The news broke on Monday and became official on Tuesday when Stanford announced athletic director Bernard Muir would be stepping down after 13 years on the job. But it had been on his office wall for months.
Since the arrival of a new university president in August.
Since the appointment of a football general manager in November.
Since the recognition by critical stakeholders across the university that relentless losing begets complete irrelevance — and that both are worse than the sacrifices required to win.
In the immediate aftermath of Muir’s decision, it’s easy to focus on what went wrong during his tenure. On the momentum lost. On the opportunities missed. On the deterioration of Stanford’s athletic brand.
We’ll touch on just two matters, the state of the men’s basketball and football programs, because they reflect an appropriately nuanced view of Muir’s tenure and where the Cardinal heads from here:
— The demise of the former is entirely his doing.
Muir owns it and will wear it for years to come. He waited too long to fire Johnny Dawkins, whiffed with the Jerod Haase hire, then hung on far too long with Haase, as well. Tally it up, and you have three strikes and a decade in the wilderness.
(Kyle Smith, hired last spring, is a clear upgrade. But there are challenges facing Smith that did not exist during Dawkins’ tenure and the early years of the Haase era.)
— Despite what many Stanford fans believe, Muir’s culpability in the football program’s regression is far less direct.
There were clear signs of slippage under David Shaw in the late 2010s, but Muir wasn’t in position to force changes against the will of a head coach who had won three conference championships and taken the program to unprecedented heights. To think otherwise is folly.
Once it became clear to all involved that a change was needed, in 2021-22, it was too late for Muir to salvage the operation. NIL and the transfer portal had become the primary means of roster construction. As an institution, Stanford was wholly ill-equipped to deal with either.
The result: four consecutive three-win seasons — one of the worst stretches in school history.
That said, there was a path forward for the Cardinal. But once the terrain shifted, Muir could not clear the brush himself. Only changes directed by the president, the provost and the board of trustees could have provided the football program with the life raft it needed.
And that, folks, is where culpability ultimately lies: with former president Marc Tessier-Lavinge and, especially, ex-provost Persis Drell, who did not understand football, did not care about football and did not appreciate the benefits football could bring to athletics specifically and the campus writ large.
The combination of Tessier-Lavigne and Drell was a complete and utter disaster for Stanford football.
Which brings us to the present — to Muir’s departure and the surrounding dynamics.
While he remained in place over these fraught years for the Cardinal, everything else changed. First, Drell announced her departure. Then, Tessier-Lavigne resigned. And last summer, Jonathan Levin took charge of the university.
Any questions about his appreciation for football were answered a few months later, when Andrew Luck came aboard as the program’s general manager with a reporting line directly to Levin, according to sources — an indication of Muir’s diminished influence.
Levin attended Stanford during Bill Walsh’s second tenure as head coach and became a full professor in the late 2000s, just in time for football’s ascent under Luck, Shaw and Jim Harbaugh. Soon after taking office in August, he worked directly with Luck to create the GM role.
All of which is to say this: Muir’s tenure was forgettable in many regards. But the decline of Stanford football is more about the absence of interest atop the university and the changing landscape across the country. His departure reflects a shift in approach that starts with Levin.
Stanford’s administration has spent years living in fear of college football’s new era, petrified that accepting a transfer from the SEC — not just any transfer; an undergraduate transfer — could spark an institutional identity crisis and that a winning season could somehow tank its U.S. News and World Report ranking.
That’s only the case if your worldview is rooted in the bowels of Stanford’s National Accelerator Laboratory in the hills to the west of campus.
A closer look reveals no such correlation.
Duke has won 26 games over the past three seasons and beat Clemson and Florida State in the process. Over that time, the school’s U.S. News ranking has gone up.
Does anyone think less of Vanderbilt since it slayed Alabama with a quarterback (Diego Pavia) whose college career began at the New Mexico Military Institute?
Northwestern not only experienced a hazing scandal and fired its coach in 2023 but then had the unmitigated gall to win eight games. We hear it’s still a pretty good school.
Sure, the requirements for success are different now than they were during the Cardinal’s ascent 15 years ago, and more change is coming. By August, Stanford could be neck deep in the revenue-sharing era, along with Cal, the rest of the ACC and every school in major college football.
But the cost of a losing, hopeless, irrelevant football program far exceeds the price of the sacrifices needed to win.
Muir’s departure, viewed not as a singular event but as another move on Levin’s chessboard, indicates the most important person on campus not only sees the new reality but is comfortable with it.
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