Consider for a moment the arc of Kevin Hogan's Stanford career. After redshirting during his first year on campus and sitting in meetings with the greatest quarterback in Stanford history (that's Andrew Luck, not John Elway or Jim Plunkett, in case you're wondering), Hogan entered the 2012 season as the number two quarterback behind starter Josh Nunes. He had only been on campus for about fifteen months, so it made sense.
But the Cardinal offense struggled under Nunes. There were high points, like a 50-13 pasting of Duke, a 21-14 upset of USC, and a 54-48 overtime barn-burner over Arizona, in which Nunes posted one of the greatest quarterback lines in Stanford history (21-34, 360 yards, 2 passing TDs, 3 rushing TDs), but eventually it became clear that he wasn't the right player to lead the team.
Slowly but surely, Kevin Hogan was integrated into the offense starting midway through the season. He threw one pass against Cal (a nine-yard touchdown), then had four carries the following week against Washington State. David Shaw was committed to inserting the "Hogan Package" for one or two series per game, but I can't imagine he would've predicted what happened the next week against Colorado.
Hogan entered on the third series of the game and simply wouldn't allow Shaw to take him out. Admittedly, the Buffaloes were the worst team in the Pac-12 that season, but Stanford was a different team with Hogan under center. In my recap of the game, I wrote:
The final score was 48-0, but this game was about Kevin Hogan, plain and simple. His performance wasn't simply a revelation, it altered the entire outlook for the rest of the season. Under Nunes, the offense had fossilized. With Hogan under center, however, everything has changed. We've known about his running ability, but on Saturday he showed that he is a complete quarterback. He hit receivers downfield, he found them in the flat, and -- most importantly -- he delivered the ball where they could catch it and turn upfield. We almost never saw that from Nunes. Also, he showed that he can make all the plays necessary to run the Stanford offense. We saw him throw out patterns to the far side of the field with enough zip to hit his target. We saw him throw the ball on the run while going to the right and the left, and he didn't panic in the pocket. His final line tells you everything you need to know: 18 for 23 for 184 yards and two touchdowns; 7 carries for 48 yards.
We have found our quarterback. End of discussion.
You know what happened next. Stanford truly was a new team with Hogan at the helm, and he led the Cardinal to five consecutive wins after that Colorado game, including a huge road win over Oregon, two straight wins over UCLA, and Stanford's first Rose Bowl victory in four decades, a 20-14 win over Wisconsin.
Optimism was high for Hogan's future, and all he did in 2013, his first full season as starter, was guide the Cardinal to a second straight conference championship and a return trip to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl. Even with all that success, however, there were whispers -- and eventually shouts -- from some in the fan base expressing concern. Hogan, it seems, wasn't good enough. Quite simply, he wasn't Andrew Luck.
Last year Hogan struggled through a well-documented personal issue, the young offensive line battled inconsistency, and he and the Cardinal finished the regular season at 7-5. After four straight BCS bowl games, Stanford dropped to the second tier and finished the year in the Foster Farms Bowl. The palpable disappointment spoke volumes about the changing expectations within the program and throughout the fan base.
More than that, it said something about Kevin Hogan and how he is perceived. Early success can lead to unreasonable expectations, and Hogan fell victim to that. Shaw spoke about this two weeks ago when addressing reporters at the Pac-12's Media Days.
"I think it's pretty widely known now what he was going through personally in his life with a family illness," explained Shaw. "I think he was going through something that very few people can even understand as far as imagining being the guy that replaces Andrew Luck and takes the team to back-to-back Rose Bowls. That next year the amount of pressure that he put on himself, I think, was huge."
Shaw has expressed regret that he didn't consider these pressures with regards to his quarterback, and one can only imagine how it must've affected both Hogan's preparation and his performance. In considering last season's struggles, Shaw has said that the team didn't play as if it were having fun, and that certainly seemed to be true of Hogan. "I don't know that football was fun for a while for him," speculated Shaw. "I think it was really, really hard."
Over the Cardinal's final three games of 2014, the football was fun and easy for Hogan, and the result was three straight wins and statistics that rivaled some of the best quarterbacks in America. Against Cal, UCLA, and Maryland, Hogan produced the best three-game stretch of his three-year career with adjusted QBR's of 93.6, 99.0, and 91.3. (The QBR, or quarterback rating, is measured on a scale of 0-100 and takes into account all plays in a game that are impacted by the quarterback. The adjusted QBR factors in the strength of the opposing defense.) In those three games he completed 45 of 59 passes (76.2%) for 637 yards, four touchdowns, and just one interception. He also ran seven times in each game, racking up 142 yards and a touchdown.
Hogan was brilliant over that stretch. His counting stats might not have been as gaudy as Cal's Jared Goff or USC's Cody Kessler, but those comparisons don't make sense. In no single game did Hogan meet Goff's average of 42.4 attempts, and only twice did he get to Kessler's average of 34.7. The Cardinal doesn't need Hogan to pile up numbers, it needs him to be efficient, and that's exactly what he was in that closing stretch of games, no more so than against UCLA. Hogan completed 14 of 15 passes in the first half (the lone incompletion being a drop) for 189 yards and two touchdowns in a performance that reminded observers of how good he could be.
All of this past is prologue for the 2015 season. After rumors flew that Hogan might be considering a graduate transfer to play for Jim Harbaugh at Michigan or closer to his family at Maryland, Hogan stayed, explaining that those rumors had been baseless. As Hogan enters his final season, the question is which version we'll see.
Considering the talent returning around him, I'm guessing we'll see something like that finishing stretch. The offense from those three games returns almost completely intact, minus left tackle Andrus Peat. I'll address the individual position groups more specifically in the coming weeks, but there will be no drop off from last year. If anything, Hogan will have more weapons than in 2014 and should enjoy more protection from an experienced offensive line. Starters Devon Cajuste and Michael Rector return at wide receiver, as do three experienced tight ends (Eric Cotton, Austin Hooper, and Greg Taboada), and the most electric player on the roster, running back Christian McCaffrey. When you consider the additions of tight end Dalton Schultz and true freshman wide receiver Trent Irwin, it seems that Hogan's main problem will be keeping everyone happy.
Beyond Hogan, the quarterback depth chart gets a bit murky. There are only two other signal callers on the Stanford roster, junior Ryan Burns and sophomore Keller Chryst. Neither player distinguished himself during the spring session, so one of the main agenda items for Shaw during August will be to monitor the battle between these two. Early reports indicate that Chryst, the jewel of the 2014 signing class, has a slight lead over Burns, which would bode well for 2016 and '17. Whichever player wins the job, Shaw has promised that the back-up quarterback will get consistent and important playing team this season, not just fourth quarter mop-up duty. This on-the-job training will give next year's starter a head start of sorts.
With Hogan in 2015 and either Burns or Chryst set to take over in 2016 -- not to mention the highly-touted K.J. Costello who's expected to arrive on campus a year from now -- Stanford is loaded at quarterback for at least the next five or six years. But what else would you expect from Quarterback U?
Photo Credits:
1. Jeff Chiu/AP Photo
2. Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
