This isn’t David Shaw’s first rodeo in El Paso. He was the offensive coordinator in 2009 the last time Stanford played in the Hyundai Sun Bowl. That year, they lost to Oklahoma without Andrew Luck.
This time around, he’ll be without Christian McCaffrey who is sitting out in preparation for the draft. Even with those parallels, Shaw says that’s where the similarities end for his program in this trip to the Sun City.
“From our standpoint, we were still growing as a program,” Shaw said on Thursday, “That was the first bowl game in eight or nine years, as opposed to the two programs coming now, with good recent history with both teams, relatively established and are good programs in their own right at the moment.”
After a tough stretch in the middle of the season, the Cardinal have run off five straight wins and are looking to cap it off with one more victory, which would give the Cardinal another 10-win season. Shaw credits the senior leadership as the key to that turnaround.
“We had a really rough spot in the middle of the year and those seniors really helped us have the best practices of the year, when we weren’t playing well, we were unranked and people were jumping off the bandwagon, we were going back to work. That’s continued here we aren’t worried about anything except what’s in front of us”
What’s in front of Stanford on Friday is a North Carolina team averaging over 30 points a game led by a potential first-round draft pick at quarterback in Mitch Trubisky.
Shaw acknowledged how tough he was to stop earlier in the week was to pressure him. With Larry Fedora in the same room on Thursday, Shaw kept his plans a little closer to the vest.
“Their head coach is in the back somewhere so I can’t tell you everything,” Shaw jokingly told reporters, “The bottom line for us is to play sound, smart defense. We had a lot of young guys play this year and the big thing they learned is, you can’t take a play off. We’re playing against a great offense in particular and a great football player playing quarterback.”
Finally, after a whole week in the Sun City, Shaw said his team is ready to play and get out there on the field and he made his case for why the average fan should watch.
“You have two talented and well-coached football teams who play the game the right way, which is physical, tough, and aggressive. You have a lot of exciting players to watch in the game. They have one of the better quarterbacks in the nation, one of the more exciting returners and we have an exciting player for the future in Bryce Love. I think that’s a great thing to watch.”
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