David Shaw explains it best when he opens his TEDx speech from earlier this month with “yes, a football coach was invited to speak at Tedx……good luck”.
Except Shaw isn’t any ordinary football coach. He has already produced a 30-minute lecture in the heat of the 2011 Heisman trophy voting about how Andrew Luck was the best player in the country and that it was more because of Stanford’s coaching philosophy that he didn’t have the same numbers as Robert Griffin III.
Shaw has risen through the ranks extraordinarily fast. He was the WR/QB coach for University of California – San Diego in 2006 and was named head football coach at Stanford just five years later in 2011. In his two seasons at Stanford, he has amassed a 23-4 overall record, won the Rose Bowl, coached the Heisman runner-up and top overall pick in the 2012 Draft (Andrew Luck) and has pointed the Cardinal toward recruiting success that will make them a top national program for many years to come.
As he states at the beginning of his speech, it hasn’t always been this way. He pointed to the 2006 season in which Stanford went 1-11, lost eight of their games by more than 20 points and had some within the University questioning whether the football program should even continue. Shaw addressed questions about how Stanford, with its much thinner pool of talent to choose from the high school ranks, can compete against schools with less stringent academic requirements.
The tide turned after that fateful 2006 season when Shaw’s head coach at UCSD, Jim Harbaugh took the head coaching job at Stanford. Shaw, a former Stanford football player was consulted by Harbaugh about the team’s successes in the early 90’s under former Stanford and NFL coach Denny Green. He was brought then along by Harbaugh and installed as offensive coordinator.
Harbaugh, a former NFL Quarterback, wanted to turn the perceived detriment into a positive recruiting tool. He wanted to scour all 50 states (and beyond) and find the top football players who also happened to be great students. He wanted to influence other universities and show that sacrificing academic standards wasn’t necessary for successful athletes, as Stanford has shown in numerous other sports.
Success came early and often for Harbaugh and it opened up the door for Shaw’s big moment. Just four seasons later the Cardinal easily beat Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl and Harbaugh was off to the NFL to restore the San Francisco 49ers.
Shaw ascended to the top spot at Stanford, but questions remained about whether the program was built to last. Harbaugh was perceived to be the reason that the more sought-after recruits were choosing Stanford and Shaw was tasked with maintaining and enhancing Stanford’s appeal with Harbaugh gone to San Francisco.
With his promotion, Shaw noted that the goals remained the same. His father Willie, also a former Stanford coach in two different decades, told him “the students at Stanford are naturally motivated; you just need to get motivation onto the football field.”
While Shaw hasn’t been on the job for long, he said he is most proud of two specific accomplishments and they aren’t likely to be the ones you are thinking. Shaw noted that his 2011 Stanford team was the first team ever to make a BCS bowl game and to have a 100% graduation rate. He also mentioned how his team not only had two first round picks draft picks in Andrew Luck and David DeCastro, but that both players were engineering majors and weren’t just coasting through school with easy majors.
It’s not every day you get to see a football coach speak in an environment like Tedx. The video below is a great watch: