Troy Taylor had no idea he was scheduling his Stanford home debut when Sacramento State agreed to face Cardinal

If Stanford coach Troy Taylor doesn’t want to face his former team in his first home game with the Cardinal, he has only himself to blame.

A few years ago, when he was the head coach at Sacramento State, Taylor was presented with a few potential opponents for the 2023 season by his athletic director, Mark Orr.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, we’ll play Stanford,’” Taylor said. “They’re right up the street. Let’s go do it.”

Taylor would go 30-8 in four years at Sacramento State, including the program’s first-ever FCS playoff win. In that same period, Stanford went 14-28 and didn’t make a bowl appearance. So Taylor, a former Cal quarterback and Utah offensive coordinator, was selected to lead the Stanford program after David Shaw resigned after last season.

After opening the season at Hawaii and USC, the home debut of the Taylor era at Stanford kicks off at 5 p.m. on Saturday at Stanford Stadium.

Sacramento State is now coached by Andy Thompson, who was Taylor’s defensive coordinator, and most of their players were recruited by Taylor. And the Hornets’ staff will be very familiar with the Cardinal’s offense since Taylor installed the same up-tempo spread system at Stanford that he used at his previous stop.

“Definitely there’s some intrigue,” Taylor said this week. “And I think when you know each other pretty well schematically and how you think and all those things, it definitely adds another layer to the game and preparation and all those things that go into somebody that has a lot of familiarity with you and your system and how you do things. It adds another layer for sure.”

But Taylor doesn’t have time to dwell on the scheduling quirk. Instead, he has to get the Cardinal (1-1) to bounce back from a historic beatdown last Saturday at No. 5 USC. Stanford allowed a school-record 49 first-half points en route to a 56-7 loss.

“Clearly they’re one of the top teams in the country, and we give them credit for how they made us perform,” Taylor said. “But we think we can perform better than that. We will perform better than that. My message would be pretty similar whether we won the game or lost the game — move on to the next game, improve, get better.”

If Stanford has any hopes of an improved record in Taylor’s first year, it must take advantage of its next two games, with Sacramento State and Arizona both coming to Stanford Stadium. After that, the Cardinal have only one more unranked opponent on its schedule – the Big Game against Cal on Nov. 18. The other matchups are against No. 8 Washington, No. 9 Notre Dame, No. 13 Oregon, No. 16 Oregon State, No. 18 Colorado, No. 23 Washington State and No. 24 UCLA.

But while the Hornets (2-0) play in the FCS, they won’t be fazed by the bigger stage of playing an FBS opponent. Sacramento State, ranked sixth in the FCS coaches poll, has played an FBS team every year since 2002 and has won three of those games – Oregon State (2011), Colorado (2012) and Colorado State (2022).

“Obviously those are all people that are really important to me on the staff and good guys and really good coaches, and we’ll wish them the best,” Taylor said. “Just not on Saturday.”

HOME CROWD

Stanford had always had at least 30,000 fans at Stanford Stadium in the 2010s, but the crowds had dimmed during the Cardinal’s recent downturn. Stanford’s announced attendance was between 25,000-27,000 in four of its six home games last season.

Leading up to his first home game, Taylor said that winning is the easiest way to get the fans to return.

“The thing that we can do as a program to rejuvenate the fan base is just put together a really good product, and play good football,” Taylor said. “In terms of marketing, that’s not my expertise. At Sac State we just won games and we were fun to watch, and we’ll do the same thing here. And I’ve found that, typically, if you’re successful, people will come.”