By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Dec. 24, 2020
2020 saw the Stanford football team play the fewest number of games since the war interregnum of 1943–45.
Before that, the shortest campaign was a four-game unofficial schedule that was played in 1918, as the world was a few months into an infamous global pandemic.
Before that, the shortest season was a one-game campaign in 1917.
Before that, Stanford played rugby from 1906 through 1916, with each season comprising at least eight games.
Here is my short but comprehensive list of short or skipped Stanford football seasons:
• Zero games played: 1943, 1944, 1945.
• One game: 1917.
• Two games: Not applicable.
• Three games: 1892.
• Four games: 1891 (the team’s first season), 1896, 1918 (considered to be an unofficial season).
• Five games: 1895, 1897.
• Six games: 2020.
• The Bad
I could cite Stanford’s offensive power outage in the first 25 minutes of the second half, which saw senior quarterback Davis Mills throw three interceptions, including a pick-six.
Instead, I’m going to a familiar scapegoat: Stanford’s rushing defense. Despite UCLA being down both its starting quarterback, who left in the second quarter, and its starting running back, who didn’t play at all, the Bruins rushed for 291 yards on the night. (They had 292 after regulation.)
The Cardinal finished the regular season allowing 222 rushing yards per contest, the worst mark in the Pac-12 other than 0-5 Arizona’s 271 running yards allowed.
The Stanford defensive secondary let up some big plays, especially in the red zone, and it’s not great that a(nother!) backup passer, redshirt freshman Chase Griffin, threw for 192 yards — close to UCLA’s per-game average of 230 a game. But Griffin got 51 of his yards in overtime, so those numbers could be considered to be somewhat inflated.
That’s my due diligence for this category. Gosh, those rushing numbers are bad. They are, in fact, The Bad.
• The Ugly
Mills and the Cardinal offense could be slotted into this category, too. Mills had a few early passes that would have been incomplete or worse if not for Brycen Tremayne. The junior wideout got airborne to make a pair of terrific catches, one of which went for 42 yards and set up Isaiah Sanders’s first rushing touchdown in a Stanford uniform. Later in the game, Mills bounced a screen pass to a wide-open receiver off the turf — an extraordinarily ugly play from a very talented passer.
But let’s look at the forest rather than the trees. I griped last week about Stanford’s lack of offensive consistency — and the week before, and after the Colorado game (although that was specifically linked to the Cardinal rushing attack).
Much as in the Washington contest, the Stanford offense faltered again for much of the second half. That’s why a potential blowout instead became a nail-biter. And that qualifies as The Ugly.
• The Good
Yes, Mills was considered for all of these categories. He completed his first eight passes and finished 32 for 47 with 428 yards, three touchdowns and those three aforementioned interceptions. That made for the fourth-highest Stanford single-game passing yardage total, after Mills’s 504 at Washington State in 2019, Todd Husak’s 450 vs. Oregon State in 1998 and Steve Dils’s 430 at WSU in 1978.
Look, Mills was good — great, even. But his favorite receiver, junior Simi Fehoko, was simply awesome. The Sandy, Utah, native snagged a school-record 16 passes, tied for the most in a college game this year, and set a personal mark by catching all three of Mills’s touchdowns. Fehoko’s 230 yards led the conference in 2020 and is third on the all-time school list, after Troy Walters’s 278 yards vs. UCLA in 1999 and Darrin Nelson’s 237 against Arizona State in 1981.
Wonderful. Inspired. Thrilling. For the second week in a row, Fehoko is The Good.
MEMwrites 
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