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Last week, ESPN reported that now former Stanford coach Troy Taylor bullied and belittled female athletic staffers at the school, tried to have an NCAA compliance official removed after she warned him of violations and made inappropriate comments to a woman about her appearance across two investigations into alleged conduct during his two-year tenure.
At the time the story was published, Stanford general manager and former star quarterback Andrew Luck declined a request for comment. In that story, however, a source with direct knowledge told ESPN, “Luck met with the team in Taylor’s presence on Thursday, and that Luck doubled down on standing by his coach.”
Now here we are, five days later, and Luck has fired Taylor with a statement that read, in part, “After continued consideration it is evident to me that our program needs a reset. In consultation with our university leadership I no longer believe that Coach Taylor is the right coach to lead our football program.”
Together, this begs a question: What changed in a few short days?
Reading between the lines, it’s possible that administrators above Luck — perhaps outgoing athletic director Bernard Muir or new school president Jon Levin — stepped in. It’s not ideal to conduct a coaching search in March, and it seems like Stanford was planning to run it back with Taylor in 2025 if none of this had come to light.
Luck was aware of the ticking timebomb inside his football program.
According to ESPN, Taylor signed a letter on Feb. 14, 2024 acknowledging that he could be fired if his conduct continued following the 2023 investigation. The second investigation into Taylor’s conduct concluded in the summer of 2024, and Luck was hired in late November.
The Athletic reported that Taylor was disciplined and that Luck was briefed on the entire situation; Luck had also been on the committee that hired Taylor in 2022. But rather than choosing to announce that Taylor was disciplined and they would be soldiering on with him at the helm in the wake of this saga coming to light … they fired him.
Stanford sees itself as a complete athletic department, one that caters to all sports on an even playing field versus the football factories that dominate the sport. Football operates with “intellectual brutality,” but it does so as part of a broader athletic program that prides itself on being the nation’s leader in all-time NCAA team championships.
Luck putting his name to the statement ushers in a new paradigm in Stanford football — and college football as a whole. It’s one where the general manager can, and did, fire the coach. It means the role he was hired to do has much more executive function than simply stocking the roster. It also should bring with it more scrutiny about Luck’s role in Stanford football’s future. He is the one in charge of the program, and because of that, he should also be on the hook for explaining how the program will be cleaned up no matter who the next permanent coach is to make the environment more welcoming to women whether they’re employed by the school or not.
After all, Stanford’s administration has known for quite a while that the culture needed to change.
