Stanford’s season outlook already looks grim, and Friday night only sharpened the picture.
A matchup with seventh-ranked Miami was always going to be a brutal ask for first-year coach Tavita Pritchard and the Cardinal. Then Stanford’s chances took an even bigger hit before the game even started, when five starters - including three offensive linemen - were ruled out because of injury.
From there, the night unraveled exactly the way you’d expect, and then some. Miami rolled to a 45-6 win, handing Stanford its worst home loss in five years.
Stanford had no answer on either side of the ball. The offense never found any rhythm, and the defense was overwhelmed. Miami receiver Malachi Toney carved up the Cardinal secondary, finishing with 12 catches for 234 yards and three touchdowns.
The Cardinal were struggling to cover, tackle, block and catch from the opening quarter.
“I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly it was, why we didn’t play well enough early on,” Pritchard said. “I just know missing the mark early didn’t change the complexion of the game, but it was a big part of the reason the game continued to go the way it was.”
With a game that lopsided, there isn’t much to extract from the final score alone. The better way to judge Stanford right now is to pair this result with its Week 0 win over Hawaii.
Those two games offer a rough outline of where the Cardinal stands with 17 percent of the season complete. Hawaii was one end of the spectrum; Miami was the other. And the gap between those performances doesn’t exactly point toward a fast climb.
The challenge for Pritchard in Year 1 is obvious: even modest improvement looks difficult. Stanford has gone 3-9, 3-9, 3-9, 3-9 and 4-8 over the past five seasons, a stretch that stands out as one of the program’s bleakest since the early 1960s. It’s also worse than the losing run that was underway when Pritchard arrived on campus as a freshman quarterback in 2006.
Miami, to be fair, will blow out a lot of teams this season. But Stanford’s problem is what comes next. After Hawaii, the schedule leaves just one remaining game against a team with lesser personnel: Elon’s trip in mid-October.
The other nine opponents still on Stanford’s schedule bring more talent, or a lot more talent, and five of those games will be on the other side of the country.
That makes it tough to see Stanford topping its 2025 mark of four wins, which came under interim coach Frank Reich. And if the injuries keep piling up, this season could start to feel a lot like 2024, the final year of the Troy Taylor era, when Stanford beat two major college teams and Cal Poly.
The next cross-country trip comes in two weeks at Duke. Before that, Stanford gets a bye week to regroup after a loss that was easy to anticipate and somehow even uglier than expected.
“We have to get better, and that’s the space this team will continue to live in,” Pritchard said. “I’m learning and growing as a coach.
Our staff is going to do that. Our players are going to do that.
“So much about these next couple weeks is about how much better can we get as quickly as we can do it. That’s what it’s going to be about for us, just improving.”