PAC-12 CHAMPIONSHIPS (M)

The PAC-12 2023 Championship is in the books and what an amazing experience for Stanford Rowing. While West Coast rowing is obviously not as deep as that of our Eastern peers, we are very lucky to have some of the nation's top competitors here to push us to new heights. While the goal is always to win, no matter what, conference championships are also an important progress check before the end of the season.

The #8 Stanford Men have a lean team this year and are in a rebuilding mode (in terms of # rowers), fielding two boats, but also have a lot of potential between both of them, particularly in the 1V8. Since the national champion is determined in this category, all you need is one boat to claim the title. So this is really where we want to see the progress, and they delivered in spades. Note that there was a big change here - the stern 4 and bow 4 swapped places for this race, and the live stream announcers said that Ted liked the chemistry he saw in practice.

In the 1V8 race, #4 Washington was really gunning for #1 Cal in the first 1,000, while Stanford stayed extremely patient. Then the Huskies started to fall off the Cal pace. By the last 500 Stanford had progressively gained ground, and was surging through the last five strokes. Alas, they were unable to overtake UW for 2nd place, and they fell short by only half a second - the narrowest margin for second place in many, many years.

Based on the cMax rankings this was massive progress - Stanford should have been 3.6 seconds behind UW. In the latest poll prior to the race they were #3 and Stanford was #7. 

Stanford's final margin v. Cal ended up being pretty close to what the cMax rankings predicted last week, and is a great indicator for how IRAs could shake out. Stanford definitely has the potential to make the Grand Final there. This would be a massive improvement over last year‘s 13th place (1st place in the 3rd level final), and could be close to their 5th place overall finish in 2021 when Harvard and Yale were not part of the field. With Harvard and Yale back, getting into the Grand Final in 2023 would be a great achievement.

The 2V8 also placed third, and while it wasn’t as close compared to the 1V8, they were only 13 seconds behind second place, and rowed far stronger and more together than any other race this season thus far. It was a very inspiring from an improvement perspective.

Read the goStanford recap here.