Some of you may remember that last year I savaged – appropriately, I would say – the Stanford Cardinal in the contemporary game preview post. Stanford came into last year’s game 1-4, with the one win coming over FCS Colgate, and allowing 38.5 points per game to FBS opponents. They would finish the season allowing 34.2 points per game to FBS teams. Somehow, inexplicably, the worst team of the David Shaw era came into Notre Dame Stadium that week and left with a 16-14 win. A win that was aided significantly by two truly horrendous referee decisions on what exactly constitutes a turnover, but regardless, that shouldn’t have mattered. Folks, as bad as Stanford was last year, this year’s edition is probably a little worse. Set aside your PTSD from last year, from JJ Arcega-Whiteside, from Devon Cajuste, etc. etc. They’re bad and their fan(s) are in for a rough experience on Saturday.

Stanford Fan in the wild

Now, I understand that some of you have some concerns over the notes you feel I may hit over the rest of this column. First, you’re right, that’s absolutely where I’m headed. Second, past is not prologue in college football. Last year’s result took all kinds of things breaking wrong. I know we’re in the final game of the season, I know we’re on the road, I know it’s a weird time (a 4:00 local time kickoff), and I know there are potentially some weird vibes (the final regular season game in the history of the Pac 12 conference, which I’ll get back to in a bit). I don’t care. Stanford is super duper bad this year, and for all the self-inflicted wounds the Irish have suffered this season they’ve still been quite proficient at slaughtering truly bad teams. In four games against FBS non-winning opponents – Navy, Central Michigan, Pitt, and Wake Forest – Notre Dame has scored 46.5 points per game and allowed 8.5. I’m not going to call a 40 point win, of course, but I would be surprised if this game was competitive, for all the reasons we’ll review together below.

Back to that aside on the impending demise of the Pac 12… Not surprisingly, given that conference leadership exhibited a Michael Scott-like grasp of business strategery, the Pac 12 was the big loser in the conference realignment shuffle earlier this year. In itself that wasn’t newsworthy as they’ve almost always come out the biggest loser in past realignments, but this time around they lost massively – for years it seemed they would die by a thousand cuts, while in the end it was a handful of sledgehammer blows that did them in. On June 30th of last year USC and UCLA announced they would move to the Big Ten. Had the conference office displayed vision, fortitude, and aggressiveness, they had a solid chance to survive. Instead they fiddled while other members laid the groundwork to follow the LA schools out of the burning conference.

In July of this year Colorado announced they would return to the Big 12. In August Oregon and Washington announced they would also move to the Big Ten, which effectively sealed the Pac 12’s fate. Later that same day Arizona, Arizona State, and Utah all announced they would move to the Big 12, and about a month later the ACC decided to accept Stanford and Cal (two Bay Area schools joining the Atlantic Coast Conference is an absurdity to discuss another time). That left Oregon State and Washington State as the only remaining members of the Pac 12; they are now locked in a court battle with current conference leadership and the departing member schools over who should control the conference. It’s a mess, and serves as a poster child both for the chaos that revenue-based conference realignment can cause and the decay that stubborn, ignorant, and disinterested leadership can lead to. This game will thus be the final regular season affair in any meaningful sense for the conference – fittingly, it will be broadcast in East Coast primetime on the Pac 12 Network, which nobody actually gets. Because conference leadership is dumb.

PSA: The streaming service Fubo carries the Pac 12 Network and offers a seven-day free trial – sign up for a trial of their Elite or Premier package (the Pro package doesn’t carry Pac 12) and don’t forget to cancel it before the seven days are up. Once you’re signed up, this is the direct link to the channel: https://www.fubo.tv/watch?channelId=88172&intent=playChannel. We can’t speak for every device of course but you can likely install the Fubo app on your phone, smart TV, or streaming stick (Amazon Fire, Roku, Apple TV, etc.) in addition to accessing it via a desktop browser.

Notre Dame (-26) at Stanford

Stanford Stadium
Palo Alto, CA
Date: Saturday, November 25th, 2023
Time: 7:00 PM ET
TV: Pac 12 Network

Yes, you read that spread correctly. Stanford has had massive issues on both sides of the ball this year, even more so than they did last year. They rank 113th nationally in scoring offense, 129th in scoring defense, 92nd in total offense, 130th in total defense, 114th in passer rating, 130th in passer rating allowed, 91st in 3rd down conversion rate, 132nd in 3rd down conversion rate allowed, 107th in red zone TD rate, 125th in red zone TD rate allowed, 118th in sacks allowed, 111th in tackles for loss, 122nd in tackles for loss allowed, 95th in 20+ yard plays allowed, 115th in penalty yardage per game, 107th in turnover margin. The advanced stats don’t suggest a snake in the grass either – the Tree ranks 103rd in F+ (FEI and SP+ combined), 91st in F+ offense, and 112th in F+ defense. For reference Wake Forest is 87th in F+ and Navy is 108th.

