Stanford football has itself in quite the quandary. Spring camp starts Tuesday, and there is no head coach. There is only an interim athletic director. And there is a general manager who was hired to manage the transfer portal and revenue sharing, but is now making major personnel moves. Stanford’s high wire act and its next move will be very telling about the commitment to football.
The football program and the athletic department as a whole is being left in the hands of caretakers right now. Football coach Troy Taylor was fired last week after an investigation into allegations of employee abuse within the football offices. The school hired two law firms to handle the investigations, and Taylor admitted some of the allegations.
Stanford’s High Wire Act
The People in Charge
There are several elements that make the timing challenging for Stanford. There is no full-time athletic director. Bernard Muir had already announced his resignation, “at the end of the academic year.” But the resignation actually took effect at the end of February. The athletic department is being run on an interim basis by the school’s chief operating officer, Alden Mitchell.
And then there is general manager Andrew Luck. The former Stanford and NFL quarterback was part of a wave of hirings throughout college sports to a newly created front office position. General managers are being hired to manage the transfer portal and the anticipated revenue sharing that is expected to start this Summer. In most cases, they answer to the coach of the program for which they are the GM. But with all things Cardinal football being in a state of flux, it was left to Luck to fire the guy who was theoretically his boss.
Luck was brought in to be the famous face of Stanford football going forward. The program has generally been reticent to dive into the deep end of the new college athletics pool when it comes to NIL, collectives, or the transfer portal. But he was going to be the name leading the new efforts for Stanford football.
The changing national landscape and the school’s reluctance to participate at the levels of schools in the SEC or Big 10 was part of what wore down former head coach David Shaw. For Taylor, even a limited effort by the school was bigger than anything he was going to get as head coach at Sacramento State.
The Calendar
But now, moving forward takes on a different look. With a head coaching change, Stanford players suddenly have a new 30-day window (dating back to the day of Taylor’s firing, March 27th), to enter the portal and go somewhere else. The tricky part about going to a new school now is that you won’t get in academically until Summer. No working out with your new team/teammates until June.
This new 30-day window afforded Stanford players will overlap with the “regular Spring portal window” for any and all football players. That runs from April 16th to April 25th. Mix both of those into your calendar with Stanford’s Spring camp which starts Tuesday and runs through April 25th.
Is Interim the Way to Go?
The Spring camp calendar also complicates who they will get as their next head coach. Most programs in the country are already in spring camp. Getting a current coach to walk out on their team at this point is highly unlikely, even for a star like Luck. The most likely scenario is to tap one of the current assistants as an interim head coach through the end of the season.
Safeties coach Bob Gregory has been an interim before. He took over the Washington Huskies when Jimmy Lake was fired midway through the 2021 season.
But hiring an interim can be tricky. What if they win just enough to warrant consideration for the permanent job, while Luck had dreams and visions of getting a big name to come lead Stanford?
Names to Ponder
On the assumption that Gregory or someone else on staff takes over this week for the foreseeable future, here are some other names being thrown around for the longer term.
Ken Niumatololo
He is most known for his 15 years as Navy’s head coach. Niumatolol averaged seven wins per year there, and had two 11-win seasons. He spent 2023 as the tight ends coach at UCLA. In 2024, he took over as head coach at San Jose State and went 7-6.
Jeff Monken
He has been the head coach at West Point for 10 years and has put together an 82-57 record, including an 11-2 mark in 2024. He has no ties to the West Coast for recruiting purposes and seems destined to stay at Army. Still, his name comes up when you ask Stanford donors.
Troy Walters
The current receivers coach for the Cincinnati Bengals. Before you assume an NFL assistant would not go “back” to college, remember that Walters won the Biletnikoff Award in 1999 as a receiver at Stanford. And he has college coaching experience, having been an assistant at Texas A&M, North Carolina State, Colorado, UCF, and Nebraska.
Dave Clawson
The former Wake Forest coach is available now if that is a hook for the selection committee. He stepped down in December of 2024 after 11 seasons at Wake. He is still under contract at Wake, but is moving into a fundraising role. The contract could be just a technicality. The tricky element here is why Clawson stepped down. Wake and Stanford share some of the same elements that burned Clawson out: lofty admissions standards that make it difficult to use the transfer portal, and the new financial systems of college sports. The advantage for Stanford in that comparison is that the school has a much bigger alumni base from which to pull money, and you have Andrew Luck making the calls to pull that money.
Stanford is rolling in endowment money, both for the athletic department and the university as a whole. The school has Ivy League-level funding. And as for athletics, more than half a dozen teams are funded by endowments, as are several coaching positions. The current search is technically for the new Bradford M. Freeman Director of Football Operations. The clock is ticking right now.
Main Image; Kelley L Cox-Imagn Images
The post Stanford’s High Wire Act appeared first on Last Word on College Football.