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A Half Full Look at the 2024 Stanford Football Schedule

Because I'm doing my best to look at the bright side of college football's new reality, I'll present this schedule overview without sadness, sarcasm, or cynicism. Just the facts as they're laid out before us.

The Atlantic Coast Conference -- that's Stanford's new football conference now, for those who aren't aware -- announced its schedule rotation through the year 2030. (That's rather optimistic considering Clemson and Florida State are already house shopping in the SEC, but no cynicism, remember?)

Is This Rock Bottom?

The First Rock Bottom

We know the idea of "rock bottom." It is the place from which nothing can get worse, and, ideally, the beginning of a return to normalcy. Perhaps a gambler spends away his child's college fund, or a family going through difficult times begins sleeping in their car.

Personal tragedies like those examples and the status of a football program are two very different subjects, but there is one thing that both have in common. We never really know where rock bottom is until we've gained enough perspective to look back from a higher perch. The gambler, for example, no doubt had several dark moments earlier on that he might've hoped were his bottom, and so it is with Stanford football.

As the Cardinal closed out the 2021 season with seven straight defeats, the 52-7 loss to Utah seemed like rock bottom, but it could also be argued that the 41-11 loss to Cal two games later was even worse. Surely the program could sink no lower. As we sat there licking our wounds after Big Game and then sat there still as the team lost to Notre Dame a week later, it was difficult to imagine things getting any worse.

But then this year began and things did just that. The 1-3 start with consecutive losses to USC, Washington, and Oregon was bad, but the devastating and wholly unexpected loss to Oregon State made things even worse. It certainly felt like the bottomest rock bottom we'd seen, and when the Cardinal rebounded with a rejuvenating upset victory over Notre Dame in South Bend and then another (less impressive) win over Arizona State it felt like things were better. We looked back at those four straight losses and knew the worst was behind us. Right?

Blogging with the Enemy: UCLA Bruins

It was, without question, the most preposterous game of the David Shaw Era. Playing UCLA in an empty Rose Bowl was strange enough, but the ebb and flow of that final game of the 2020 season defied all logic. After thoroughly dominating the first half, the Cardinal fell apart in the third quarter before regaining its footing in the fourth quarter to force an overtime in which they'd appear to have the game salted away before botching things enough that defeat once again seemed certain until a heroic finish saved the victory in the end. If that sentence made your head spin, it was nothing compared to the actual game.

Stanford 48, UCLA 47

Where do you even begin? There have been some improbable Stanford wins in the past, but if we agree to put the 2007 upset over USC in a category by itself, there isn't another game in the last fifteen years that brought a more unlikely result than Saturday night's game at the Rose Bowl.

Blogging with the Enemy: UCLA Bruins

There were two long streaks lost during Stanford football's lost season of 2019 -- nine straight wins over Cal and eleven straight wins in ten years over UCLA. The loss to Cal was probably more painful because there was part of me that thought that streak might go on forever, but the UCLA streak was fun because it was so improbable. It just didn't make sense for a program like UCLA to lose eleven straight games to anyone, and while there were certainly times when the game between the Cardinal and the Bruins highlighted the large gap between the teams, it was still... unnatural. It was never a streak meant to last.

In my previews of the last four games in the rivalry, I enjoyed writing about an imagined young boy named Kevin and his UCLA parents, Joe and Betty. In the world I created, Kevin had been born during the closing moments of UCLA's last win over the Cardinal back in 2008, and he passed one milestone after another, all without celebrating a win over Stanford.

Now that the streak is finally over, I'm sure 12-year-old Kevin has probably lost interest. While he'll likely spend his evening watching TikToks in between sessions of Among Us with his friends, his parents will be glued to the screen. Both Stanford and UCLA have already announced that they won't accept any postseason invitations. For each team, this is the end, and each team will look to use this final game to erase the might-have-beens that have plagued them through 2020.

Blogging with the Enemy: UCLA Bruins

While it might be tempting to dispense with the formality of a preview that even pretends that UCLA has a chance of beating Stanford on Thursday night and ending the Bruins' eleven-game losing streak against the Cardinal, this is not the season for that. If we've learned anything from the first six games of the year it's that anything can happen, ranging from the humbling blowout at the hands of Central Florida to the decisive win ten days ago against Washington.

We might want to point at that win over the Huskies and hold it up as evidence that things are heading in the right direction and that a winning streak is on the horizon, but in this season of injuries for the Cardinal, there were two more significant losses that night. Right guard Henry Hattis went down with a gruesome looking injury in the second half, and soon after that quarterback Davis Mills was pulled after feeling discomfort in his knee.