If there’s any sliver of daylight about something that wouldn’t be most recognizable in the reservoir of a Port-a-John, they rank 76th in 20+ yard plays, in large part thanks to Colorado rolling over for them, and 64th in sacks – tied with Notre Dame, in fact – with 23 in 11 games. Six of those sacks came in their opener against Hawaii though, and even with a respectable sack total they also have half as many PBUs as the Irish and fewer interceptions (six) than Xavier Watts has by himself (seven), so they haven’t exactly translated pressure into disruption. The bottom line is that they’re very bad at everything again, as they were last year but to an even greater degree across the board. David Shaw dumped a massive rebuilding project on former Sacramento State coach Troy Taylor, and in this his first season it’s quite clear the program still has a long way to go.

Stanford’s Offense

They, um, will put offensive players on the field on Saturday. Probably.

That might be about the nicest thing I can say about their offense this year. They rely heavily on the quarterback run – even removing sacks their two main quarterbacks have over three times as many carries as their most-utilized running back. Their play selection skews slightly towards pass – counting all opponent sacks as pass plays the split is 55/45. Looking at his history as the head man at Sacramento State and the pre-Ludwig OC at Utah I believe he’d prefer to flip that or even go heavier to the run, but Stanford just doesn’t have the personnel for that right now.

Quarterbacks Ashton Daniels and Justin Lamson have combined for 744 yards on 171 non-sack carries, yielding a pedestrian 4.4 yards per carry, and seven of the team’s 13 rushing touchdowns to date. After an early season time-share, Daniels seized the QB1 job on the heels of his breakout performance against Colorado. Daniels has been the better player, but that’s kind of damning with faint praise as the closest Irish analogue for his passing performance is 2017 Brandon Wimbush. In that spot duty Lamson has a completion rate under 50% for a paltry 5.9 yards per attempt.

Neither have gotten much help from the remaining skill position guys. Former Irish recruiting target Elic Ayomanor – the staff eschewed further pursuit of him when the 2022 class consisted of Tobias Merriweather, CJ Williams, and Amorion Walker, which, uh… – is their leading receiver with a respectable 55 catches for 955 yards and six touchdowns in 11 games. He’s been pretty feast or famine though; against Colorado, Washington, and Oregon State he posted a combined 25/562/5 line while in their other eight games he posted a combined 30/393/1 line. Sophomore wideout Tiger Bachmeier, the younger brother of Boise State QB Hank Bachmeier and older brother of former Notre Dame 2025 QB target Bear Bachmeier, has flashed at times but doesn’t profile as a game breaker type. The tight end position is short of the halcyon days of Zach Ertz and Austin Hooper – Ben Yurosek was good but went down for the year after game six, and, in the larger role he’s played as a result, sophomore Sam Roush has just been okay. Receivers not named Elic have combined for just five touchdowns.

Their running back production is virtually non-existent. Senior EJ Smith, Emmitt’s son, leads all backs with 217 rushing yards and hasn’t had more than six carries against a non-FCS opponent this year. Fellow senior Casey Filkins has slightly better numbers but has also missed the last three games with an undisclosed injury and doesn’t seem to be on the radar to return. Former Irish commit and freshman RB Sedrick Irvin had a solid game against a good Arizona team back in September but for – reasons, I guess? – has been a forgotten man since. Essentially the entire offense runs through Daniels and Lamson, which isn’t great news when they’re going up against a defense that has consistently forced quarterbacks into the worst game of their season.

Complicating all of this is that, as you might imagine, their offensive line is pretty bad. They lost six linemen to the transfer portal and have cycled through various combinations of backups and newcomers this season in search of effectiveness. That search has largely been in vain, which in turn has severely limited the offense’s general competence. Occasionally they can get into a good matchup (like the even more undermanned Colorado) or rise up for a day (like inexplicably pushing Washington), but it’s a unit bereft of talent and experience and has played that way through most of the season.

