Utah and Stanford have often been mirror images of one another on the football field, right down to the colors. Renowned for physical defenses and mauling offensive lines, both teams have coaches who have earned lasting respect from around the nation. Yet for all these similarities, the two teams have been on wildly different trajectories over the last few years.
The two schools arrived at their places in the football landscape in totally different ways- Stanford had never struggled to attract elite talent due to the school's legendary academic reputation, and Jim Harbaugh turned that talent pool into one of the elite teams in the nation before handing off the reins to David Shaw as the Pac-10 became the PAC 12. In the first few years, Shaw looked to not be missing a beat, putting together exceptional recruiting classes and teams to match.
Utah, by contrast, has scraped and clawed their way to relevancy, with coach Whittingham identifying true diamond-in-the-rough recruits all over the football field and coaching players into units that play with unparalleled unity and fidelity to the scheme. It took time for P5 depth to develop, but Utah is now a perennial powerhouse despite not having a talent pool like the other schools with which it competes.
In the meantime, Stanford has returned to its roots — squandered talent.
These sharply diverging lines are a crude metric of return on recruiting — the ratio between average star rating and the FPI of the team four years later, once that recruiting class had fully developed.
Coach Whittingham's performance has been steady — he continues to get more out of his teams than anyone has a right to expect, with an average ratio of 4.29 points of FPI per recruit star- a team of 3 stars is a P5 contender, a team of 4 a conference champion and playoff spoiler.
The bottom has fallen out on David Shaw's performance. Despite average star ratings of 3.45, his ratio has dwindled to 0, making essentially nothing of the exceptional recruits he's pulled in these last five years. 2022 is no different, and Utah is going to prove it on Saturday.
Utah is massively favored in this game, and for good reason. While last week's matchup featured a high powered offense that could presumably hang with Utah given a few lucky breaks, Stanford brings the second-worst offense in the conference to Rice Eccles. The defense is hardly better.
The main determinant on the final margin of this game will be if Whittingham feels like giving his kids a long rest or a short one. I'm betting the foot comes off the gas fairly early as Utah has a big game next week and is still fairly banged up.
Utah 41, Stanford 14
