Harris creates competition for starting jobs
A look at the Stanford depth chart will tell you more than you need to know about how things have gone thus far for the Cardinal in 2005.
Of the 11 positions on offense, head coach Walt Harris has thrown four into open competition this week, leaving the word “or” plastered between names up and down the offense’s two-deep. One of them, in fact, resides next to the name of a captain, senior center Tim Mattran, who’s in danger of losing his spot to Brian Head.
“We’re trying to let people understand that a lack of execution is going to result in some changes of starting positions and a change in playing time,” Harris said. “We’ve got to play a lot better. We have to play what we’ve been coaching them to do a lot better and we have to coach them a lot better.”
Harris’ first season as Stanford’s head coach – even though it’s just three games old – has been a bumpy one already. The Cardinal had to open with a long road trip to Annapolis, Md., for a narrow win over Navy. That was the easy part. The next week, a home loss to UC Davis sent shockwaves through the college football landscape.
UC Davis, still technically a Division II school in its third year of making the transition to I-AA, has only 37 scholarship players on the roster. And yet that Stanford offense couldn’t muster a single touchdown or 200 total yards as their points in a 20-17 loss came on a field goal and defensive scores by linebackers Kevin Schimmelmann and Michael Craven.
A bye week wasn’t enough to fix the problems, either, as Oregon traveled to Stanford Stadium last weekend to deliver a 44-20 pasting in the conference opener.
“It’s always tough when you lose a couple,” said wide receiver Mark Bradford, whose 110 yards against Oregon accounted for nearly half of his team’s total offense. “We’re just trying to make the plays we can make.”
The struggles led Harris to call a meeting with his seniors in the hope that they could spark a team that after Washington State will travel to Arizona and then face a murderer’s row of Arizona State, UCLA and USC.
“The reason behind it was to try to let them know how important they are in the overall scheme of things in motivating our team,” Harris said. “They are the guys our team respects the most because they’ve been here the longest and I know they worked extremely hard to get to this point.”
Bradford and Schimmelmann said they don’t see this week’s matchup with the Cougars as a get-well game, but it’s clear from the urgency they express that the Cardinal is looking to do just that, before a 1-2 season turns much uglier.
“It’s hard to say exactly what we need to work on, but it starts with the individual, as long as you don’t try to do too much, especially when stuff starts going down,” Schimmelmann said. “It’s not so much a get-well game but another opportunity to showcase our talents and play better.”