Back to the quarterback depth chart for a second… I can’t find solid confirmation of this, but given the timeline of Justin Lamson’s recruitment and transfer – he enrolled at Syracuse in February 2021 and transferred to Stanford in May 2023, five semesters later – I’m fairly sure that Lamson was an undergrad transfer. If Stanford can take an undergrad transfer from Syracuse… I mean, get it together, Notre Dame. Anyway, much like the Palo Alto and Berkley programs cosplaying as Eastern seaboard institutions, that’s a discussion for another time.

Stanford’s Defense

Even in comparison to the struggling offense, the defense has been rough. Highlighting some of the numbers noted above, they’re in the bottom five nationally in scoring defense, total defense, passer rating allowed, and 3rd down conversion rate allowed. The lipstick the rest of the defense provides for that particular pig is the kind you can get at a gas station, but even if it came from Rodeo Drive it wouldn’t be flattering enough. They’ve had a few good performances against the run, so that will be something to watch on Saturday, but even at that they’ve been torched on the ground a few times too. They’ve created precious little disruption, with just 21 PBUs, one forced fumble, and six interceptions in 11 games (the Irish have 41, 16, and 14, respectively). Which is how you end up in the bottom five nationally in scoring defense, total defense… You get the point.

Sophomore Gaethan Bernadel, who sounds like he just stepped out of a JRR Tolkien novel, and fifth year senior Tristan Sinclair, who sounds like he just stepped out of a James Herriot novel, are the inside linebackers in Stanford’s 3-4 scheme and lead the team in tackles. Bernadel has 4.5 TFLs and Sinclair has 5.0, so they’re capable of getting behind the line of scrimmage at times, but neither is particularly fearsome. Sophomore OLB/DE David Bailey led the team in TFLs last year as a true freshman and leads them again this year with 6.0 despite missing a couple of games. He’s a key guy to neutralize. Redshirt freshman linebacker and spurned Notre Dame target Tevarua Tafiti is in the two deep and has been making a bit of a push lately.

The secondary has some guys in it who play football. Fifth year senior cornerback Zahran Manley leads the team in PBUs with five while senior safety Alaka’i Gilman, Alohi’s younger brother, is just behind him with three. Sophomore safety/nickel Scotty Edwards and Manley lead the team in interceptions with two each. Numbers aside, they’ve just been far too vulnerable to opposing passing games – only Hawaii, Arizona, and Wazzu had even below average days against them. Notre Dame receivers have had an up and down year, but even given their struggles at times they should be able to make some noise here.

Prediction

This is not just a game between a good team and a bottom feeding team. It’s a game that pits strength against weakness – whether it’s Notre Dame’s ability to generate explosive plays (7th nationally in 20+ yard plays, believe it or not) versus Stanford’s propensity to give them up at a high rate, or the highly disruptive Notre Dame defensive front against a highly suspect Stanford offensive front. There are weird vibes around this game as noted at the top of the article, but even so I think this will be similar to the Wake Forest game. Stanford is a 3-8 team in a dying conference – I think a few well-struck punches early have the potential to push them into offseason mode.

Key questions:

1) Which version of Stanford will show up? Stanford is bad. Legitimately bad. Not 2016 Notre Dame bad, where they’re bad but sneakily not bad, they’re just flat out bad. Even so, they lost by one point to current #16 Arizona in a September semi-defensive battle and they took current #4 Washington to the wire a few weeks ago in a shootout. Will this be a game where they dip into the NZT supply again? Or will we see the version that got hammered by USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Oregon State and oh-by-the-way also lost to their coach’s previous (FCS) employer?

2) Was Notre Dame’s offensive output against Wake Forest a blip or a turnaround? The Irish should be able to do whatever they want on offense, and against teams of Stanford’s, uh, quality this season they have done that consistently. Still, we all have searing memories of the offense pointing a Tommy gun at its lower extremities several times this season. We saw some things against Wake – motion, play action, slot production – that we hadn’t seen in a while. I believe that’s a sign of self-scouting and re-emphasis, but we won’t know for sure until the game gets going.

3) How angry will Audric Estime play off his Doak Walker semifinalist snub? How on earth can you leave Estime off the semifinalist list? How?!? And Blake Corum – who is significantly behind Estime in yards (888 vs. 1,103), yards per carry (4.9 vs. 6.0), and 100 yard games (2 vs. 5) – is on the list? Presumably thanks to his edge in touchdowns (20 vs. 14), which he has due to his offensive coordinator not trusting his quarterback at all in the red zone. But I digress… Hopefully Big Dric gets super mad and takes it out on the Tree in what will likely be his final game in a Notre Dame uniform.

Notre Dame 45

Stanford 13

OK, so I guess I did almost call a 40 point win. What can I say, I hate that program.