For around 25 minutes on Saturday, Stanford was committing costly penalties, dropping important passes, lacking in pass protection, and looking every bit the team that scored just 6 points against a lackluster Northwestern defense last week.

But for the next 35 minutes, Stanford (1-1) stretched the field, opened up the playbook, unleashed all manner of creative formations and plays, and exploded for 491 yards against a stiff UCF (0-2) defense in a blowout 31-7 win that flashed glimmers of the true potential in this offense.

“Today we still sputtered early on and missed a couple of things, but our guys stayed positive and then got into a rhythm,” said head coach David Shaw. “Once you get into a rhythm, we’re throwing it, we’re running it, we feel good. We’re mixing it up, and you saw a bunch of different things.”

Perhaps the most promising sign was that Stanford easily sustained its drives, with six of its 11 drives going seven plays or longer. In fact, only one of Stanford’s five scoring drives was shorter than 60 yards.

Fifth-year senior quarterback Kevin Hogan had a sparkling game, completing 17 of his 29 passing attempts for a career-high 341 yards, 3 touchdowns and no interceptions. He was helped out by a monster breakout from true freshman running back Bryce Love, who caught the ball twice for 135 yards and a touchdown on a 93-yard touchdown reception in the fourth quarter.

“He’s not ready for the entire game plan, but at the same time we’re going to pick spots for him both as the primary guy to get the ball but also as a decoy,” Shaw said about Love.

Senior Michael Rector caught four passes for 86 yards and a touchdown while sophomore running back Christian McCaffrey also caught four passes for 59 yards and a short touchdown as part of his 166 all-purpose yards.

Although Stanford started slowly due to lots of sloppy, penalty-laden play from the offensive line and a bevy of big drops from his receivers, Hogan and the Stanford offense broke out in a huge way against an inexperienced UCF secondary.

The turning point came late in the second quarter, when an ugly scoreless tie was finally broken with a spectacular 53-yard flea-flicker touchdown pass, where senior running back Barry Sanders took the handoff and pitched back to Hogan, who threw a beautiful deep ball to Rector running wide open across the field for Stanford’s first touchdown of the season.

“It was in the game plan because this is a team that plays with their safeties tight to the line of scrimmage and they’re very aggressive,” Shaw said. “We had to wait for the corners to start getting aggressive. Once they started getting aggressive, then we made the call.”

Once Stanford was finally able to get over the hump with that first touchdown of the season, the floodgates opened.

The offensive line got great push against a tough UCF defensive front, McCaffrey and Remound Wright hit their holes and kept the chains moving, and Hogan was able to attack an inexperienced Knights secondary both in the short game and over the top. The blocking also got a lot crisper after Stanford hit its stride, as Stanford’s offensive line was not penalized for the rest of the game after the Rector touchdown.

After the flea flicker made it a 7-0 game, Stanford stretched the lead at the end of the first half with a 52-yard field goal from Conrad Ukropina. The touchdowns from McCaffrey and Love capped impressive scoring drives to put Stanford up 24-0 before Barry Sanders made highlight reels around the country by juking a UCF defender out of his shoes on a 20-yard rushing touchdown to put the game on ice.

Sophomore tight end Dalton Schultz was particularly impressive in his blocking all evening, routinely taking on defensive ends one-on-one and sealing the edges for the Cardinal rushers.

“Once we got into a rhythm offensively, it was fun to watch,” Shaw said.

Shaw and offensive coordinator Mike Bloomgren, to their credit, also called a masterful game, with poor execution having held the offense back early before they opened up the playbook with the flea flicker, some new twists on the Wildcat, diversified formations with multiple tight ends and heavy personnel packages to keep UCF guessing and outgunned all game.

On the other side of the ball, Stanford’s defense turned in one of its patented shutdown efforts, holding UCF to just 15 yards in the first quarter (including -5 yards passing) and just 181 yards overall. The Cardinal almost pitched their third nonconference home shutout in two seasons before UCF was able to tack on a garbage-time touchdown against Stanford’s third-team defense to take the goose egg off the board.

That was helped by the fact that UCF quarterback Justin Holson was removed from the game after just one drive due to a broken finger suffered during the game, after which Knights head coach George O’Leary inserted true freshman Bo Schneider to right the ship.

At first, it seemed as though Stanford’s decimated defensive line, already thin due to Harrison Phillips’ season-ending injury, was going to collapse after senior defensive end Aziz Shittu was disqualified from the game late in the first quarter after a targeting penalty.

However, that didn’t slow the defensive line down one bit.

Fifth-year senior Brennan Scarlett and sophomore Solomon Thomas played as a two-man defensive line on almost every play from the second quarter on, and they were both disruptive forces to behold up front, even somehow getting stronger as the game wore on despite common sense dictating that they would start to slow down.

“If a man goes down, we have to be able to pick up his load and carry it the rest of the way,” Scarlett said. “It was unfortunate that Aziz went out early in the game, but we have to contribute to our hard work and practice and stuff and we were able to finish it out.”

Thomas also picked up the first sack of his collegiate career in the fourth quarter when he brought down UCF backup quarterback Tyler Harris. He finished the evening with two of his four tackles going for a loss.

Senior inside linebacker Blake Martinez led the Cardinal in tackling for the second week in a row with 8 tackles, and he added an interception — the fifth of his career — as one of two turnovers Stanford collected. Sophomore Jordan Perez, playing alongside Martinez for most of the game, was also very impressive in his increased exposure, particularly in the pass rush.

Finally, Stanford’s secondary had a stellar game apart from some pass interference penalties, with fifth-year senior cornerback Ronnie Harris, sophomore cornerback Alijah Holder and freshman nickelback Quenton Meeks all having had outstanding games. Senior safety Dallas Lloyd also forced a key fumble by UCF.

Even in a game this lopsided, it almost feels like Stanford left points on the field after dropping at least three possible interceptions and several accurate passes from Hogan. With that in mind, Shaw isn’t eager to rest on his laurels this week and will focus harder than ever to solve Stanford’s execution problem before Stanford travels to USC next weekend for its toughest matchup of the season.

“I think we have so much room to improve,” Shaw said. “If we can play cleaner, we can be even better. That’s what our charge is this week. Our charge is execution.”

Contact Do-Hyoung Park at dhpark ‘at’ stanford.edu.