Bradford M. Freeman Director of Football David Shaw hit on a number of topics in the first segment of his lunch chat at Pac-12 Media Day, and he remained no less candid in the second portion of the discussion as he opined on spring official visits, single-sport specialization, and the return of Chip Kelly to the Pac-12.

When asked if he would do away with spring games, Shaw said, “Absolutely not. What I would do away with is spring visits. I was one of the ones early on who said this would be great because it would take some monetary deals off of families for these unofficial visits where they are taking all their money to go visit all these schools all around the nation. I was initially in favor of it. We have bastardized it so bad and prioritized it so much that kids now use it to ‘get all my official visits in now so I can make my decision early’ and what’s suffering now? Spring grades are suffering. Spring high school sports are suffering. There are a lot of kids now that are not playing their high school sport because they want to go take all these visits. These kids should run track. They should play baseball. You know, they should play their spring sports. They should be invested in their high school. They’re only juniors. Why is college football dominating their junior year of high school? Let ‘em finish their spring sports! Let ‘em come visit us unofficially. If you need to make more visits lets add a visit. Let’s make it six visits. Great. But I don’t like what we’re doing to the high school student-athlete. I don’t like what we’re doing to the high schools, what we’re doing to high school coaches, what we’re doing to the other high school sports. We’re messing those things up so badly and unnecessarily. For us the thing’s gotten so early, with our academic requirements, that we’ve had to hold some guys off and say ‘we need to see senior grades, we need to see fourth-semester grades, we need to see a test score.’ It’s affected us more than anybody else, we’re actually recruiting seniors. We’re finding some guys who maybe didn’t play great their junior year, but maybe have outstanding senior years and a lot of people are done! They can’t offer a scholarship because they only recruit juniors and sophomores. We’ve been able to find seniors who are doing what we need to do academically and say ‘this kid’s ready to play.’ There are jumps a lot of guys make between junior and senior year. That’s an underserved group of high school football because everything’s done so early, half the schools aren’t recruiting seniors anymore. They’re not offering any new scholarships to seniors so yeah. It’s an insane world right now. It’s not completely off the wheels or completely out of control yet, but there is so much about it that I don’t feel is right.

"Sports specialization for young people is still a problem for me. I’m having a tough time with it with my own children. My daughter loves soccer, she wants to play soccer but she also likes to play other sports but now we’ve had to shave those sports out. So where now she does soccer and track but a lot of people are saying she’s going to have to choose. She’s an outstanding soccer player but she was also at the state meet last year as a long jumper. And she’s a freshman, and now we’re saying she might be able to run track as a sophomore because soccer might take over her world? She plays fall soccer, she has to play spring soccer too that takes over her world? She’s 16! She’s 15 and going to be 16. Is that really what it takes? It has to dominate your life?"

Q: Do you sense that fewer schools are pursuing multi-sport athletes?

DS: I’m not sure how many are but there seem to be less. There seem to be less schools that are coveting the multi-sport athlete and I don’t know if it’s the college coaches or the high school coaches who want them to focus on one sport to be better, play seven-on-seven all summer long instead of going to basketball camp. Spring seven-on-seven is more important than running track or going to baseball so I don’t know who’s really pushing that, but it’s happening more and more. I’d love to hear more guys are running track. I’d love to hear more guys playing basketball, or doing wrestling because for me there are fewer issues with repetitive motion injuries. I go from football, this explosive sport to basketball, lateral quickness, explosive sport also, so they’re competing but it’s a different training. Baseball, it’s a little less intensive but it’s more focused on concentration and great hand-eye coordination. You have to understand the rhythm and a different kind of philosophy and strategic approach, so for me I love when guys play other sports. Harrison Phelps, the guys that wrestle, they have a natural grit that you don’t learn in any other sport. There’s no other sport outside of boxing, and still not even to the same degree as three minutes of pushing on another human being and having him push on you that now as a defensive lineman, ‘all I have to do is six sets right now? This is great. I like this. I’m doing what I need to do.’

Q: How do you feel about the return of Chip Kelly?

DS: So excited. I texted him, actually I waited because I knew he was going crazy, but I texted him late ‘welcome back.’ I was so excited. Our conference has missed Chip and it’s not just the winning. It’s the style of play. It’s his unique way of looking at the game of football, his philosophy, his energy. I’m excited for college football and I think he had as much impact on college football as anybody else in decades. I think at Oregon, the way that he has influenced, and I’ll even say it: legitimized spread offenses whereas before it always ‘oh those are gimmick offenses’ what Chip was able to do at Oregon was legitimize it and say ‘No, this is a real offense. This can really help us win games and can be something that is consistent and you don’t have to have a superstar quarterback to be successful. You can do it with a good quarterback and still be able to win a conference championship so you’ve seen it in my position proliferate through college football particularly because of what Chip Kelly was able to do at Oregon.

Q: Do you think he'll be able to win right away?

I put nothing past Chip. I anticipate them being competitive right away. I don’t know that they’ll be at the pinnacle of where he can be right now, but he’s going to make them competitive right now because what makes Chip really, really unique in my opinion is that he has a scheme, but he can morph that scheme into whatever it needs to be based on his talent. He did that on this level and the NFL level.

Q: What about having to go against him?

That was next thought after the excitement was the anxiety because it was like ‘Oh my God. Here we go again.’ He knows how to attack you. He knows how to make it difficult to stop you. He knows how to stretch from sideline to sideline and isolate guys in space and he’s got the talent especially at running back and quarterback to make you miss the space, he’s gonna hurt you.

Q: Is it fair to say playing those Oregon teams made Stanford better?

100%. 100%. Yes. Where we built from Jim Harbaugh’s first year, every single year getting better and then when I took over, tried to get better and Oregon was still thorn in the side. I don’t know how many games we had lost to them, two or three games in a row, whatever it was. And at the time I went to Derek Mason at the end of the year and said ‘we’re evaluating every single thing we’re doing against Oregon.’ And we’re evaluating everything we do to see how we can get to the point of competing against these guys because we thought they were still ahead of us talent-wise but not by as much as the score was saying. So we could get closer talent-wise but at the same time give our guys a chance to get in the fourth quarter and be successful. My second year for us to go up to Oregon with not our most-talented team but one of our toughest teams mentally, and to keep the game close and find a way to win it at the end with a field goal, that’s where we needed to be against these guys. We’re not going to go up there and out-athlete ‘em, but if we can play our style of football and keep it close and give ourselves a chance to win….so that was a huge thing for us and built us more confidence that in my opinion led us to our Rose Bowl wins.

Stay tuned to TheBootleg.com for Stanford Football and Basketball Team and Recruiting Updates all year long!

R.J. Abeytia has been contributing to The Bootleg since 2014. You can follow him on Twitter at @RJ_Abeytia and follow The Bootleg @TheBootleg for up to the moment Cardinal news and analysis.

Not a subscriber? Sign up now to get all the great information inside our Premium Football and Hoops Boards Click here to subscribe!

And don't forget to sign up for our Bootleg Newsletter! It's free and a great way to get all the latest Stanford Cardinal information right into your inbox!