Progress?

It’s hard to argue Stanford didn’t play better, at least on defense, in its 20-13 win over Arizona State on Thursday night. That doesn’t mean it played well, mind you, but the offense managed to string together four consecutive scoring drives, they flipped the turnover script from its last game (-4 to +3) and those turnovers and 86 yards in penalty yardage (Stanford had 50) added up to just enough on a night where Bryce Love gamely tried to go but appeared to re-injure his left ankle and the Cardinal run game was throttled for most of the game to the tune of a 3 yards per-carry average.

Once again it fell on KJ Costello and his receivers to make plays, and tonight they delivered. Costello was 22-29 for 231 yards and one touchdown. JJ Arcega-Whiteside had seven catches for 91 yards and Trenton Irwin had seven for 79. Trevor Speights ran hard and even took advantage of the screen game (ASU could NOT have seen that coming) to add 25 yards on two catches, but it was a slog the vast majority of the night. Stanford averaged 4.7 yards per play on first down, which is actually down from the 6.1 they averaged against Utah. The ratio was 20/8 run/pass largely due to the Cardinal running the ball almost exclusively once they went up 20-6 on a Scarlett touchdown with 2:45 to go in the third quarter.

Defensively, the Cardinal got the swing play when Bobby Okereke ran down Manny Wilkins and forced him to fumble. Thomas Booker recovered and that triggered those four straight scoring drives. It was the first fumble in 710 carries for Sun Devil runners, and ASU, a team with just two turnovers on the season, ended with three, the others coming on interceptions from Wilkins and N’Keal Harry. Stanford did take away the run, allowing only 39 yards on 11 carries in the second half. Don’t underestimate the job of Jake Bailey, who once again had a solid game (minus one bad kickoff) and ended with 335 yards of punt yardage on eight kicks, five of which ended inside the Sun Devil 20 only three of which were returned for one yard total.

And that’s where we are now with this team. A group boasting offensive talent most teams in program history could only dream about has been carried more often than not by a defense that doesn’t have enough to stand up against elite offenses but at least consistently gets the most out of its talents and special teams. Seven games in, Bryce Love has not made it to a post-game press conference once. On the one hand, 5-2 is 5-2, and a 2-0 win would have been beautiful tonight because it ended a two-game losing streak and the game was on the road in conference.

On the other hand, at some point there needs to be some accountability for why everything is so difficult for the most talented part of this roster. Once again, Stanford’s opponent schemed the ground game into futility. Once again, accountability is muddled with the absence of Nate Herbig to injury. We’ll see what the game grades reveal about the line, but ASU piled up 12 tackles for loss. That’s 34 in the last four games. Did the Cardinal generate rarely seen push on plays tonight? Yes, they did. But that’s a low bar even for a team missing its best offensive lineman.

Stanford sits in full control of its Pac-12 destiny, with monster games coming up at home against Washington State and then in Seattle. They are, at the moment, a team without an elite defense who cannot win unless its defense plays at an elite level. That’s a tough formula to make work, but it’s reality at this moment. The back end of extra rest now awaits, with Love’s status once again uncertain but with the rest of the team hopefully ready to step into the final five games as healthy as they can be at this juncture. That’s going to have to do for now, as Stanford fans decide whether the main takeaway is the clearing of a low hurdle or the fact that the hurdles need to be so low right now for Stanford to claim victory.

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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.

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