Some of the darkest days for fans of the University of Colorado football program have been concentrated in the last several years. Paradoxically, those looking for a new dawn in Boulder might focus their attention West to Palo Alto in California's Bay Area. It is there on the Stanford campus where one might find how quickly a new coach can turn around a moribund program.
The mastermind behind what is now the Stanford juggernaut was current San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh. Following a three year stint at the University of San Diego, Harbaugh was named the head coach at Stanford. The situation in Palo Alto in 2006 was every bit as dire as it was in Boulder in 2012.
The Cardinal finished the 2006 season with a record of 1-11, lowlighted by an offense which scored a grand total of 127 points for the season. How bad is that? By comparison, the CU Buffs scored 214 points in 2012. Two days after the 2006 season ended, head coach Walt Harris was fired, and the Harbaugh revolution was begun.
Following the 1-11 season in 2006, Harbaugh began the arduous task of rebuilding the football culture for the Stanford Cardinal. In 2007, Stanford won four games, in 2008 they won five games, and in 2009 they won eight games to become bowl eligible for the first time since 2001.
By 2010, the rebirth of the Stanford Cardinal football program was complete. Harbaugh led the team to an astonishing record of 12-1 and were ranked #4 in the country following the bowls. It was the first time that Stanford had been ranked in the top five at the end of the season in 70 years.
When Jim Harbaugh was hired at Stanford, one of the more important things he did was to bring along Mike Shaw, the current Cardinal head coach. When Harbaugh moved on to become head coach of the NFL San Francisco 49ers following the 2010 season, Shaw stayed at his alma mater as head coach and has kept the Cardinal rolling with 23 wins out of his 27 games. Stanford has ended the year in the Top 10 both of those seasons.
Like the Cardinal in 2006, the 2012 version of the CU Buffs was arguably the worst in the long and storied history of the program. They not only lost a lot (11 times, versus only victory), but they also lost so ugly that opponents scored more than 40 points 8 times during the season. Four opponents scored at least 50 points, and two rocked the Buffs for 69 and 70, respectively. Following the end of the season, head coach Jon Embree was fired.
Mike MacIntyre was hired in December 2012 as the new head football coach at the University of Colorado. MacIntyre was previously the head coach at San Jose State, where he pulled a very Harbaugh- like reconstruction of the football program. In his three years at SJS, the Spartans went from a single win in 2010 (1-12), to 5-7 in 2011, and then to a stellar 11-2 record in 2012.
Like Harbaugh did at Stanford, MacIntyre took the San Jose State program and changed the culture. He did this by building an excellent staff that was dedicated to working as a team to molding young men into student athletes first and foremost. The excellence they demanded of their players off the field helped turn them into very good football players on the field.
The terms "strength" and "conditioning" are a mantra for all football programs, of course, but MacIntyre took it to a new level by hiring a young man named Dave Forman to be his director of Sports Performance. While at San Jose State, Mac hired Forman away from Stanford, where he had been working as a strength and conditioning coach for three years.
In his time at Stanford and his two years at SJS, Forman turned programs which were routinely pushed around into teams known for their strength, conditioning and performance. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that he will not achieve the same thing in Boulder. Indeed, the altitude at CU will only help CU to become one of the best conditioned programs in the conference and the country.
In the horror of the 2012 football season, it seemed to many Buff fans that the football world had been turned upside down. That being the case, the sun coming up to better times has risen from the West. Stanford and San Jose State are both bastions of the Bay Area's Silicon Vally, and together they helped create the new football technology which will return Colorado to football prominence once again.
Let the MacIntyre revolution at CU begin!
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Check out "A New Dawn for Colorado Buff Football"
Dream big! It's a great correlation and model to emulate, plus CU would love to compare itself academically to Stanford also. We will see if that is at all realistic.
ReplyDeleteForman could be one of the key components. Any team in Colorado in any sport should be better conditioned than any of their opponents and should be able to win games in the 4th quarter (that is of course if they can keep it competitive that long).
Since the 2005 Independence Bowl, when both CU and Bama entered the game with 6-6 records, those two programs have gone in completely opposite directions. Time to change the trend! Go Buffs!
For the youngsters out there who might think that Stanford has always been a football power, all I can say is think again and look at the history.
DeleteTake away the last three years (Stanford was 35-5, CU was 9-28) and look at the 90's and the 00's. During this time frame the Buffs were 146-95, while Stanford was only 107-123.
I don't really think it is a matter of dreaming big, but having coaches who instill the right culture and expectations. CU took a big hit during Neuheisel's time, recovered a little early on during Barnett, but crashed severely at the end Barnett's tenure. Hawkins completely destroyed the culture that McCartney built and Embree was in way over his head.
I have a sneaking suspicion that MacIntyre is going to shock folks with his job at CU as much as Harbaugh did at Stanford. If people think that San Jose State was not big-time enough, they should look at the University of San Diego. They have a stadium which holds a whopping SIX thousand (yes, 6,000!) people, which is smaller than than most high schools in SEC country.
I just hope the new AD will be prepared to do what is necessary to keep Mac in Boulder.