I actually know only one person who attended Stanford, and as I watched the second half of the Fiesta Bowl at 8 a.m. UAE time, I was thinking of his (and other Stanford fans) suffering.

Frankie, my condolences. I feel your pain.

Fourth-ranked Stanford contrived to lose to third-ranked Oklahoma State, 41-38, in overtime, in a Fiesta Bowl game the Cardinal never trailed until it was over. Stanford absolutely should have won, and I was thinking of how ticked off and shattered and dispirited I would be, were I a Stanford fan, to lose “our” biggest bowl game since the 1971 Rose Bowl. Which was only 41 years ago.

It was about some horrendous coaching, a great quarterback under-utilized in crunch time, some poorly timed penalties and, marginally, about a child kicker who will serve as the official goat of the game, which is just wrong.

Actually, this was about a bad coach not using the greatest quarterback in a generation, moral cowardice in his settling for a field-goal attempt on the last play of regulation, and Jim Harbaugh leaving Stanford one year ahead of what probably would have been a national championship at The Farm.

I confess I did not know that David Shaw was the coach at Stanford. Hey, I live on the other side of the world. But not knowing David Shaw? I am not alone.

Do a google search for “David Shaw wikipedia” … and the first result will be a list of famous David Shaws in history.

The Stanford coach is not among them.

Type in “Stanford football coach” and the first result is “Jim Harbaugh.”

Ah, yes.

So, Jim Harbaugh turned around the Stanford program. The Trees were horrible when he arrived and a national power when he left. However, he left after an Orange Bowl win a year ago, to revive the San Francisco 49ers, who are in the NFL playoffs with a 13-3 record. (Had Harbaugh stayed one more year at Stanford, we wouldn’t be talking about any of this, I am convinced.)

So, I woke up on the couch, TV running in Abu Dhabi. It was the Rose Bowl when I passed out, and the Fiesta Bowl when I woke a few hours later, and there was Stanford in a tight duel with Oklahoma State, the team that thought it should have been in the BCS championship game next week, instead of Alabama.

The TV director was flashing, now and then, to a Stanford coach who was holding one of those giant play-calling boards, not quite covering his mouth as he talked to coaches in the booth, and for the first 2-3 times he appeared on my screen, I thought, “Some harried offensive coordinator, maybe. Looks discombobulated. Looks flustered. Looks overwhelmed, actually. Good thing he’s not in charge.”

No. That was Stanford’s head coach, and his being overwhelmed was about to kill the Trees.

David Shaw had never been a head coach until this year, and he had one huge advantage for his rookie season — Andrew Luck, the quarterback, a guy considered a once-a-generation player, the best QB prospect since Peyton Manning and perhaps since John Elway. The kid who will go No. 1 in the NFL draft to the Colts, even if they already have Peyton Manning.

Also, Luck was very sharp. He finished 27-of-31 for 347 yards and two touchdowns and one interception. Yes, he certainly looked like the best QB in recent college football history.  And he rarely threw the ball in the waning moments of the game.

David Shaw, the Stanford coach, remember, spent a lot of time ordering up plays from some retro double-tight-end, three-running-backs formation, fit only to run from. I sorta understand why he did that. Playing defense against Oklahoma State is a lot like playing Oregon (which beat Stanford this year and last), in that they play at a high speed and spread the field and exhaust your defense. Stanford was running the ball fairly well, and their defense was gassed by the end, but …

But. A big but.

But your quarterback is Andrew Luck! 

When Okie State tied it at 38-38 with 2:35 to play, what should have happened next should have been all about Andrew Luck. Not about keeping your defense off the field, not about ball control … it should have been about Andrew Luck slicing and dicing Okie State’s shaky defense. Andrew Luck putting the capstone on a great career by taking the Cardinal to a touchdown (probably) or a chipshot field goal as time expired.

Here is the final drive:

Luck 3-yard pass

Luck 9-yard pass

Luck 9-yard pass

Luck 4-yard pass

Taylor 4-yard run

Luck 25-yard pass — more a catch-and-run than a down-the-field thing, by the way

At this point, Stanford is on the 25, and Oklahoma State takes a timeout with 52 seconds left. Stanford, then, still has all three timeouts — and the greatest QB in a generation. That’s at least three or four plays, right? Easy. And the last will be a touchdown pass to win it. Cool.

What David Shaw did next was criminal coaching negligence. He … sat … on … the … ball.

Taylor 6-yard run

No timeout.

Taylor 2-yard run.

No timeout.

What had been a sickening suspicion, after that first-down run, was now nausea-inspiring reality. David Shaw is playing for a field goal.

Roll back to earlier in the game. A kid named Jordan Williamson, the Stanford kicker on this occasion, had missed a 41-yard field goal on the first drive of the game. Early in the fourth quarter he connected on a 30-yarder, but he looked shaky. He did not inspire confidence in me, a professional football observer.

Now, Stanford was, at this point in the final minute, on the 17-yard line, and the clock is running, because David Shaw, the man with three timeouts in his pocket and the best quarterback in the nation taking snaps …  because David Shaw has decided to entrust the game to a 19-year-old redshirt freshman who is maybe the 70th-best athlete on his team and has been in this sort of crushing pressure … oh, never.

