Stanford ripping up the rulebook for Christian McCaffrey’s offseason regimen

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To reach Stanford’s football weight room, one must navigate a pair of nondescript hallways and descend a set of stairs into the basement.

Sports performance director Shannon Turley’s office is tucked away to the right side of the large space.

Inside Turley’s office, a full wall is occupied with massive, four-inch binders, labeled by player name, each containing blow-by-blow details of their training regimens in painstaking detail. The room is essentially a complete archive of every repetition of work that the Cardinal have invested since the beginning of 2007, when Turley arrived as part of Jim Harbaugh’s staff.

On the right side of the wall are the names of past Cardinal players, including Andrew Luck, Toby Gerhart, Richard Sherman and Trent Murphy. On the left side are current Cardinal players.

Christian McCaffrey amassed 368 yards in the 2016 Rose Bowl. AP Photo/Lenny Ignelzi

The organizational strategy is simple: When a current Stanford player sets a goal, Turley can retrieve the binder of a former player to show him a blueprint for NFL success. (Recently drafted lineman Joshua Garnett, for example, told coaches upon his arrival four years ago that he wanted to become the Cardinal’s “next David DeCastro”).

Every Stanford player can consult the binder of a certain NFL alumnus as an effective reference point.

Well, every Stanford player, except one. Because Christian McCaffrey has become an exception, both in his record-breaking on-field performances and in the off-field work that supports them.

“Christian is authoring his own binder,” Turley said. “He’s carving his own path. He’s unlike anybody we’ve ever had.”

Technically, McCaffrey is unlike anybody that any college …

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