So instead of building on the success of last week's win, the offense will take the field on Thursday night with a third-string quarterback playing behind an offensive line featuring three freshmen. We don't know much about Jack West, aside from what we've heard from David Shaw, who said this week that West can make all the necessary throws. Thus far in his Stanford career, there have been only five official throws, all coming last season. He threw one incompletion in mop-up duty against UC-Davis, and was 1 for 4 for four yards a couple months later against Oregon State. When he took over for Mills last week the Cardinal offense was in victory mode, so all he did was hand the ball off. He'll have to do a lot more than that against UCLA.

Stanford 49, UCLA 42

The day will come when the streak will end, but that day is not yet here.

For much of the season these new UCLA Bruins had looked like the worst team in the conference, and there was a time when they looked at risk of entering this final game of their season at 0-11, but things began to look up over the past month or so, and instead Chip Kelly's team looked much improved, and they brought the fight to the Cardinal early.

Stanford took the ball first, as usual, in front of an uninspired crowd that must've been one of the smallest in recent Rose Bowl history. The afternoon was typically gorgeous, but the holiday weekend and the disappointing 3-8 record of the home team combined to keep most fans away. I sat on the more crowded shady side of the stadium, shoulder to shoulder with loyal UCLA season ticket holders, but the sun shone on vast swaths of empty seats on the other side of the field. The official attendance figure was 38,391 -- much less than half the Rose Bowl's capacity -- but even that number seemed a bit inflated.

And so when K.J. Costello dropped back to pass on the third play of the game and delivered a room-service interception for safety Darius Pickett, there wasn't much response from the UCLA crowd, even when it looked for a moment like Pickett might return the ball for a touchdown. He was tackled at the Stanford 23, but the Cardinal defense stood strong from there, and the Bruins had to settle for a 38-yard field goal from J.J. Molson.

That interception from Costello was problematic. His pass was aimed directly at our seats, so I saw exactly what Pickett saw -- Costello locked onto his receiver and didn't seem to know the safety was lurking. The ball wasn't half way to its intended target before everyone in the stadium knew it would be going in the other direction. David Shaw addressed this in his post game presser, but not in the sense you might expect. He cited Costello's reaction to the play as evidence of his growth and potential as a quarterback. Costello took full responsibility for the mistake, and Shaw explained that he sees Costello's coachability as one of the main reasons he expects him to be one of the top quarterbacks in the nation next season. (More on that in a bit.)

Game Preview: UCLA Bruins

Two years ago I introduced you to an imaginary boy named Kevin who was born on October 18th, 2008. Kevin is ten years old now, and although he's likely experienced a lot of things in his imaginary lifetime -- sleepovers and Fortnite and Little League baseball -- he's never seen his UCLA Bruins beat the Stanford Cardinal. He has, of course, seen plenty of heartbreak. Let's take a look at the streak, one game at a time.

Stanford 58, UCLA 34

What if it never ends? What if Stanford's winning streak over UCLA stretches through the end of this decade and into the next? What if one day fifty years from now, in attempting to persuade a nation to take on a daunting challenge, a President of the United States asks a crowd, "But why, some say, Mars? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, ninety-nine years ago, fly to the Moon? Why does UCLA play Stanford?"

If that scenario comes to fruition, if Stanford wins over UCLA become as regular as orbits around the Sun, it's likely that historians will look back on the win in 2017 and know that regardless of what the score might indicate, this game was the one where the streak almost ended.

Blogging with the Enemy: UCLA Bruins

Do you remember Kevin? He was introduced in this space last year during the week leading up to the UCLA game. Kevin was born on October 18th of 2008 on the afternoon of UCLA's last win over Stanford. He'll turn nine in a few weeks, and while he's seen three presidential elections, two different Summer Olympics, and a total eclipse of the sun, he still hasn't seen his Bruins beat the Cardinal. He still leaves the stadium crying each year, dragging his blue and gold pom-poms behind him, ignoring his parents' efforts at cheering him up disguised in offers of popcorn and cotton candy.

Last year's game was certainly the worst of Kevin's life. After watching his Bruins control the Cardinal throughout the game, Kevin surely thought the moment had finally come. A late 13-9 lead seemed safe with the Stanford offense struggling, but then it wasn't. Then Ryan Burns was lofting a pass towards the corner of the end zone and into the hands of J.J. Arcega-Whiteside, then Joey Alfieri was sacking Josh Rosen, then Solomon Thomas was scooping up the fumble and rumbling into the end zone as the clock fell to zeros, and then Kevin was crying. Again.