Each Thursday, five of The Daily’s football writers (myself included) predict the score of Stanford’s impending football matchup for that upcoming weekend. While our accuracy certainly varies from week to week, the idea behind these forecasts is that a news organization that only covers Stanford sports may have a decent idea of how the school’s football team will perform in the near future.

Each of the last five weeks, however, every single one of us has underestimated Stanford’s point total. The Cardinal offense has consistently outclassed its opponents, blowing away almost every serious expectation in the process.

Surely there must be an explanation for this remarkable trend. Perhaps the simplest is that Stanford is just a really good football team. This seems to be the prevailing wisdom in the college football world this year, with the Cardinal finding themselves back inside the AP top 10 for the first time since the penultimate week of the 2013 season.

The other alternative, however, is that the Pac-12 has taken a step back. As hard as this is to believe after the conference’s remarkable run in the last few years, the case for this is worth examining as well.

The polls do substantiate the possibility of quality drop-off within the conference. Just three teams from the Pac-12 are ranked this week, half of the total from the preseason ranking. The number comes in at fifth compared to how the Power Five conferences shook out and is no greater than the figure for the American Athletic Conference.

Of course, midseason rankings are subject to plenty of situational factors like how front-loaded the schedules of contenders are (looking at you, Big 12), and they likely overreact to the results of the previous week. Yet it’s hard to paint any team’s ranking as some grand injustice. Utah is the lone team in the Pac-12 South that has looked above the rest, and nobody aside from Stanford and Cal in the North even accrued any votes in the most recent poll.

Very few bubble teams are even managing to trend upward. Worse times may still be ahead for UCLA and Arizona, and even the recent renaissance of Arizona State didn’t result in the Sun Devils looking particularly competitive against Utah.

Stanford’s own 10th place ranking also seems overly generous in a number of ways. The Cardinal are placed two spots above the undefeated Iowa Hawkeyes, despite the fact that Iowa has more wins over other current top-25 teams (an easy task, since the Cardinal has zero) and a convincing head-to-head win over Northwestern.

For a while, I wrote all of this off as a symptom of the difficulty of putting together a run in the Pac-12. David Shaw’s saying that “anyone can beat anyone” during in-conference play seemed to be an appropriate explanation, and I used it frequently when talking with the conference’s detractors. Yet after taking a closer look into the programs that compose the West Coast’s premier league, I wonder if this conclusion was entirely accurate. Supposed parity amongst teams hasn’t allowed Oregon State or Colorado to grab a win any more than it has blemished division leaders Utah and Stanford.

The Pac-12’s out of conference record doesn’t convey the depth that this maxim would require either. While Utah’s reasonably comfortable win over Michigan now seems like a real achievement, the conference’s resume seems notably deficient in most other aspects. Consecutive ugly losses by Northwestern have made the Cardinal’s early drop to the Wildcats less excusable, and Washington State’s recent tear through the conference is difficult to frame positively after the Cougars’ inexplicable Week 1 loss to FCS opponent Portland State.

Ugly Pac-12 wins over Texas, Rutgers and BYU now appear about the best football achievements the conference can claim, at least until Stanford plays Notre Dame this November. Even if anyone can beat anyone in the Pac-12, it seems almost no one can beat anyone of consequence outside the conference.

There have been some positives with the negatives, of course, and factors like rampant injuries and coaching changes have hurt the prospects of some genuinely good teams. These may gradually correct themselves as the season wears on and early losses start to get overshadowed by more sustained streaks of wins.

Still, I think it’s time to start fearing that the remarkable football the Pac-12 has shown during the past few seasons may have higher propensity to take a step back than we thought. All good times must eventually come to an end, and it might just be the Pac-12’s time to experience a decline.

The question then becomes what this decline will mean for the conference. It may lead to less exciting football games and more days where Stanford Stadium empties in the third quarter.

Yet it’s hard not to wonder if elements this apparent step back is merely a step forward in disguise. Weaker conferences make it easier for their teams to go undefeated, and usually result in opponents being fresher when it comes to the postseason. The national champions in both the last two seasons have come from arguably the weakest conference, begging the question of whether increased competition brings as many positive effects as it seems to imply.

So maybe the Pac-12 has declined, at least temporarily, when juxtaposed against the comparative strength of others. And maybe some of Stanford’s recent success is attributable to this decline. But maybe, just maybe, in having fewer contenders, the Conference of Champions has increased its prospects of generating an overall winner for the first time in years.

There’s only one way to find out.

 

 Coincidentally, Andrew Mather is no longer the Columnist of Champions. SEC supporters can send their fan mail to Andrew at amather ‘at’ stanford.edu.