Troy Taylor’s latest challenge is turning Stanford football around

STANFORD, Calif. — It’s not hard for Troy Taylor to envision a parallel universe in which he would be home, outside of Sacramento, a high school teacher enjoying summer break. He would probably be scribbling plays in a yellow notebook, preparing for Folsom High’s upcoming football season and life would be good.

That was his reality seven years ago. He was the co-head coach at one of the most dominant football programs in the state and the architect of one of the most explosive offenses ever seen at the high school level.

“I could have been very happy being at Folsom High School for the rest of my life,” Taylor said.

A record-breaking quarterback at Cal who spent two years with the New York Jets after being picked in the fourth round of the 1990 NFL draft, Taylor spent five seasons as an assistant at his alma mater before deciding to go the high school route. At the time, the idea of bouncing around, trying to climb the college coaching ladder didn’t mesh well with his idea of how to be a good father and husband.

Folsom became his laboratory. One season the team never punted. In another, his quarterback, current Cincinnati Bengals backup Jake Browning, tied the single-season national record with 91 touchdowns. After 14 years, off and on, there was a special body of work, but finally it hit him: “I need a new challenge.”

Taylor had developed a relationship with then-Washington coach Chris Petersen — initially through Browning’s recruiting process — and after the 2015 season he told Petersen he was flirting with the idea of getting back into college coaching. The conversation began a series of events that led to Taylor being named Stanford football coach in December.

He’s tasked with turning around a program that is just a few years removed from the most successful period in its 130-year history but is coming off a dismal two-year run in which it won just three conference games. Stanford faces significant short- and long-term challenges in the face of the changing world of college football.

SOMETIME AFTER TAYLOR let Petersen know about his college coaching ambitions, his phone rang. On the other end was then-Eastern Washington head coach Beau Baldwin, who was in the market for a new offensive coordinator.

“He told me, ‘Hey, Coach Pete said I should interview you and when Coach Pete tells me to do something, I listen,'” Taylor said.

Petersen had developed an immense amount of respect for Taylor over the years and that was relayed to Baldwin.

Plus, Petersen knew Taylor and Baldwin had similar styles and thought they would make a good match. He was right.

On his way back from the national coaching convention, Baldwin stopped in Sacramento to meet with Taylor. They discussed football concepts and theory, and the conversation ended with Baldwin offering Taylor the job. From a football standpoint, it was the exact type of gig he was looking for: an opportunity to apply his offensive concoction at a higher level and see where it might go.

From a family and life standpoint, though, this was not a no-brainer. The $63,000 salary was a pay cut from his teaching job (which included a $2,000 stipend he got to coach football) and meant he and his wife, Tracey, would have to uproot their three kids — then ages 7, 10 and 15 — to Cheney, Washington.

“If my wife would have said no, that would have been it,” Taylor said. “It was totally in her hands. But she’s like, ‘All right. I believe in you. Let’s do it.'”

Taylor didn’t plan to remain a coordinator for long. He wanted to be a head coach. As much as he obsessed over X’s and O’s, being able to set the culture of a team was just as important and he knew it would never happen from the OC chair.

“I was going to give myself five years to become a head coach at the college level,” he said. “I didn’t want to travel all over the country for the rest of this deal, but let’s give it five years. I could always come back and I’ve got my teaching credential and all that.

“People were wondering if the offense was going to work at the college level. So was I. So, let’s give it a shot.”

YES, THE OFFENSE worked. At Eastern Washington, quarterback Gage Gubrud set the FCS single-season passing record (5,160 yards), the Eagles went 12-2, ranked second nationally in total offense and third in scoring. Having future Super Bowl MVP Cooper Kupp at receiver certainly helped, but any possible doubt about Taylor’s transition from high school was gone.

After the season, he was named the offensive coordinator at Utah and this time when he leveled up, it came with roughly a half-million-dollar raise.