He is going to have the kid try a 35-yard field goal. He wants the snapper, the holder and Jordan Williamson, all 5-11, 170 pounds of him, to win the biggest Stanford game since the 1971 Rose Bowl.

I have written before, but apparently not on this blog, about what I call “moral cowardice” among football coaches who do just enough in the final seconds of a game to get their kicker on the edge of his range, and then go into a shell, and turn over the fate of the game to a skinny guy who never practices with the real players. The idea is, the coach believes he can evade blame by having the kicker sort of in range, and he will not be criticized for the kicker “not doing his job,” meanwhile avoiding any responsibility for, say, a turnover “while already in field-goal range.” I hate coaches who do this. Hate them. Despise them. They think no one notices. I do. Norv Turner infamously did it with Nate Kaeding in San Diego a time or two, and now David Shaw is doing it with a redshirt freshman. I am disgusted.

The clock gets down to :03 … and David Shaw uses the first of his three timeouts.

Had Jordan Williamson ever done anything like this before? As opposed to, say, Andrew Luck, Best Quarterback in the Nation, a senior with scads of big games in his history?

Well, no. Of course not.

Williamson had made 12 of 15 field goals this year, but none of them were like this. Look at Stanford’s games this season. Wins by 54, 30, 27, 26, 41, 30, 44, 8, 25, 3 and 14. And a loss to Oregon by 23.

I see only two opportunities for a pressure kick … the 8-point OT win over USC, but Williamson wasn’t even Stanford’s kicker that day. (That would have been someone named Erik Whitaker.) In the 3-point win, 31-28 over Cal, Williamson did have one semi-pressure moment. With Stanford leading 28-21, he kicked a 35-yarder on his home field with 3:07 to play to give the Cardinal a 10-point lead. But that is not remotely in the same league as a 35-yarder against No. 3 Oklahoma State in a primetime nationally televised game, last play of the game, with the winner making a claim for a share of the national title.

So, with Andrew Luck standing on the sidelines, Jordan Williamson went out there, and started swinging his arms in some bizarre kicker thing … and Oklahoma State called a timeout. Another 30 seconds to think about the enormity of it. Icing, indeed.

Now, remember, a college kicker cannot be compared to an NFL kicker. Those pro guys are elite, and rare, and what they do is just amazing. A 35-yarder to an NFL kicker is like a PAT to a college kicker. a 35-yarder to a college kid is like a 45-50-yarder to an NFL kicker.

And this was a 19-year-old kid from Austin, Texas, who is playing for books, tuition and access to the training table, who suddenly had this massive game dumped on him by a guy probably making $2 million this year.

Line up again, Williamson swinging his arms in some sort of OCD moment, and here is the snap … and there goes the kick … horribly wide left.  David Shaw has gotten what he deserved — but not what the Stanford Nation deserved. Nor Andrew Luck. And certainly not what Jordan Williamson deserved.

Into overtime.  Stanford has the ball first and, for the love of God, don’t ask the kid kicker to do anything hard, because he’s now missed from 35 and 41, and you do not want him to have to make a clutch kick. But you still have Andrew Luck, and it’s not too late to put the game in his hands!

Taylor 5 run (out of that jumbo formation)

False start on Levine Toilolo, 5-yard penalty

Taylor minus-3 run (!!!!!)

Now, finally, on third-and-13, David Shaw is dialing up a pass play for the greatest quarterback in the nation, for the first time in (let’s count) … six plays.

Luck, under quick pressure, dumps it off to Montgomery for 3.

Which means the ball is back at the 25, where this series started … with that 5-yard run, remember?

Out trots Jordan Williamson, and we all knew how this would go. There’s a 43-yarder, also wide left.

Okie State comes out, gets to the 1 in two plays, takes one play to put the ball in the middle of the field, runs out their kicker for, essentially, a PAT, and he drills it. Game over.

Holy crap. My connection to Stanford is covering some football and basketball there, and that’s about it … and I am ticked off.

By then, Jordan Williamson, was hunched over on the Stanford bench. Later, we are told by a reporter on the scene, Jordan Williamson was crying like a baby in the lockerroom. A kid who is now Stanford’s answer to Buffalo’s Scott Norwood (missed 47-yarder, Super Bowl XXV).

I was already plenty steamed, and then I saw this quotation in the Associated Press game story:

Said David Shaw: “There’s an old saying that adversity reveals character — and that’s not just for him, that’s for all of us.”

Whaaaat? Don’t you dare blame a 19YO kicker you threw into the fiery furnace! And the “that’s not just for him” clearly indicates that you do, in fact, blame your teen kicker … which is what bad coaches do.

So, I’m sorry Stanford. I’m sorry this ended like this, because you know that was your Last Shot. Your school hired this guy of marginal ability, who led the team Harbaugh built, and got them to a pretty big game, and he screwed it up royally, and now Andrew Luck is gone, and a bunch of other guys Harbaugh coached up are gone, too, and Stanford will now return to 7-5, 6-6, 8-4 … things like that, until David Shaw is fired and some other guy hired.

You had one shot, and Andrew Luck was holstered by the coach. It killed me, and I have never even been inside a classroom at The Farm.