All is not lost.

 

A week after the Fiesta Bowl, I know it still hurts. Those missed kicks, those chances lost, a depressing 12-hour drive home from Arizona in defeat. But this is sports. When you go down you don’t stay down. You get up fighting and move on.

 

I don’t mean to trivialize what it feels like to lose, let alone to lose in that way. Winning would be meaningless if losing wasn’t so painful. The great thing about sports, though, is that there is always another chance. Another game, another season or even a different athletic discipline. College football is dead—at least for the next nine months. Long live college basketball!

 

The Pac-12 season is already four games old and Stanford’s men’s and women’s teams are tied for second and first, respectively. The women are also ranked No. 4 in the nation, and though unranked, the men have been receiving votes in both the AP Top 25 and coaches’ polls. But I’m going to avoid the obvious and not write about the men’s team from here on, partly because they’ll get their fair share of coverage from other sources and partly personal bias; I do report on the women’s team, after all.

 

The cruel reality of the sports world is that some get all the attention, and so it is on the Farm with football and men’s basketball. The core of Stanford fans, the students, rarely make it to any of the other varsity or club activities on campus—rival students might probably claim we hardly make it to those either. Perhaps this is because you are academic overachievers and struggle to find the time outside of classes and assignments, but that doesn’t really feel like a good excuse.

 

Many of the athletes on campus are professional in all but name, and we get to go watch them in our backyard for free. Take senior women’s basketball forward Nnemkadi Ogwumike for example. Over the break, when most of you were relaxing with family, she scored 174 points in seven games and just 209 minutes of play; that’s just over 0.8 points per minute. She broke into the exclusive 2,000-point club last Saturday against Oregon State, and she is on pace to finish second on the all-time Stanford scoring list by the end of the regular season, behind guard Candice Wiggins’ school record of 2,629 points.

 

Many people expect undefeated No. 1 Baylor to sweep this year, in large part because of its Naismith College Player of the Year favorite, 6-foot-8 junior forward Brittney Griner, a player who is already on the USA Basketball roster. And can dunk. But if anyone can upset that apple cart, it might just be Ogwumike. She was named the United States Basketball Writers Association National Player of the Week for a 42-point, 17-rebound destruction of No. 6 Tennessee in the final days of 2011 and just seems to be getting better. Even in the last two contests against the Oregon schools, in which Stanford head coach Tara VanDerveer claimed Ogwumike might not have been on her A-game, she averaged more than 30 points per game. But perhaps the best-placed people to comment on her abilities are those who have to come to Maples Pavilion and face her.

 

“She’s obviously an incredible athlete,” said Oregon State head coach Scott Rueck after his team’s recent loss to Stanford. “She’s got the combination that the greatest players in her sport have. People come to watch her because she does things no one else can do. It’s not only athleticism and skill, but she’s got this fire and drive in her. This passion that her whole team can just jump on.”

 

And to make matters worse for the Cardinal’s opponents, she has a younger sister on the team, sophomore forward Chiney.

 

So when you need a break from homework this quarter and you’re missing being able to watch the nation’s best college football player strut his stuff on Stanford’s field every weekend, come on down to Maples. In tight games the Cardinal could certainly do with your support, and players like the Ogwumikes deserve it with their skill and commitment. But more than that, you can erase the pain of the Fiesta Bowl with the dream of NCAA glory.

 

 

Tom Taylor is really a ladies’ man at heart. Catch some other women’s sports with him at tom.taylor “at” stanford.edu.