Ariel Zambelich for The New York Times

Stanford cornerback Wayne Lyons doing a body weight neck extension exercise. Shannon Turley's training program has helped reduce injuries.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Inside the Stanford weight room earlier this football season, there were weight vests and wooden sticks and core boards. There were kettle bells and roller pads and something called a Bod Pod, a white, egg-shaped contraption that measures body fat.

There were football players, too: pairs with legs bent, a towel held between them for balance; others climbing ropes like back in gym class; working on hip mobility and shoulder stability; the focus not on brute strength, even for a team as physical as Stanford.

And there was Shannon Turley, the architect of a training regimen among the most distinct in college sports. He is Stanford's director of football sports performance, and for years, he felt it necessary to write letters to N.F.L. scouts to explain the Cardinal's nontraditional approach. He stopped that practice this year in the wake of Stanford's success.

Turley's impact speaks as much to availability as ability. The coaches recruit speed and size and talent. He believes the best players, the ones most on the field, who sustain the most collisions, also carry the most injury risk. His first priority is to keep them on the field.

From 2006, the year before Turley arrived on the Farm, as Stanford's campus is known, through last season, the number of games missed because of injury on the two-deep roster dropped by 87 percent. In 2012, only two Cardinal players required season-ending or postseason surgical repair; this year, only one.

In an era in which injuries are more scrutinized than ever, this has made Turley something of a celebrity strength coach. Counterparts from other colleges visited. As did N.F.L. personnel. As did Australian Rules football teams. The student newspaper wrote a three-part series about Turley. Bleacher Report compiled a big article. The National Strength and Conditioning Association named Turley its strength and conditioning coach of the year in 2013.

Stanford lost quarterback Andrew Luck, running back Toby Gerhart and Coach Jim Harbaugh to the N.F.L., and yet the Cardinal will make their fourth consecutive Bowl Championship Series appearance Wednesday in the Rose Bowl against Michigan State. The year before Turley arrived, Stanford went 1-11.

Turley considered all that inside his weight room, as he surveyed the flurry of activity around him. "This," he said, "is real-world applicable man strength."

This is the era of the strength coach in college football. Strength coaches oversee conditioning in the off-season. They also deal with being allowed fewer scholarships.

Turley is a strength coach, and he is not a strength coach, or not exactly. Strength is not his focus. Function is. Balance is. Flexibility is.

His approach is grounded in physics, on the premise that low man wins on contact, that to get low requires mobility and stability and the ability to apply force in the opposite direction. His players bench press, but he cares more about how they lift — with hands closer together, without bouncing the bar off their chests — than how much. He wants them to bend all the way down when they squat.

Freshmen in Turley's program do not lift weights upon arrival. Instead, for the first few weeks, they do "body work," or push-ups and pull-ups and squats or lunges without weights; basically old-school, military calisthenics.

"You have all these different genres of training, and we steal from them all," Turley said. "CrossFit. Bodybuilding. Power lifting. But ultimately, it's none of those. It's a system we've developed to train football players."

A self-described terrible athlete, Turley was always better at training for a sport than playing it. At Virginia Tech, he volunteered as a student assistant trainer. He noticed the best players in the weight room often were not the best players on the field. That made little sense.

He read research papers and went to clinics and peppered trainers and physical therapists and doctors with questions. He watched YouTube clips. He devoured training manuals.