Down 20-10 at halftime, Davis Warren hit Caden High for a 49-yard touchdown that tied the Georgia Tech game 20-20, then found Nico Brown for 33 yards on fourth down late in the third quarter, then got High again on a sweep in the fourth. High finished with two scores, the tying 49-yard catch and the fourth-quarter sweep; Brown caught the go-ahead 33-yard touchdown on fourth-and-11. Warren's 396 passing yards were a career high, with three touchdowns.
It was also the fourth straight home game Stanford has treated as its only reliable habitat. Saturday at noon Eastern on ACC Network, the Cardinal play at Wake Forest carrying a road losing streak that reached 12 games with the loss at Duke on September 19, the longest such stretch in program history. Wake Forest and Notre Dame are the next two trips, with no home game in between. The simulations give Stanford a 17.7% chance here, which is roughly what you would expect given ACC media picked Stanford last in the league and Wake Forest 13th. Stanford beat Georgia Tech 34-27 in Week 4.
What the Georgia Tech game actually settled
Not much about the road, but something real about the offense. Andrew Luck, who as general manager oversees all aspects of Stanford football, hired Tavita Pritchard as permanent head coach for 2026, and this was the rebuild's first tangible win. It was a second-half rally that came almost entirely through the air, from a quarterback who missed all of 2025 with a torn ACL and won the job in August. High and Brown accounted for all three receiving touchdowns. Micah Ford's carries went nowhere. If you were waiting to see whether the passing game could carry a full half of ACC football by itself, you saw it.
What the night did not settle is the part of Stanford that keeps handing opponents the first thirty minutes. Justice Haynes ran for 107 yards and Trelain Maddox scored on a 20-yard run and a 9-yard catch as Georgia Tech posted season highs of 431 total yards and 163 rushing. Brandon Nicholson's interception and Tevarua Tafiti's fumble recovery closed the game out, but only after Stanford had already spent a half digging.
Why Wake Forest is a bad place for that pattern
Wake Forest is 3-1 and just won 30-27 at then-No. 16 Louisville, sealed when Gabe Kirschke blocked a 57-yard field goal with 15 seconds left. The Deacons' defense gave up 21 first-half points in that game and then pitched a scoreless fourth quarter, which is how Stanford's defense has played too, soft early, stingy late. Two teams who both prefer to win the second half, one of which has to do it 2,700 miles from home.
The lever worth watching is protection. Wake Forest's rebuilt offensive line, replacing both starting tackles, allowed three sacks against Miami and two documented sacks at Louisville. Stanford's cleanest route to a first-half lead for once runs through getting to the quarterback rather than stopping the run, and a first-half lead is the one thing this team has never needed to protect on the road.
The odd bit of history
This is only the fourth Stanford-Wake Forest meeting ever, and the first in Winston-Salem since 2009, when Wake Forest won 24-17. Wake Forest leads the series 2-1. Luck now runs the program that has to go back there, which is the kind of detail that means nothing tactically and everything to the people in the building.
A Stanford win would not change the season's arithmetic much (the model still projects about 2.4 conference wins), but it would end the one drought that has outlasted three coaching staffs. Watch the first quarter. If Warren is upright and Stanford is not already chasing, the rest of this becomes genuinely interesting.
Full numbers are in the interactive guide, and the methodology explains how the projections are built.