If you woke up on Tuesday morning hoping to find it had all been a dream, hoping to learn that the football had managed to stay inside of the left upright on the field goal attempt at the end of regulation, I'm sorry to disappoint you. The kicker who had been so accurate all season wasn't able to make that field goal. The defense that had been so stout all season -- and effective on Monday night -- wasn't able to get Oklahoma State off the field when they had to. The offense, easily one of the best in the nation, couldn't get the ball in the end zone for the touchdown that would've assured victory.
It wasn't a dream. What you saw really happened.
But if you can put those final fifteen minutes out of your head for just a moment, you have to realize that this was a great, great game played by a wonderful team led by the best quarterback you'll ever see.
Coach David Shaw opened his press conference with one final pitch for his quarterback to win the Heisman Trophy. "There's no player in America like Andrew Luck. There really isn't. Forget about the stats, forget about the comparisons of other guys or whatever, it doesn't matter. What he does at the line of scrimmage, what he does with the ball you know, and the kid is completely unselfish. He doesn't care if you don't throw a pass, he doesn't care about his stats, he doesn't try to get bigger stats so he can win awards. The kid is the definition of what you would want at the quarterback position in all facets. I don't have a vote. We'll see what happens. I just know that he's one of a kind... There's nobody like this guy."
Saturday night was Luck's last chance to impress the Heisman voters, but more importantly it was his last chance to play in front of his home fans. He did what he usually does. He managed the game, he moved his team up and down the field, and he put his teammates in position to make plays. Oh, and he also matched a career high by throwing four touchdown passes for the sixth time in the past two seasons. We'll find out for sure two weeks from now, but it certainly felt like he did enough to secure the Heisman.
It's hard to know where to start with this game. Big Game is usually either exhilarating, nerve-wracking, or depressing, but somehow Saturday's version seemed to have equal parts of each. Going into the game there was talk that the Cardinal might have trouble staying focused after losing the biggest game in program history a week before, but surely having the Cal Bears on the opposite sideline and the Axe marching around the stadium would keep them in the moment.
I spent most of Saturday afternoon convincing myself that Stanford would win this game. My doubting innerself didn't put up much of an argument, and I started thinking about the Pac-12 championship game and even the BCS champhionship game. I imagined David Shaw hoisting a trophy in New Orleans, and I pictured Andrew Luck posing at a press confernence with a stiff-arm trophy on one side of him and a crystal football on the other.
Stanford University would be on top of the college football world.
And just like that, the dream was over. In most games there's a moment you can point to, either when things turn in the winnng team's direction or when the door is shut on the possibility of a comeback. In Oregon's crushing victory over Stanford on Saturday night, however, the Cardinal died a slow death. It was as if they suffered a mortal wound in the first half but then took two painful hours to bleed to death.
Matt Barkley handed the ball off to running back Curtis McNeal at the Stanford thirty-yard line with just over ten and half minutes to play in the third quarter. McNeal took off through a gaping hole on the left side of the line and sprinted untouched to the corner of the end zone to give USC a commanding 20-10 lead over the Cardinal.
Given the amount of time left in the game and the typical efficiency of the Stanford offense, the ten-point lead was far from insurmountable, but with the way the game was going, I was concerned. Only moments earlier the Trojans had capped off their opening drive of the second half with a sixty-one yard McNeal touchdown, giving them their first lead of the game and Stanford's first deficit of the season. The Cardinal offense had responded to that taste of adversity with a three-and-out, and now Andrew Luck took the field amidst a sea of uncertainty.
Could the Cardinal respond in the face of adversity? Would the team's national championship aspirations evaporate in the heat of the Coliseum? Would Luck's season end without a Heisman Trophy? Most importantly, was the 2011 Stanford Cardinal just a good football team, or a great football team?
If you want to know why it's taken so long get this recap up, it's because it's taken me this long to wrap my head around what happened on Saturday night. This was Reunion Weekend at Stanford, and I spent much of Friday and Saturday wandering around a campus that was strange and familiar all at the same time. There were dozens of buildings that hadn't been there during my time, but my freshman dorm (Rinconada, if you must know) hadn't changed a bit. My old friends from the Class of '91 had grey and thinning hair, but they were still the same people I'd bonded with two decades earlier.
The Stanford football team presented a similar paradox. The helmets and jerseys looked the same, but the results? Slightly different.
A friend of mine called me a few hours before kickoff and asked me how I was feeling about the game. My response? I told him I was getting tired of watching games like this, tired of watching the Cardinal beat up on listless opponents, tired of waiting for Washington and USC and Oregon and...
And then the game started and I realized that I could never get tired of this. Not in a millions years.
If there had been any concerns about the Stanford offense through the first three games this season, most worries focused on slow starts, vanilla play calling, and the rebuilding offensive line. On Saturday night against UCLA, Andrew Luck led his team to scores on all three first half possessions, the Cardinal rushed for more than 200 yards, and Drew Terrell threw a pass to Andrew Luck. I think we can put those concerns out of our minds for a while.
It's hard to tell from the final score, but there was a stretch of time on Saturday night when it seemed like an entire season was about to come crashing down.
Tight end Coby Fleener was still sitting on the bench, not having seen any action since taking a violent blow to the head midway through the first quarter, and wide receiver Chris Owusu had joined him after landing awkwardly on his right shoulder while returning a kickoff.
Fleener's injury was a helmet-to-helmet blow, a likely concussion, and even before he wobbled off the field it looked like he'd be out for the game (he would be), and there are concerns any time Owusu is tackled (he would return), but things really begin to look grim when linebacker Shayne Skov went down with just under ten minutes to play in the second quarter.
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