One of the first things Frank Reich did to prepare for his first season as a college coach was to study SMU’s explosive offense. Now his team will be charged with stopping it when Stanford visits the Mustangs Saturday morning.
SMU (3-2, 1-0 ACC) is averaging 47.1 points a game in its last 18 home games under coach Rhett Lashlee, posting a record of 16-2.
“In order to get adjusted and acclimated to the college game, I watched other offenses,” Reich said. “And obviously with coach Lashlee’s pedigree and his career and resume, one of the teams I really studied right away when I got here was the SMU offense, because of what they do schematically and the success that they’ve had.”
Reich had plenty of material just looking at last year’s film. The Cardinal (2-3, 1-1 ACC) allowed an 87-yard pass on the first play of scrimmage in SMU’s 40-10 win at Stanford, one of three long touchdown passes thrown by Kevin Jennings in the first quarter.
Here are the keys for the Cardinal to reverse last year’s outcome:
TIME ZONE ADJUSTMENTS
Stanford will be playing in its fifth time zone in six games, including previous visits to Hawaii, BYU, Virginia, and The Farm. No other FBS team will be playing in five time zones during the 2025 regular season.
Saturday’s game has the added obstacle of kicking off at 9 a.m. Pacific Time.
Reich has experience traveling from west to east as a coach for the then-San Diego Chargers and Arizona Cardinals, and he said his philosophy was to make only minor adjustments to the team’s schedule leading up to the game.
“My experience generally is, don’t make dramatic changes,” Reich said. “I’m not saying it doesn’t work for some team somewhere, but for me and the success that we’ve had is, you make subtle changes, keep the players focused on what they have to do. That’s the way we’ve handled it.”
The Cardinal is 0-3 on the road this season – and that’s with all games being played at 4:30 p.m. PT or later – but seventh-year defensive lineman Clay Patterson said the earlier start time wasn’t a concern.
“I don’t think whatever time we’re playing at is going to matter,” Patterson said. “It’s just the mindset that you come in with, that you’re going to beat the guy in front of you regardless if it’s at 9 in the morning your time or 8 at night your time.”
STOPPING JENNINGS
While Lashlee’s offense is innovative, it certainly helps to have Jennings running it. SMU’s dual-threat quarterback passed for a career-high four touchdowns last week against Syracuse and completed 16 passes in a row at one point.
“I think it just starts with our rush lanes,” Patterson said. “We have to be really smart in how us four D-linemen attack our rush lanes. We can’t get up the field too much. We have to recognize that he has the ability to get out of the pocket and then just the type of quarterback he is, he has a good pocket presence as well. So just understanding that he’ll be able to see any gaps that we give him.”
The Cardinal allowed 473 yards passing in its last game to San Jose State’s Walker Eget.
Jennings currently ranks third in the ACC with 287 yards of total offense per game. After starting 10-1 last season en route to the playoffs, the Mustangs have gotten off to a slower start this year with losses to Baylor and TCU. But Jennings has been remarkably consistent, throwing for at least 260 yards and a touchdown in every game.
“Super talented, really good arm,” Reich said. “He can hurt you in every way, and then is really good in the clutch. In those critical downs he’s a real playmaker.”
BIG BEN
Stanford quarterback Ben Gulbranson has seen his passing yardage increase in each game this season – from 109 in the opener against Hawaii to 444, the third-most in program history, in the Cardinal’s 30-29 win over San Jose State.
“There’s going to be a natural progression for the players learning a new system and putting it to work,” Reich said. “But ultimately the players have to make the plays and Ben at the quarterback position has done a particularly good job of getting better every week and gaining more confidence.”
Patterson said that one of the highlights of the San Jose State game – in which Stanford overcame a 12-point fourth quarter deficit and scored the winning touchdown with 19 seconds left – was the team celebrating around Gulbranson, an Oregon State transfer who arrived after spring practice, in the postgame locker room.
“I think that was a really pivotal moment of the team growing closer together and supporting Ben as our quarterback and just everyone letting their emotion come out in that moment,” Patterson said. “It was really special.”