On Stanford Sports

This post has been brewing in my head for a while following Stanford's disastrous loss to UC Davis last month.

UC Davis!

I didn't even know they had a football team!

My buddy RKao went to UC Davis. He said that their favorite pasttime is cow tipping. (I did *not* make this up.)

Why is Stanford upset so often?

The origins as to Stanford's record for upsets starts with its own success. Stanford is, legitimately, a sports powerhouse that's won 11 consecutive Sears Cups / Sports Academy Director's Cups, awarded to the "best overall collegiate athletics program" in the country. Stanford has a well-deserved good sports name recognition because we field good teams in virtually every sport, year after year.

But Stanford's college sports dominance is often not in big money, big publicity sports. The NACDA press release above says that Stanford won national championships in women's volleyball and women's tennis, and placed runner up in men's water polo and men's swimming. Further, Stanford teams placed in the top ten in women's cross country (5th), women's basketball (5th), women's swimming (5th), women's outdoor track and field (5th), men's cross country (6th), men's gymnastics (7th), men's indoor track and field (7th) and softball (9th).

None of these sports are minor, but none feed into the top professional leagues: MLB, the NFL, the NBA, and (to a lesser extent) the NHL.

Since these are the sports that people care more about, as evidenced by the TV positioning of college football (every Saturday), basketball (the NCAA tournament), and to a lesser extent, baseball (the College World Series), Stanford's reputation for powerful athletics is continually disappointed when faced with the scrutiny of the most public sports.

I have a second theory, but one that I can't substantiate at all. Stanford's high athletic standards give it athletes that are more cerebral, but less athletic. Witness basketball: we feature cerebral players that just aren't the best athletes.

The biggest stars that have played for us in recent years include Chris Hernandez, Josh Childress, Casey Jacobsen, and the Collins twins. All of these players are very good in their own right, but you can find concrete physical weaknesses in each of their makeups. Compare these guys to the super athletes that Arizona has recruited: Andre Iguodala, Salim Stoudamire, Channing Frye, and Mike Bibby.

So we have good athletes who are smart enough and well-coached enough to have great execution. And, over the course of a regular season, good athletes with great execution can do very well (I'm excepting Stanford football from this, which, through the steady stream of coaching changes, seems to have neither good athletes nor great execution). Other teams depending on their athleticism can get worn down over the course of a game and especially over the course of a season, but great execution shows up game after game. Analysts and fans get deceived into rating Stanford's team highly because of the deceptively good records generated by very good execution.

This strategy works; I'm not criticizing it given Stanford's limitations on recruiting. But I'm saying that this strategy is enough to get into the playoffs, but that there's no way that these teams can go deep into them.

Eventually, they run into teams with superior athletes, who, even coached less well, can run them off the field/court. It takes a lot of superior execution to win against super athleticism. That's the classic team that has beaten Stanford's overrated teams. Or, deep in the playoffs, you eventually meet teams that have superior athletes *and* superior execution. And no team has any chance against a group of players who is more athletic and has better execution.

So that's Stanford sports. Great reputation. Good players. Great execution. Good enough to become the favorite. Not good enough to avoid the stream of embarassing upsets.