on-one coverage against Stanford’s wide receivers.
Those receivers, to their credit, had shown again and again that they could beat one-on-one coverage, but too often Hogan had missed them. Against the Golden Bears, junior Ty Montgomery and sophomore Michael Rector weren’t just open; they were open by five-plus yards all afternoon. Put simply, most quarterbacks could only dream of the opportunities Hogan had — and Hogan’s offensive line gave him the time to hit those targets.
With all of this space, Hogan finally made the adjustment so many people had been begging for over the past few months: He erred on the side of the underthrow, not the overthrow.
Generally, underthrowing receivers is not such a great strategy, as it opens up the possibility of an interception. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard an announcer praise a quarterback for “putting the pass where only his receiver could get it.”
In Stanford’s case, while Hogan’s consistent overthrows may not have caused turnovers, they were so prevalent that Stanford was consistently wasting great opportunities to score. And when your receivers are open by five yards, overthrowing them by one foot is an incompletion while underthrowing by a few yards is either a touchdown, a big completion or — in most cases — defensive pass interference for a 15-yard gain.
With Hogan employing that new strategy and Cal’s remaining persistent on stopping the run, 50-yard touchdowns seemed as easy as — heck, maybe even easier than — 4-yard runs.
Obviously, we can’t expect this same level of dominance against better competition, but that doesn’t mean Hogan’s play wasn’t a good sign. I think that with the ball skills of Montgomery, Rector and the rest of Stanford’s receiving corps, these slight underthrows will still work, even against slightly better coverage.
The most interesting question to me right now is no longer the offensive play but rather Stanford’s motivation. When the Cardinal shocked Oregon each of the past two seasons, the path to the Rose Bowl was (apparently) very simple: You must win every game.
While Stanford’s path now is still simple — beat Arizona State to go to the Rose Bowl — it is complicated by the awkwardly timed nonconference game this Saturday against Notre Dame.
Before the advent of conference championship games, no one could have foreseen a scenario like this: Stanford can gain nothing from beating Notre Dame beside pride and a higher final ranking, while it can lose everything with an injury. So what will the Cardinal do?
Normally I’m of the conservative type, and I usually agree with NFL coaches who rest their players before playoff games, but I’m still on the fence about Notre Dame. If I know David Shaw and this football team, I think you’ll see a full effort on Saturday. And while I can’t disagree with that plan, I hope it doesn’t cause pain in hindsight.
Sam Fisher caught five touchdown passes in last Saturday’s Ink Bowl but suffered an injury that will keep him off The Daily’s depth chart for the foreseeable future. Send your condolences and sweet potato latkes to safisher ‘at’ stanford.edu.