Stanford pushes the right buttons, including mute

Colorado's noisy season was hushed when Stanford fashioned the biggest comeback win in its history.

Elic Ayomanor

While Deion Sanders was creating a college football program in a microwave, Troy Taylor was using a slow cooker.

While Sanders was gathering enough sideline celebrities at Colorado to film another Ocean’s 11-12-13 sequel, Taylor was losing to Sacramento State, the team he built before he left for Stanford, in front of 23,848 quiet patrons.

Colorado and Stanford might be the two most divergent teams in the Power Five-going-on-Four. On an early winter’s night in Boulder, they shared a small square in the Venn diagram.

Little did anyone dream it would be the most astonishing game of this deepening season, and maybe the most instructive, too.

Colorado, having won four of six against a meaty schedule, was expecting a leisurely stroll, an improvement to 5-2, and a springboard to a bowl game, probably a gaudy one considering how Sanders had marketed this enterprise. The only thing that had kept Taylor Swift from visiting Folsom Field was the fear that the earth would lose its geological structure if Swift and Deion were ever in the same place.

Stanford had lost to USC, 52-10, and to Oregon, 42-6, and had only beaten Hawaii. Its administration takes a dim view of transfers, which has become the main tool of talent-gathering. Jim Harbaugh was no longer there to knock off USC or recruit Andrew Luck. David Shaw was no longer there to win Rose Bowls. Stanford had been orphaned by the Pac-12 partioning. It was forced to commit itself to the ACC, which has 15 schools three time zones away, and in doing so it agreed to deprive itself of a full share of TV revenue until 2034.

So this would be a scrimmage, basically. For a half, it was. Colorado led 29-0 at the break, and Deion’s son Shedeur, the quarterback, had thrown four touchdown passes.

What happened next illustrated the appeal of sports itself, where imaginations can run as wild as Elic Ayomanor did Friday night.

Ayomanor, from Medicine Hat, Alberta, became a legend of The Farm in those two quarters, plus two overtimes. He caught a pass and took it 97 yards. He caught another and took it 60 yards. Stanford somehow got Colorado into overtime, and after the Buffaloes scored a touchdown, quarterback Ashton Daniels saw Ayomanor going down the left sideline, locked up by cornerback Travis Hunter.

Daniels threw it anyway. No reason not to. The ball was a little short, but Ayomanor reached all the way around Hunter and still came away with it, and scored. Amazed, Daniels seized the top of his own head. A simmering Colorado sideline went flat. Stanford intercepted Colorado’s second-overtime pass, and Joshua Karty drilled the field goal that won it, 46-43.

It was the biggest comeback win in Stanford football history. Ayomanor’s 294 yards receiving, on 13 catches. were the most ever by a Stanford receiver in a game. All the yards and catches came after halftime. The Cardinal players, already beaten and bruised by mid-October and deprived of all logical reasons for confidence, outscored the Buffaloes, 36-7, in the second half. They scored on all eight of those possessions.

“We come back out (after the half),” Coach Prime said, “and here comes the complacency. Here comes that team that I can’t stand, that you can’t stand.”

Taylor didn’t seem surprised, or maybe he was just sleepy, after four hours of football that lasted until 12:25 a.m. Patience has served him well. He was a high school coach in the Sacramento area, and then he was Utah’s offensive coordinator, and then he won a conference title at Sacramento State. When Stanford called, he was 54 years old, and it no longer mattered that he had been the alltime passing yardage leader at Cal, Stanford’s historic antagonist.

To contrast Taylor’s methods with those of Sanders is not to mock Coach Prime. He, too, paid some dues. You don’t take over Jackson State if you’re interested in short cuts. But these are long seasons, especially in the last and maybe the best version of the Pac-12. The merchandise sales and the TV ratings and the 60 Minutes interviews and the social-media avalanche cannot protect Shedeur Sanders, no more than Colorado’s overmatched offensive line can. He was sacked four more times on Friday and has bitten the dust more often than any other FBS quarterback. After halftime, and once Colorado put on its slippers and mentally went to the Barcalounger, Stanford began chasing and catching Shedeur.

Hunter, the two-way dynamo who was just returning after a lacerated liver, also let himself get baited into a roughness penalty as Colorado was stopping Stanford on third-and-22. That became a first down, and Stanford rode it to the score that cut the lead to 29-26.

The Buffs, and Deion, might be on the verge of learning how quickly fascination turns into ridicule. Suddenly the bowl trip isn’t a given. Colorado needs two more wins to get eligible with UCLA, Oregon State, Arizona, Washington State and Utah. It could well be underdogs in all five. Who knew there would be any 2023 pressure on a team that went 1-11 in 2022? Maybe Deion should have appeared on “15 Minutes.”

Stanford has no such promises to break. Everything is still gravy, including the spicy sight of whatever else Ayomanor has planned.

Ayomanor was a top all-around athlete in Canada but realized football was his ticket, and also realized he needed to redeem that ticket south of the border. He went to the Peddie School in New York, which was also frequented by John Metchie, the Canadian receiver who starred at Alabama and is now with the Houston Texans. Then he transferred to the Deerfield School in Massachusetts. Covid-19 cut his visibility, and he knew the college recruiters were snowed under by players’ tapes. So Ayomanor conducted his own tryout tour.

He impressed Shaw, who was still at Stanford, by asking if he could run routes against the best cornerbacks on the team. He went to Notre Dame and received passes from Tommy Rees, the former Irish QB who had become the offensive coordinator. Ayomanor looked so good that Rees offered him a ride before it was time to leave. The fact that he was 6-foot-3 and 210 pounds, and ran the 40 in 4.56 seconds, and ran a 10.8 100 meters at Deerfield, didn’t hurt.

But the fact that Ayomanor ended up at Stanford blunts the dire narrative about the program. There are more high-end football players with glossy grades than you think. Most of them have parents that know what Stanford is, wouldn’t be pleased if their son wanted to leave, and aren’t terribly concerned about NIL. In that subset of players, Stanford has a clear advantage. 

Hardly anything is more overrated than recruiting ratings, but Shaw brought the top class in the Pac-12 to Stanford in 2021. The first residue of that class was visible in Boulder. For the hushed masses at Folsom Field, so was the other side of midnight.