David Shaw typically steps into the press conference room fifteen or twenty minutes after leaving the field at the end of a game, talks to the assembled media for another fifteen or twenty minutes, and then leaves. After the Cardinal's season-ending 35-26 loss to BYU on Saturday night, however, there was a delay.
It brought me back to Saturday morning, when I had watched the biggest college football game of the year. The Michigan Wolverines and Ohio State Buckeyes had continued their rivalry with a matchup in Columbus; both teams entered the game at 11-0 with designs on a national championship. I ended the evening watching the Stanford Cardinal lose to BYU to complete a disappointing 3-9 season. The contrast was remarkable.
As I watched former Stanford head coach Jim Harbaugh and his Wolverines coast past the Buckeyes and put the finishing touches on an undefeated regular season, I was struck by the wide gap between the quality of football I watched in the morning and what I would likely see that night.
I couldn't have been the only Cardinal fan to see what was going on, to see that the distance between Stanford and Ann Arbor is much more than the 2,400 miles you might trace on the map. It hadn't been that long ago when Stanford was playing in big games like that, when the Stanford offense couldn't be stopped, when Stanford players were taking regular trips to New York on the first Saturday of December. It hadn't been that long ago.
I've been missing that all season long, and as I've been wondering if Stanford can one day return to those heights, it's possible that David Shaw was wondering the same thing.
As the wait in the press room grew longer, speculation began in all corners of the internet. At first I thought the delay was just because it was the final game of the season; Shaw was likely spending a bit more time addressing his players and thanking the seniors. But as the minutes continued to tick by, it began to feel like something was brewing.
I don't think I've had a single conversation about Stanford football in the last two months without being asked about Shaw's future, and I've always maintained that his job was among the safest in America. "The only way he won't be the coach next year," I said, "would be if he resigned, and even that would surprise me."
So when Shaw finally stepped up to the podium at 12:30am, glanced at his watch to note the time and said "Good morning," I wondered if we might be watching something important. He was clearly emotional, and he began with these words: "First of all, wining and losing always goes on the head coach." And that's when I knew.
He spoke little of the actual game, except to praise his players for their grit and determination and to report on a few more injuries. After three or four minutes, he got to the point. "I just informed the team that I just coached my last game at Stanford. It's been a great sixteen years. It really has. It took a while to get out here because, basically, I had to hug the entire football team one at a time."
He had much more to say, but I spent the rest of his conference thinking back over the course of his tenure and wondering how we had gotten to a moment I could never have imagined only a few short years ago. No Stanford coach has won as many games, as many conference championships, or as many Rose Bowls as David Shaw, but things have changed recently. In raising the expectations of the program, Shaw hoisted his own sword of Damocles; when he failed to meet the expectations he had created, many in the fanbase reached for the sword.
As Shaw was first criticized and then vilified for his declining winning percentage over the past few years, I frequently defended him in this space and on Twitter. People didn't like that, and they weren't shy about letting me know.
I've never hidden my admiration and respect for a man who always represented the team and the University with dignity and class, and always treated me with kindness. As a result, many of my critics assumed that I was defending him only because I liked him. Commenters on Twitter questioned my intelligence, folks slid into my DMs to tell me I needed to stop being so soft, and some readers decided that Shaw and I must be close personal friends, as if that were the only possible explanation for a difference in opinion.
My best guess is that I had ten or eleven conversations with Shaw during his time as head coach, the first at an alumni gathering in Southern California a few months after he was hired in 2011, and the last at Pac-12 Media Day this past July. Even though I wasn't one of the writers waiting to speak to him after practice every night, I am the only person who wrote consistently about Stanford football for the duration of his tenure, and the only person who sat with him at lunch during his first Media Day and his last. But we aren't friends. He likely doesn't know my name.
Even so, I am not a journalist. I never attempted to separate the respect I felt for Shaw from the product on the field. I saw the same decline that my readers saw, I just believed that Shaw was the best person to fix the football problems. (I also continue to believe that Shaw would've been the best person to navigate this brave new world of college football; we'll see how the next head coach does with that.)
Someone asked Shaw on Saturday night what he would miss the most after leaving, and I knew the answer before he opened his mouth. I asked him the same question five or six years ago, only then it was hypothetical, and if I remember correctly, I prefaced my question with, "When you leave this job twenty years from now..."
But his answer on Saturday night was the same as it had been on that summer afternoon so long ago. "The people," he said. He spoke about relationships with coaches on his staff and with the coaches of Stanford's other sports teams. He talked about the joy he felt in welcoming back former players as well as the wistfulness of leaving behind freshmen and sophomores whose Stanford arcs are only just beginning. He's going to miss the people, and I'll miss him.
As the clock ticked past one in the morning, he reflected on the end of his Stanford career. "It's time for me to step aside," he said, "time for the next group to come in. And hopefully whoever they hire next wins more games than I did."
They won't, but maybe that's okay.