Jordan Richards is Cardinal defense’s quiet leader

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In the moments before games, the guy who gathers his Stanford teammates around him and leads their chants, cheers and generally raucous enthusiasm is, by his own description, “a quiet kind of guy."

Last year it was Shayne Skov or Ed Reynolds who led the cheers, and their fire was obvious. Now strong safety Jordan Richards is the ringleader.

In a sense that’s an unusual role for him. “Jordan’s not a speech giver,” head coach David Shaw said. “Jordan is a communicator."

When he talks, people listen closely. In the secondary, “when he makes calls, everybody gets it and everybody understands it,” Shaw said. “That’s the role of a defensive leader, to make sure everybody’s on the same page.”

At the beginning of the season, Shaw had predicted that Richards was among the Stanford players who would become household names by the end of the season. He’s well on his way.

He leads the nation’s top-ranked defense in solo tackles with 17 and is fourth in total tackles with 21. He has forced two fumbles.

Although Stanford has given up only 74 passing yards per game and one touchdown pass, Richards says the defenders don’t pay much attention to such statistics.

“It comes down to playing within yourself and the defense and just hunting the football,” he said. “We’re not necessarily going out each week and saying we’ve got to hold them to X amount of yards to keep the ranking.”

Stanford made a focused effort in recent years to recruit speedy defenders who could make open-field tackles. Richards, who had 1,068 yards as a receiver as a senior at Folsom High (Sacramento County) in addition to being a premier defensive back, was a prime example of that push.

As a freshman he had eight tackles in his first collegiate start, which came against USC. He has been a fixture in the defense ever since.

Stanford’s misfires on offense this year in Pac-12 play have put more pressure on the defense. “Those guys have struggled here and there, but we’ve also struggled here and there,” Richards said. “There were times when we leaked yardage."

The No. 14 Cardinal (3-1) had better not leak too much yardage when they face No. 9 Notre Dame (4-0) on Saturday in South Bend, Ind. It’s their first time at Notre Dame Stadium since their bitterly frustrating 20-13 overtime loss in 2012.

Stepfan Taylor was stopped inches from the goal line on the final play. Though his knee hadn’t hit the ground, officials ruled his forward progress had been stopped. The call was upheld on a replay review, to the consternation of the Cardinal players, who never heard officials whistle the play dead.

The way Richards sees it, Stanford shouldn’t have let the game go down to tha goal-line stand. He said the team “learned a lesson about not cashing in on plays early in the game.”

He recalled that the Cardinal bounced back from the loss. They didn’t lose another game , winning the Pac-12 title and the Rose Bowl.

“You have your little pity party on the plane and then you’ve got to stop feeling sorry for yourself and go on with the next game,” he said.

Tom FitzGerald is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: tfitzgerald@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @tomgfitzgerald