Four kickoff times for Stanford football have been announced:
The Saturday, August 23rd game at Hawaii will kick off at 4:30 PM PT on CBS. The Saturday, September 6th game at BYU will kick off at 7:15 PM PT on ESPN. The Saturday, September 13th game vs. Boston College will kick off at 7:30 PM PT on ACC Network. The Saturday, October 18th homecoming game vs. Florida State will kick off at 7:30 PM PT on ESPN.
First off, three of those four games are late night games. The BYU game will be kicking off at 8:15 PM MT, so that game will be the latest of the bunch with respect to the time zone it will be played in. I think late night games against ACC opponents will give Stanford a bit of an advantage since they’ll be kicking off at 10:30 PM ET. That’s a late time for these ACC teams’ body clocks to start playing.
As for the opponents, Hawaii went 5-7 overall last season and 3-4 in the Mountain West. Stanford defeated Hawaii in Honolulu back in 2023 by a final score of 37-24 to kick off the short-lived Troy Taylor era. Stanford is currently 2.5 point favorites in this year’s matchup, so they will be expected to win provided they are healthy going into the game.
Moving on to BYU, they are coming off a season in which they went 11-2 overall and 7-2 in the Big XII while also defeating Colorado 36-14 in the Alamo Bowl. In their previous meeting at Stanford Stadium, BYU had a 35-26 victory in what would end up being David Shaw’s final game. On paper, BYU should be favored by like 10+ points.
That said, their star quarterback Jake Retzlaff is currently facing a sexual assault civil lawsuit. If it were any other school, odds are good that Retzlaff would be starting the whole season, but given BYU has their honor code, I would say odds are 50/50 that he’s the starting quarterback when Stanford comes to town. I could see a situation where BYU gives Retzlaff a four-game suspension or something. Just because optically, to not give him any punishment could look bad for the school. Odds of an honor code violation appear high even if there was no sexual assault that took place.
If Retzlaff is unable to go, perhaps we’ll see former Stanford quarterback Bear Bachmeier under center for the Cougars. Bachmeier was an early enrollee in the spring and his older brother wide receiver Tiger Bachmeier grad transferred to BYU to play with him, putting his Masters in Computer Science on hold for a couple of years. We’ll definitely see Tiger out there on the field in Provo. Will we see Bear? Just depends on how the Retzlaff situation sorts itself out.
Switching gears to Boston College, the Eagles are coming off a season in which they went 7-6 overall and 4-4 in the ACC. They fell to Nebraska 20-15 in the Pinstripe Bowl at Yankee Stadium to end their season. The Eagles did not face Stanford last season, so this will be the first season they’ll face each other as ACC opponents. Stanford might be favored slightly going into this game pending on how Hawaii and BYU go, but casting the specific spread aside, it should be a close game.
The four ACC opponents that Boston College and Stanford shared last season were Syracuse, Virginia Tech, SMU, and Louisville. Stanford went 2-2 in those games knocking off Syracuse and Louisville. Boston College went 1-3 in those games, defeating Syracuse. I don’t view the transitive property as much of an indicator, but it’s still worth mentioning.
Wrapping up with Florida State, on paper this is a big time opponent to welcome to The Farm for homecoming. Florida State was ranked in the top ten to start last season. Unfortunately for them, they were all sizzle and no steak as they fizzled out the season with a 2-10 overall record and 1-7 record in the ACC. Stanford’s 3-9 overall and 2-6 ACC record was better. The lone win Florida State had in ACC play was over Cal at home, which they won 14-9 back in September.
This game is a hard one to predict. We’re just gonna have to see what the Seminoles look like come October. Maybe they’ll have rebounded and they’ll be coming to The Farm as a ranked or least bowl bound team. Maybe they’ll be terrible. We just don’t know. But regardless of how they look, given the brand that they have, Stanford Stadium should have a lot of energy. Especially with it being homecoming and at night.
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