FROM INDIANS TO CARDINAL: STANFORD FOOTBALL'S SEARCH FOR IDENTITY & HIGH PERFORMANCE

 

Personal Background

Fall is my favorite season of the year- cool and crisp weather, colorful foliage, and college football. I love college football even with the unintended consequences of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) and the transfer portal. I find It somewhat unseemly that a college football player can earn millions of dollars and play for seven years. Under whose reality can trust and loyalty ever be developed in these conditions among the teams? Yet college coaches to be successful today must deal with NIL, the transfer portal, and the trust factor simultaneously and if they cannot, they will be fired even in mid-season.

I have made it no secret that I attended and graduated from the University of Oklahoma who since the end of World War II has been the most successful college football program in terms of wins. Along the way, OU has won numerous national championships and produced seven Heisman Trophy winners. While a student at OU I became a Christian, married my college girlfriend, and received a superb education, So, football directly affected me very little. Nevertheless, football affected me very much in the sense that some of my friends and classmates were scholarship football players and the home games helped to give the student body a sense of pride in our university and state.

I also follow other college teams other than OU. Among these are Tulsa, Kansas State, Texas Christian, Rice, Michigan, and Stanford. Stanford is the major subject of this essay because it poses a mystery for me, perhaps it is more of a paradox. Whether attempt to define those terms, I will the readers decide,

 

Identity

Stanford University, or more legally Leland Stanford, Junior University, was founded in 1891 as a private nonsectarian, coeducational university by Leland and Jane Stanford in honor of their son Leland, Jr, who had died in 1884 at the of 15 due to typhoid. Leland, Sr.  had served as governor of California and US Senator from that state until his death in 1893. He arrived in California during the Gold Rush and became a successful merchant. Later he was a founder of the Central Pacific Railroad and was its president as well the president of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Stanford left a mixed legacy- some labeled him a “robber baron” while others call him a “captain of industry.”

Today, Stanford University is rated as a top-notch institution of higher education not only in the US, but also globally. It is known for its connection to Silicon Valley and for its innovation through the various affiliative schools- business, education, law, etc. Perhaps unknown to most persons is that the Hoover Institution has a prominent place on Stanford’s campus. Originally set up to study war, peace, and revolution, and named after President Herbert Hoover who was one of Stanford’s earliest graduates, the institution is now a conservative think tank.

Now, I will return to football. For many years, the Stanford athletic teams were known as the Indians since 1930 for reasons obscure to me. Around 1970, the mood on campus began to change against this nickname and the various mascots like “Prince Lightfoot.” Native American students, staff, and their allies objected to the cultural insensitivity and racial stereotyping. In 1972, a formal protest was made to the university administration and as a result, the “Indians” nickname and associated mascots and rituals were dropped. The search commenced.

Other universities, including my alma mater, were undergoing the same process. OU teams are called the Sooners, a reference to the 1889 Land Run which essentially created the State of Oklahoma in 1907. A Sooner was a cheat who went into the unassigned lands before the Boomers to claim their plots. Then we had an Indian mascot chanting inanely

at our home football games. He was seen by many of our students as silly and that mascot was replaced after I graduated in 1972 in favor of the Sooner Scooter, a prairie wagon pulled by two horses appropriately named Boomer and Sooner,]

Stanford’s search for a new athletic identity hit a few snags. Proposed nicknames like “Griffin’ and “Robber Barons” were considered and rejected. Finally in 1981 Stanford chose “Cardinal”- the color, not the bird” as its new nickname with the Stanford Tree as its unofficial mascot. The Tree is actually the symbol of the Stanford Band and represents El Palo Alto, the redwood featured on Stanford’s seal and the city of Palo Alto’s logo.

