Stanford, Washington State And The Battle For The Pac-12's Deeply Weird Soul

Here is a behind-the-scenes journalistic confession I've made in the past, but one that's worth repeating: The only bias in media is toward the interesting. This is why I was terrified when Washington State opened its season with a loss to Portland State, and this is why I am thrilled that the Cougars appear to have righted themselves since then, thereby ensuring—or at least, hopefully ensuring—that Mike Leach will hang around major college football for at least another year or two.

Leach is arguably the quirkiest and most polymathic individual to coach in any major American sport; a couple of times, I have had the privilege of spending a long afternoon in coaches' meetings with him, listening to him deliver discursive sermons like a more with-it Abe Simpson. Just this week, when queried about the atmosphere for Washington State's home games in the sleepy rural burg of Pullman, Leach likened it to Woodstock. Asked to elaborate, Leach said that, "It's not like some special, you know, part of my heart," but that he'd written a paper about Woodstock during college; it was clear that this question animated him far more than anything he could ever be asked about football. And this is what makes him a perfect fit for the Pac-12, a conference that—at least when it comes to football—feels as much like a cutting-edge iconoclastic laboratory as any conflation of college football programs ever could.

But at the moment, that laboratory is in flux.

Let's go back to what seems like a long time ago, when USC was the Pac-12's dominant program. Let us recall a league that invented the notion of "student-body right," a league known for its dominant running backs. Let us note how that perception slowly evolved during the 1990s and during the Pete Carroll era at USC in the 2000s, and let us celebrate how, in the wake of Carroll's departure and the Trojans' series of unfortunate events, the Pac-12 evolved into something altogether different.

For the past several years, the Pac-12's defining program was Oregon; the Ducks' offensive and sartorial boldness became the beating heart of a conference that had long been marginalized by the SEC/Big Ten/Big 12 time-zone establishment. Oregon's success forced the remainder of the league's hand; Oregon led nearly every other Pac-12 program—and arguably, every other college in America—to make interesting choices in order to keep pace. And this is how the Pac-12 became the most interesting cradle of coaches in America. This is how it lured cutting-edge thinkers like Leach and Chris Petersen (Washington) and Rich Rodriguez (Arizona) and Sonny Dykes (Cal).

Now that Oregon is in the midst of a subpar season, it has once again shifted the league's DNA. Without Oregon (and also USC), the Pac-12 is imbalanced, which is why, after Utah's blowout loss to USC last week, the league is on the verge of getting shut out of the College Football Playoff altogether. There is only one legitimate playoff contender remaining, and that happens to be the one team that has long attempted to stand as the firewall to Oregon, the one team that is unafraid to stack its offensive line and play the sort of physical football that defies the league's conventional wisdom.

I am speaking, of course, of Stanford, which began its revival under Jim Harbaugh and Andrew Luck but has refined that identity under an extremely intelligent 43-year-old coach named David Shaw, who has had multiple opportunities to land an NFL job—or even a higher-profile college job—but has chosen to remain at Stanford. And every time it feels like Shaw's attempt to brand Stanford as the Pac-12's physical antidote to offenses like Leach's pass-happy Air Raid has been short-circuited, he manages to turn it around. Last year, Stanford went 8-5, the first time in four seasons that Shaw hadn't won at least 11 games; after a dispiriting loss to Northwestern to begin the season (where Shaw made the vexing decision to punt late in the game on a 4th-and-short in Northwestern territory), it was starting to look like maybe Shaw had reached his natural limits at a university burdened by recruiting challenges and sporadic fan interest.

Yet after the Northwestern game, something clicked. Stanford beat USC, and crushed Arizona, and Oct. 15 the Cardinal put up 56 points in a victory over UCLA, which up to then appeared to be a serious Pac-12 contender. The Cardinal are now 6-1, and in prime position in the Pac-12 North heading into this weekend's game against Washington State. They have a potential Heisman Trophy finalist in running back Christian McCaffrey and a fifth-year quarterback, Kevin Hogan, who appears to have finally found himself in an offense that veers heavily toward conservatism.

No team in the Pac-12 has thrown fewer passes than Stanford; through seven games of the season, the Cardinal are averaging 23.7 pass attempts per contest. Washington State, which leads the Pac-12, is throwing 56.3 times per game. And this is why Washington State-Stanford, no matter the result, feels a little bit like a referendum on the Pac-12's identity in this moment of flux. It is the Air Raid versus the eight-man front; it is retroactiveness versus futurism, and it is the Pac-12's experimental ethos at its best.

If Stanford loses, of course, the temptation will be to proclaim this a disaster for the Pac-12, since it will almost certainly miss out on the playoff this season. But when it comes to the larger question of sheer entertainment, the Pac-12 can't really lose here: I mean, really, has there been a better single moment in college football this season than when a Washington State assistant coach implored Mike Leach to go for two points in the final seconds of a game against Oregon, and Leach pondered the vast and unsolvable mysteries of the universe before kicking the extra point (and eventually winning in overtime)? What makes the Pac-12 interesting is when it feels like an experiment, and if nothing else, Stanford-Washington State unquestionably fits that bill.