I won’t go that far already, but the reputation I received last year, deserved or not, of being Mr. Negativity in my weekly columns, is going to be absent—at least for this week. I don’t want to scare away the freshmen just yet.

So instead of trying to suck every shortcoming out of Stanford’s 68-24 drubbing of Wake Forest on Saturday, I’m going to look on the bright side of things.

I have never hesitated to criticize Jim Harbaugh in the past. Case and point was my cynical Oct. 19 column last year, after Stanford’s loss at Arizona, where I questioned some of the decisions made in the game (i.e. why Stanford threw the ball on fourth-and-one).

That said, the man knows how to coach a team up—especially an offense. The year before Harbaugh arrived on the Farm—my freshman year—Stanford went 1-11 under He Who Shall Not Be Named (Walt Harris), and the offense was so pathetic, despite being led by the current Buffalo Bills’ starting quarterback Trent Edwards, that it often made the dozen or so fans that actually stuck around to watch the game liable to lose their lunch in their seats.

In his first year, 2007, Harbaugh led the Cardinal to a 4-8 record, followed by a 5-7 campaign and then last year’s 8-5 season, culminating with a loss to Oklahoma in the Sun Bowl.

Now, the Cardinal is 3-0, and this may be the best coaching job Harbaugh has done yet.

Last year, when the going got tough, Harbaugh could always tell his redshirt freshman quarterback to hand the ball to the 240-pound, should-be-Heisman-Trophy-winning bull of a running back—Toby Gerhart.

Even when the stellar offensive line in front of him had breakdowns, Gerhart used his power to muscle out two or three yards. And his reliability was unmatched—he had 18 more carries than any running back in the nation. Stanford ran one play—“Power”—so many times last year that opposing defenders literally begged out of games. Unlike some coaches, which might have felt the need to show off their bags of tricks, Harbaugh had no problem with that strategy.

Sometimes he would trot out seven or eight offensive lineman, putting 2,400 pounds of blockers in front of Gerhart. It was a blue-collar, “stop us if you can” attitude, and it worked.

This year, it isn’t so simple. Gone is the team’s security blanket, and in his place is a cavalcade of other backs vying for carries.

Yet without Gerhart, the Stanford offense hasn’t missed a beat, and what’s even scarier for opposing defenses is that it may be a better offense this year. There were times on Saturday when it looked like Stanford could score 100 points if it wanted to. The first team offense played eight series and scored eight touchdowns. For the game, Stanford only had one possession that didn’t end in a touchdown. Not only that, but Stanford was not even challenged—it only faced eight third downs all game!

And this wasn’t Directional State University the Cardinal was playing. It was Wake Forest, a team that broke the Cardinal’s heart last year in Winston-Salem, N.C. with a second-half comeback (thanks in large part to a mysteriously abysmal clipping call on Chris Marinelli—don’t think Stanford didn’t remember that) and plays in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Sure, Duke did drop 48 on the Demon Deacons the previous week, but Stanford’s offensive output was impressive no less.

Breaking it down a little bit, Harbaugh does not try to be cute. He simply puts his players in positions in which they can succeed. When he wants to run the ball, he will often bring in a sixth offensive lineman, sixth-year senior James McGillicuddy, as a wing to help the already potent line open holes. He gives the extraordinarily gifted redshirt sophomore quarterback Andrew Luck a lot of short, quick throws early in the game to get his confidence up.

Harbaugh uses quite an array of players and formations, not to be gimmicky like some coaches, but instead to maximize the skill sets of the players on the field. Sure, you can often tell the Cardinal will be running the ball on a given play from who is on the field pre-snap, but Harbaugh’s mindset seems to be that he doesn’t care what a defense knows, because his team will execute—he will keep doing it until it gets stopped. So far, so good this year.