David Shaw is excited about getting Stanford football team back on field after pandemic-altered season was put on hold.
David Shaw has been asked before each of his 10 seasons as Stanford’s head coach what he’s most concerned about and most excited about. This season it carried an entirely new meaning.
“What has me most excited, my initial response to that question is playing football,” Shaw said on a video conference Wednesday. After the Pac-12 announced in August that conference schools wouldn’t be playing in 2020, the league reversed course last Thursday. Stanford is scheduled to open play on the weekend of Nov. 7.
“Everything we’ve done in our conference is for the (players’) health and safety and nothing else,” Shaw said. “I feel great about everything we’ve done. I feel great about the lead time that we have. Would I love another couple of weeks? Absolutely. But Nov. 7 is absolutely doable.”
Stanford allowed its players to go home this fall when the school moved to remote instruction, as did programs like Washington, Oregon and UCLA. It seemed the Pac-12 season wouldn’t start until at least January.
“We transitioned from preseason training mode to offseason training mode,” Shaw said.
Shaw is a member of conference and NCAA working groups dealing with COVID-19. He said that the availability of daily testing, and finding that heart abnormalities are a more rare complication from COVID-19 than originally thought, were two of the main reasons the conference is moving forward with a fall season.
State and county health guidelines limiting large groups don’t allow for regular practices on The Farm, but Shaw hopes he’s allowed to have normal team drills by the time training camp starts.
Stanford’s first six opponents in the seven-game schedule are expected to be announced this week. It will include the five other teams in the Pac-12 North (Cal, Washington, Washington State, Oregon, and Oregon State) and one crossover opponent from the Pac-12 South, which will count in the division standings.
Even though the crossover game will create unbalanced schedules, Shaw agreed with adding a sixth contest so each team will have an even number of home and away games. He hoped the extra game would be against USC or UCLA, the two Pac-12 South schools that Stanford traditionally play every season.
“If it’s not one of our Southern California partners I’d be sad,” Shaw said. “But I’d also understand that not everyone can be satisfied.”
If the North division schedule stays consistent from previous years, Stanford would be traveling to Oregon, Washington, and Cal and hosting Washington State and Oregon State. But there won’t be any fans in Pac-12 stadiums this year, making the trips to Eugene and Seattle less intimidating.
“To go into those stadiums and actually hear, that’s just never happened before,” Shaw said. ‘That evens the playing field to a certain degree, not having a noise issue.”
It will be just another unique circumstance in a season full of them.
Following his initial response, Shaw said what made him most excited is to see his team finally healthy after an injury-marred 4-8 season in 2019, which marked the first time Stanford won fewer than eight games with Shaw at the helm. His biggest concern was making sure his players didn’t get COVID-19.
With teams and conferences all playing varying amounts of games this season, and few if any out-of-conference games among contenders, Shaw said the simplest solution would be to give the conference champions automatic entry into the College Football Playoff, and have a few wild card teams to fill out either a six- or eight-team bracket.
“Whether it’s 6 or 8, at some point of time (expanding the playoff) is going to happen,” Shaw said. “We all know it. It’s the only thing that makes sense and is fair and equitable.”
Shaw said that he’s watched two college football games from start to finish this month, both featuring Stanford transfers – Notre Dame offensive lineman Devery Hamilton against Duke, and Mississippi State quarterback K.J. Costello against LSU. Costello threw for an SEC-record 623 yards in his debut against the reigning champions.
“Mike Leach has thrown for a lot of yards with a lot of quarterbacks, and very few have had the arm talent that K.J. Costello has,” Shaw said. “So we figured it would be a special year for him… to push himself hopefully into that first round of the NFL draft.”
