How good is too good? Well, if you’re a high school athlete dreaming of Stanford, that ceiling is probably higher than most can reach. And, funnily, that’s a hard reality recently hired head coach Frank Reich is finding a hard time dealing with.

The conversation reared its head on June 1, when Reich made an appearance on the Lots to Say podcast. At one point, one of the hosts Bobby Jones asked, “One of my friends, Vanderbilt football [team] coach Clark Lea [talked] about how rigorous the academic standards are at Vanderbilt to also play football. Stanford feels similar, except more accomplished in the football side of things. But you have to recruit a certain type of kid to go to school there, right?”

Well, as soon as the words were out of Jones’ mouth, the head coach launched into how much of a hassle it has been trying to recruit folks who are not just elites on the gridiron, but off of it, too. Mostly because the definition of elite in his eyes, and those of others within the administration is vastly different. “Oh yeah. And I found out really quick that they’re real serious about that here [laughing],” remarked Reich, who boasts a $10 million net worth, before revealing an exact instance of how he was taken aback by the program’s strictness.

“There was one guy we were looking at…I thought his tape looked pretty good, and so I’m asking the guys. I said, ‘Hey, what about this guy?’…They did a quick study of his grades and his grades were good. Like, I’m not going to go into the exact details of this conversation but they weren’t, by almost all standards…these grades were good grades, good GPA. But they were not good enough for Stanford,” he revealed. “The guy was a good player, and so I just asked the question…something to the degree of, ‘Well, these are solid grades, right? There’s nothing we can do? [They said], ‘No, there’s nothing [we can do]…The grades aren’t good enough.”

“And so it is a smaller pool of student-athletes that we can recruit. But that’s, I think, one of the things that makes this a pretty cool place when you’re going into college football,” Reich concluded. Unfortunately, the battle doesn’t end there. For Stanford student-athletes, their struggles aren’t just limited to getting enrolled, but also the years they spend within the institution.

As per a report from The Stanford Daily back in 2015, student-athletes don’t just have to wake up at 5 am, deal with 20 hours of practice, but also gym sessions, conditioning, and actual games. That too, six days a week. Now add to that, road games and it seems like there might be barely time to breathe.

Yet Reich is surely hopeful.

No amount of grade barrier can stop Frank Reich

Frank Reich is making his first foray into CFB, courtesy of Andrew Luck. Luck, the former No.1 overall draft pick and 4x Pro Bowler is back at his alma mater Stanford as GM, and one of his first moves was to hire his former coach Reich as interim HC, for one season.

But no matter how short of a stint, Reich is going to make sure he makes a difference. “I’m all in and I am so excited to be here. I feel great about this group of players and coaches. I’m happy to be part of it and play the role that I’m supposed to play. I just happen to believe that we can do something and that we’re gonna make progress,” he had said in a post-Spring practice press conference.

“We want to dictate the game on offense. What that means is we want to run the ball on our terms when we want to run it. And we want to throw it on our terms, when we want to throw it. The whole point of this game is trying to impose your will on the other team. So we want to have a balanced offense, we want to run the football, that’s part of Stanford’s tradition on offense to be good [at] running the football. Any success that I’ve had in the NFL as a coach were on teams that ran the football well,” he had further said.

It’ll be fascinating to see how Reich, and Andrew Luck, can usher in this new era of Stanford football. It’s going to be a constant tryst to stay within the boundaries of what the school allows. Luck’s been through the wringer before so he’s acclimatized. Reich is going to have to do so as well. The ACC just got blessed with a couple of great coaches from the NFL and he’s certainly one of them.  So you’d expect him to find a way to succeed with this self-imposed handicap.