On the eve of the ultimate sport of one other misplaced season, Stanford introduced its head coach “for the future.” It was a reputation from the previous: Tavita Pritchard, who performed quarterback for the Cardinal on the daybreak of the glory years and served as offensive coordinator throughout the fade to irrelevance, took the keys because the thirty seventh coach in program historical past.
He will probably be launched at a information convention Tuesday morning.
The appointment ended an eight-month search that seemingly may have been wrapped up in days. Pritchard was the frontrunner from the beginning — a buddy and former teammate of Stanford normal supervisor Andrew Luck well-versed within the college’s peculiarities. He was a secure choose. A predictable choose. A choose so contained in the field that he’s the field.
None of which implies Pritchard was the mistaken choose.
Stanford gained an Orange Bowl and two Rose Bowls by being predictable, in spite of everything. Pritchard can win — and maybe win massive — if given the sources obligatory.
We’ll get to that element in a second. First, let’s handle the chance issue, as a result of it’s substantial for any college that appoints a first-time head coach, notably a first-time head coach who has solely labored for 2 groups.
After graduating, Pritchard spent greater than a decade on Stanford’s employees in numerous capacities. When David Shaw stepped down after the 2022 season, Pritchard headed to the NFL and landed a job teaching quarterbacks for the Commanders. (His boss in Washington: present Cal GM Ron Rivera, who’s busy hiring a head coach himself.)
What’s extra, Pritchard has by no means designed or deployed his personal offense — Shaw ran the present at Stanford all through his tenure — and that provides a component of the unknown.
However the threat right here is fully with Luck, who led the hiring course of and turned to somebody he has identified for many years. They share a imaginative and prescient. They know the establishment. However outsiders have labored at Stanford. (Hi there, Jim Harbaugh.) What number of coaches have been interviewed? Did Luck plan to rent Pritchard all alongside?
Regardless, the dynamic is wholly acceptable on condition that Pritchard’s success relies upon largely on the sources Luck supplies and the cohesion with central campus that Luck fosters.
If the administration is correctly aligned on employees salaries and income sharing and admissions and help personnel and exterior NIL, the soccer program can thrive within the ACC. As with every Stanford endeavor, success is fully about willpower.
Additionally, the timing is true for Pritchard. With Florida State and Clemson floundering, there’s alternative galore within the ACC. Virginia completed first this season, with Georgia Tech and Duke one sport again, because the hierarchy flipped and SAT scores took their revenge.
That’s the place Luck enters the chat. It seems he has the total help and backing of president Jonathan Levin and provost Jenny Martinez. That help, in flip, ought to create a permission construction for the soccer program:
— To spend roughly $14 million on income sharing yearly and provoke constituents to supply tens of millions in exterior NIL, a essential piece of the expertise acquisition and retention course of.
— To make shrewd use of the switch portal and settle for an occasional 300-pound defensive lineman from the SEC, moderately than serving solely as a vacation spot spot for graduate college students from MIT.
— To lure top-tier teaching and help staffs. Simply as bringing Vic Fangio aboard was Harbaugh’s masterstroke, Pritchard’s most necessary rent would be the defensive coordinator.
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— To double down on highschool recruiting and determine neglected prospects who can blossom into all-conference expertise. Stanford will complement its roster with transfers, however highschool recruiting should stay the muse.
If these steps are faintly acquainted, effectively, the circle has come full on The Farm.
Stanford is as irrelevant now because it was when Pritchard set foot on campus practically 20 years in the past. The challenges have been completely different again then. There was no portal, no NIL — a minimum of, no authorized NIL — and positively no switch portal. (Additionally, Stanford wasn’t crisscrossing the nation for convention video games.)
However with a supportive president (John Hennessy), a football-savvy athletic director (Bob Bowlsby) and a head coach who wouldn’t accept mediocrity (Harbaugh), the Cardinal climbed out of the gutter and spent practically a decade on the nationwide stage.
Then institutional indifference took maintain, simply because it did within the early 2000s, with one distinction: Adjustments throughout the faculty sports activities panorama within the post-COVID period, notably to the participant procurement course of, accelerated Stanford’s downturn. All-time low arrived earlier than anybody with the authority to unravel issues realized there was one thing mistaken.
All of which makes Luck this period’s Bowlsby and Pritchard the trendy equal of Harbaugh. They’re fully completely different personalities from the originals, in fact, and much much less completed of their roles.
However like their predecessors, Luck and Pritchard are wholly dependent upon one another for achievement and dealing with a receptive administration.
Given how far Stanford has fallen, failure just isn’t an choice.
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