STANFORD, Calif. - Though he had every reason to celebrate the amazing catch that made him an overnight star, Stanford receiver Francis Owusu had no time for that Thursday night. He had a paper to write.
Owusu was up until 4 or 5 a.m. finishing his assignment for a communication class. It was due Friday morning.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world was savoring his unbelievable no-look reach-around-the-defender grab in the end zone during Stanford’s 56-35 nationally-televised victory over UCLA.
“It’s surreal,” Owusu said. “It’s surreal to see your name on ESPN. I’m enjoying the moment, but at the same time, I’m keeping my head down with the rest of my teammates getting ready for this next game.”
Days after the catch, it still defied description.
“I’m still in a state of disbelief,” said David Shaw, Stanford’s Bradford M. Freeman Director of Football. “I don’t know how he did it. It’s just phenomenal. We watched it again with the players, and it was the same reaction -- Wow.”
This is what Owusu remembered:
“When I turned around, I saw the ball in the air,” Owusu said. “My vision was blurred after that when the defender hit my head. I had an idea of where I was going to land. From there, instincts took over. I put my arms out where I thought the ball would land and I was able to catch it. Once I caught it, I wasn’t going to let go.”
Former Card receiver Chris Owusu, now with the New York Jets, didn’t see his little brother’s catch on television. Chris was asleep, but woke up to a series of texts. When he finally saw the replays, Chris texted Francis this message: “Excellent catch.”
“I don’t know if he was ready for it to take on a life of its own,” Shaw said.
But Owusu has handled it well.
Through the Washington State game on Oct. 31, Stanford will have played seven consecutive games at 7:30 p.m.
Night games are a mixed blessing. The primetime kickoffs mean Stanford is having a great year and they seem to offer greater exposure -- to a point. However, Stanford alums and recruits back east most likely won’t stay up to watch the games in their entirety, if at all.
It also forces Stanford fans from areas like Sacramento or Southern California to find a hotel, rather than drive home immediately afterward, which they would be able to do after an afternoon game.
“It makes Sunday tough on everybody, even the home team,” Shaw said. “You do all this stuff afterward, players, media and family, and not get back to the house until 12:30 or 1 a.m. Road-trip wise, you may not get back until 4 a.m. in the morning. The first half of Sunday is shot, you’re a zombie. For the players, Sunday is a day to catch up on school work, but half their day is gone already. It’s hard to recover from a night game.
“We don’t complain about it, but it would be great to play a few more games while the sun is out.”
Shaw proposes some kind of compromise, where a team can declare, say, three home games in the afternoon and three at night.
“There are a lot of prime spots in the day, too,” Shaw said.
In the discussion of who Stanford will face at quarterback on Saturday in the 7:30 p.m. Pac-12 game against visiting Washington -- true freshman Jake Browning, who injured a shoulder last week, or redshirt freshman K.J. Carta-Samuels, a San Jose product -- Shaw cautioned that the Cardinal doesn’t worry about stopping certain individuals.
“We try really hard not to prepare for individual people because that gets our players’ eyes in the wrong spot,” Shaw said. “That leaves them concentrating on the wrong things, as opposed to which gap am I hitting, what am I responsible for, what angles do I need to take at the quarterback. More than anything, it’s about us preparing for them schematically.”
The dramatic finish to Michigan State’s 27-23 victory over Michigan, in which the winning touchdown with no time left was created by a bobbled punt snap, incited vitriol on social media by many disappointed Wolverine fans.
Those type of reactions are things that Stanford, among others, has a plan for. In the 2012 Fiesta Bowl, for example, Stanford players and coaches did a great job rallying around kicker Jordan Williamson, who missed some crucial field goals in an overtime loss to Oklahoma State.
Asked if he would tell his team to stand up for each other after such a game, Shaw said: “It happens organically. When you’re the head coach, one of the things you have to do early on with your team is make sure there is a hard line drawn between the people in our locker room and the people not in our locker room. We can’t expect people outside our locker room to understand the people inside our locker room.
“We have to try not to over explain things to people outside our locker room, because they’re not going to get it anyway. When games like Northwestern (a season-opening 16-6 loss) happen, you go back and close the doors and say, this is who we are, this is what we believe in and go back to work. That’s what happens in the course of the year.”
Quarterback Kevin Hogan continues to recover from an ankle injury, though he has remained in action in three full games since suffering the injury against USC on Sept. 19.
Shaw said Hogan was at about 85 percent last weekend. He’s mobile and makes good decision, but Hogan still needs to develop the “burst or explosion” that could make the difference between being fully healthy.
Shaw has taken some ribbing for being stoic on the sideline, but that’s been changing. Late last season, safety Ronnie Harris helped Shaw to think differently about his sideline persona.
“At the Rose Bowl last year, when we played UCLA, we were up a couple of scores, I just saw him pacing up and down the sideline,” said Harris, a fifth-year senior. “Something came over me, and told me to go up and talk to him.”
Harris told him, “Coach, just let it out. It’s OK to show your emotions.”
Shaw has taken that advice to heart and the team has noticed.
“I feel like it’s just given us a little bit more of an edge,” Harris said. “Being able to see him have a little bit of passion makes us go out there with a little bit more trust and a little bit more passion ourselves.
“I don’t think we were missing passion, it just takes you to higher heights. You’ve seen it all this year. We’ve played with a different type of intensity. And that intensity goes not only to our players, but to our coach and our coaching staff as well.”
Shaw understands that as well.
“They kind of get excited when they see me crack a smile,” Shaw said. “I’m not being anybody different than who I am, but I’m conscious about expressing what I feel at the moment.”
Stanford senior right guard Johnny Caspers is not afraid to get down and dirty. The earth systems major certainly did during the summer while doing research on natural waste streams for the Stanford Educational Farm.
“I took horse manure from the Red Barn and coffee grounds from dining halls on campus, and I used worms to try to create a compost-soil aggregate that could be used for the farm. It’s really small scale right now, but I’m trying to create an interconnected system that’s cheaper and relies on less transportation of materials.”