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Stanford Cardinal vs Arizona Wildcats Football Recap

Stanford 42, Arizona 17

Saturday night’s game between the Stanford Cardinal and the Arizona Wildcats flew in the face of history and common sense on a number of levels. The boys from The Farm don’t mind, though: Stanford football is now just a few wins away from stamping itself as an elite team in the world of college pigskin.

It’s not every day that Stanford looks like a top-5-level football team in the United States of America. It’s also not every day that a football team wishes it had its backup quarterback on the field instead of its starting signal caller. Yet, both realities were in evidence on a Saturday evening when thousands of San Francisco Bay Area residents – perhaps drunk with baseball giddiness after the San Francisco Giants’ World Series title – couldn’t care enough to travel to Stanford Stadium for this ballyhooed Pac-10 battle.

Those Bay Area dwellers sure missed a vintage performance by the Cardinal, who look and breathe like a team worthy of a BCS bowl. The Cardinals – with 510 yards, 293 of them by air and 217 by land – offered unbeatable balance that crushed the outmatched Wildcats with equal parts finesse and power. This is the Stanford way under coach Jim Harbaugh: Offer one speed with your left fist and another with your right. The end result is almost always the same: The opponent gets rocked and knocked to the canvas before too long.

Indeed, Stanford amassed a 21-3 lead with just over a minute left in the first half based on a combination of downfield passing from quarterback Andrew Luck and the power running of both Stepfan Taylor and Anthony Wilkerson, who combined for 163 of the Cardinal’s 217 rushing yards. Stanford led by at least 18 points for the rest of the evening, a testament to the newfound swagger and substance that can be found within Stanford’s football program. This was a game that was long on hype but – as you can see – quite short on drama.

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 Arizona really could have used the running ability of injured (and unavailable) backup quarterback Matt Scott. The visiting Wildcats put a rusty Nick Foles on the field after a two-week injury-based layoff, and were stale on offense as a result. Scott really needed to be the guy for the Wildcats, at least in the early stages of the second quarter when this game was still competitive. However, despite that counterintuitive notion that Zona’s backup was better than its starting signal caller, this point remains: The Cardinal would have to like their chances on a neutral field against many other top teams in the country.

Stanford is playing consistently, relentlessly, and gives the impression – unlike other highly-ranked teams in college football – that what you see on a given weekend is what you’re generally going to get. Oregon needed to be on top of its game – and play at home – in order to thwart Stanford a month ago. The only shame about Stanford’s situation right now is that the Pac-10 Conference has placed only two teams in BCS bowls as at-large representatives over the course of 12 seasons (Oregon State in 2000, and USC in 2002). With Big Ten and SEC teams being very likely to grab at-large spots in BCS bowls, all while Boise State and TCU seek at-large berths of their own, Stanford could be left outside the candy store along with its conference. The Cardinal still have a few wins to register, but if they go 11-1, they will definitely deserve to be in a BCS bowl.

By Matt Zemek
DFN Sports Senior Staff Writer