[CTcard]

CT,  I take it you take issue with the observation in general.  I won't go looking up the numbers, but you believe that we generally avoid running against numbers?

My initial line of thinking was that for matters such as this, arguments of kind don't mean as much as arguments of degree.
Stanford ran 67 plays vs UCLA. Almost certainly some of them were runs into a stacked box. I would assume that happens to every team in every game ... almost. The issue is how often, and how much does that hurt the offense overall.

I don't have enough tape to go count every single play to check which were runs into a stacked box. However, your metric of safeties making plays at the LOS is easy to check - so I counted. By my own memory, I expected to see something like 4 of these. I was surprised to see only 1, and that seemed noteworthy.

More broadly, Stanford is rarely running the ball on standard downs at this point, so it seems a reach to think that running into stacked boxes is the most important cause of offensive trouble. Others have taken up that theme in this thread.

[CTcard]

CT,  I take it you take issue with the observation in general.  I won't go looking up the numbers, but you believe that we generally avoid running against numbers?

My initial line of thinking was that for matters such as this, arguments of kind don't mean as much as arguments of degree.
Stanford ran 67 plays vs UCLA. Almost certainly some of them were runs into a stacked box. I would assume that happens to every team in every game ... almost. The issue is how often, and how much does that hurt the offense overall.

I don't have enough tape to go count every single play to check which were runs into a stacked box. However, your metric of safeties making plays at the LOS is easy to check - so I counted. By my own memory, I expected to see something like 4 of these. I was surprised to see only 1, and that seemed noteworthy.

More broadly, Stanford is rarely running the ball on standard downs at this point, so it seems a reach to think that running into stacked boxes is the most important cause of offensive trouble. Others have taken up that theme in this thread.