 

Performances and Awards

Ironically. Stanford’s football fortunes peaked about the time of the nickname change. At the conclusion of the 1970 Rose Bowl, quarterback Jim Plunkett won the Heisman Trophy (the only Stanford player to do so) and he and wide receiver Randy Vataha led their team to an 8-3 regular season followed by a 27-17 upset of Ohio State in the Rose Bowl. In the 1971 season Stanford finished 8-3 once again and upset Michigan 13-12 in the Rose Bowl. This was the last game Stanford was known as the Indians. The Cardinal has appeared in 14 Rose Bowls and claims two national championships- 1926 and 1940.

Compare Standford’s football with another private school rival on the Pacific coast- USC.

School	National Champs	Heisman Winners	Rose Bowls	NFL Draft Picks
Stanford	2	1	15	>200
USC	11	8	34	>500

 

Yet there is one area in which Stanford excels- having the most Heisman runners-up:

Player	Position	Year
John Elway	Quarterback	1982
Toby Gerhart	Running Back	2009
Andrew Luck	Quarterback	2010
Andrew Luck	Quarterback	2011
Christian McCaffery	Running Back	2015
Bryce Love	Running Back	2017

 

Stanford’s string of second-place finishes—especially five in less than a decade—has made it the most frequent runner-up in Heisman history. I believe the reason for this situation is simple. And it does not in what was recently suggested to me that Stanford is more “honorable and team oriented” than the football powers like USC and OU. The answer is simply two words- time zones. A plurality of Americans live in the Eastern Time Zone- about 150.2 million people or 47.8% of our population. Stanford is in the Pacific Time Zone with about 54 million people or 16.6% of our population, three time zones away from the East Coast. The Cardinal teams are not seen through the medium of television as Ohio State or Michigan, especially since the region already has a football juggernaut- USC- that has the nation’s attention and interest.

 

Conference Realignment

Beginning with the 2024 football season the PAC12 Conference of which Stanford was a member ceased to exist. USC, UCLA, Oregon, and Washington opted for the BIG10 Conference while Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and Arizona State joined the BIG12 Conference. This realignment reduced the number of “power conferences” from five to four and left Stanford, Cal-Berkeley, Oregon State, and Washington State searching for new conference affiliations.

Stanford and its archrival joined the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC), The Cardinal, although not playing traditional powerhouses USC and Oregon on a regular basis, now face Miami and Clemson in the ACC. How has that been for them? As I write this in early October 2025 Stanford 1-1 in conference play and 2-3 overall ranked 14^th out of 17 ACC teams. In its initial season with the ACC in 2024, the Cardinal finished 2-6 and 3-9 ranked 16^th. Different conference, same difficulties in sustaining success.

I would like to propose a solution. But first, a little background. More than two decades ago I was the high school head coach for both the boys and girls soccer teams in an urban area. Most of my players came to the teams with little or no soccer skills. Our conference included suburban schools with experienced players with developed skills from years in soccer clubs before high school. I suggested to the coaches of two other schools in the same situation as mine that we form a “Little Three” mini-conference of our own with a trophy awarded to the winner of the head-to-head competition among our three high schools. They agreed and our “little Three” began.

Thus, I propose that Stanford and similar schools form a new conference named the Association of Academics and Athletics (AAA). Teams from institutions like Stanford, Cal-Berkeley, Tulsa, Rice, SMU, Baylor, Tulane, Vanderbilt, Duke, Virginia, William and Mary, Syracuse, Northwestern, and Notre Dame (I know- I know!). AAA would be open to other schools if they agreed to place a priority on academics in their athletic teams. That would mean:

1.     No NIL.

2.     Limited transfer portal.

3.     Monied boosters no longer would control the athletics departments.

4.     Focusing on developing players for life, not just for NFL, NBA, etc.

5.     Coaches could focus on coaching and recruiting, not worrying about winning and job security.

 

Conclusion

When I began researching to write this essay, I wanted to answer a simple question why so many Stanford football players were Heisman runners-up as opposed to them winning the Heisman. I discovered a deeper dilemma involving our culture as a whole- the influence of money, the emphasis on winning, and how to sustain success over the long haul. Will AAA, if adopted, solve al current and future problems inherent in college athletics? No, as AAA may bring a host of unintended consequences of its own.