Head coach David Shaw always gives his players 24 hours to get over any loss. His policy is that “you have to put a loss in the rearview mirror and instead look ahead through the windshield — otherwise, you’ll crash the car.”
The Oregon loss might have stung more than most, but Stanford needs to have a short memory and drive away, because the Cardinal are quickly approaching another roadblock — one that would like nothing more than to exact revenge for five years of futility by running Stanford off the road.
That roadblock, of course, is the California Golden Bears (6-4, 3-4 Pac-12), and the Stanford Axe is the one thing they have left to play for this season. And though the Bears haven’t had as much success as they would have hoped this season, the No. 15 Cardinal (8-2, 7-1) are treading carefully — they know that given the history of the rivalry, they’re going to get Cal’s best shot in the 118th Big Game.
“It’s the biggest rivalry in college football, I’d say,” said senior linebacker Blake Martinez. “People talk about Oregon and USC for us being big games, but when it comes to Cal, you know that no matter what the records are, who’s out there, what’s going on, it’s going to be a dogfight from the beginning to the end.”
The Cardinal, to their credit, have done a tremendous job of putting the emotions of the loss behind them and realizing that they still control their destiny in achieving their primary goal: winning the Pac-12 North. That’s the message that head coach David Shaw has been preaching all season — through the losses to Northwestern and Oregon — and has continued to preach throughout the week.
“It’s like we’re supposed to be walking around with our heads down, lamenting,” Shaw said. “We’re 8-2; we’re 7-1 in the most competitive conference in America and we have a chance to go to the Pac-12 Championship Game. We don’t have time to wallow. And we don’t wallow.”
And since it’s the Cardinal’s most hated rival that stands as the last barrier to that goal, they’re more than happy to get lost in the animosity of the rivalry and let it fuel their charge.
“We want to keep that Axe because I know everyone on this team hasn’t lost to Cal since they’ve been here,” Martinez said.
Stanford is on a historic tear in the rivalry right now: The Cardinal have outscored the Golden Bears 201-75 in the last five games, including a historic 63-13 beatdown in 2013 that marked the largest scoring total and largest margin of victory in series history. A sixth straight win would match Cal’s longest winning streak in the history of the rivalry.
And, most importantly, it would ensure that a second consecutive senior class would leave The Farm never having lost the Axe.
In order to do that, though, Stanford will need to figure out how to stop the Cal “Bear Raid” offense and the arm of talented quarterback Jared Goff, who will be matched up against a Stanford secondary without its emotional leader and top performer in fifth-year senior Ronnie Harris, who will miss the game with an ankle injury.
Although sophomore cornerback Alameen Murphy has seen lots of game action this season, the loss of Harris, the conference’s leader in deflected passes, means that Stanford’s secondary will consist of five first-year starters against perhaps the best quarterback in the conference.
“He’s just awesome,” Shaw said of Goff. “He’s the kind of guy you root for. He’s a really good kid, he’s a humble kid, but he’s a heck of a football player. I’m not surprised by the numbers that he’s been putting up and hopefully we’ll keep those numbers down a little bit in this game. We’re going into this game with a lot of respect for this guy, because he’s that good.”
A big key to stopping the conference’s second-best passing offense will be to get pressure up front — and in that regard, Stanford’s front seven is peaking at the right time. After starting the season with 10 sacks in the first seven games, the Cardinal have notched 11 in the last three games, including a pair of 4-sack performances against Colorado and Oregon.
Spearheading that charge will be fifth-year senior defensive end Brennan Scarlett — a Cal transfer and the Bears’ captain last year. Scarlett is coming off of a career-high 2.5-sack performance against Oregon, and he’ll line up on Saturday against the same people he faced in practice for two years.
And was he able to beat them in practice?
“Yeah,” he said with a huge grin.
The battle between Goff and the Stanford defense should be the decisive factor in the game, since the Cardinal should have little trouble moving the ball on the ground and controlling the clock — Cal’s rushing defense has been its Achilles heel all season, holding back the resurgence of a ball-hawking secondary.
And given that the two things this team holds most dear — the Pac-12 North title and the Stanford Axe — are at stake on Saturday, don’t expect the Cardinal to be lacking for motivation at all.
“They’re fired up about playing this game,” Shaw said. “They know they’re going to get Cal’s best. We know they’re going to try to come after us. They want to win the Axe. We know that. We want to make sure we’re at our best, too.”
Contact Do-Hyoung Park at dhpark ‘at’ stanford.edu.