The results were mixed. Utah won its first Pac-12 division title in his second season (2018), but the Utes ranked in the bottom half of the conference offensively in his two years in Salt Lake City. Taylor’s pass-heavy offense clashed with what Utah had done traditionally and has done since.

Still, the three years in college football were validating and led Sacramento State to offer Taylor its head coaching gig after the 2018 season. It meant another pay cut — this time measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars — but for Taylor, that was but a footnote. He was doing exactly what he set out to do: become a head coach in college football and do it in his hometown.

“People were shocked when I left Utah,” Taylor said. “‘What’s he doing? Why would he leave for less money and go to Sacramento State to be the head coach?’ … And I said, ‘This isn’t about money. This is about running a program.'”

“As an offensive coordinator, you can make a lot of money, but you’re never going to be able to really drive the culture.”

Like Stanford is now, Sac State was in a tough spot. In 2018, it went winless in the Big Sky Conference (0-7) and was 2-8 overall. Going into Taylor’s first season, the Hornets were picked to come in 12th place in the 13-team league.

The turnaround was immediate. Sac State went 9-4 overall and 7-1 in the conference and earned two historic firsts: a share of the Big Sky football championship and a berth in the FCS playoffs. After not playing in the 2020 Covid season, Taylor took the Hornets to new heights. They went undefeated in conference play in 2021 and 2022, rose to as high as No. 2 in the FCS rankings and won their first-ever playoff game.

The day after Sac State was eliminated from the FCS playoffs in December, Taylor was officially named Stanford’s head coach.

STANFORD ATHLETIC DIRECTOR Bernard Muir is not expecting the same kind of instant revival on the Farm. Not in what has the potential to be a very strong year in the Pac-12 and not with what Stanford has been through.

“I know it’s going to take some time to get us back to where we want to be just because our numbers are a bit down, but he’s not making excuses and he’s trying to get better every day,” Muir said. “And that’s exactly the energy and enthusiasm we’re going to need.”

A bit down sells things a bit short.

The Cardinal lost 12 starters and 17 players to the transfer portal and the school’s stringent admission and transfer requirements precluded the possibility of using the portal to completely replenish the roster for this season in the way most other schools could have. Taylor said he expects to have about 75 of the allotted 85 scholarship players this season.

Those departures combined with Stanford’s downturn are why the Cardinal were picked to finish in last place by the media in a poll released at Pac-12 media day Friday. Muir and Taylor both theorized, however, that the mass exodus was more a product of unusual circumstances — extra year of Covid eligibility, staff change, lack of success, etc. — than something they expect to turn into a trend.

“In this day and age where schools bring in 30 new transfers, we’re not going to live in that world,” Taylor said. “I don’t want to live in that world. I want to build culture and you only build culture when you have people for a duration. You can’t bring in new players every year and think you’re going to develop a great culture.

“I like the idea of building it with high school athletes and then if you’re smart enough to choose Stanford, you’re probably smart enough to stay in school until you get your undergraduate degree.”

Of the 17 players who left, 16 did so with degrees. The extra season of eligibility from Covid resulted in more graduates with remaining eligibility than will usually be the case.

It’s nearly impossible to measure progress while a new coach is 0-0, but three players who spoke with ESPN last week were enthusiastic about the job Taylor has done injecting new energy and belief into the program.

“He’s everything we heard about him times 10,” tight end Benjamin Yurosek said. “He’s competitive, he’s intense, he loves the game of football.”

“Coach Taylor’s big philosophy is love and that’s obviously been prevalent in Stanford, but just understanding what that means, not that golden retriever type of love or anything, but loving your brother enough to tell him what he doesn’t want to hear or push him in all those types of ways.”

What Yurosek laid out reflects the kind of culture Taylor has always felt was vital to building a successful football program. It was that way in Folsom, just as it was at Sac State. In both places, unprecedented success followed. At Stanford, that’s a tougher bar to clear.