Actually, it is not crazy, just improbable. If you look at what the Stanford people proposed, it was two or three aircraft meeting over the continental US and flying two to five miles apart, not wing to wing. The idea (which came up in May, btw and has probably been hanging around the newspaper office ever since waiting for a slow day when not many reporters turned up) was a response to fuel-saving ideas that could be implemented immediately. The reporter made it sound loony, but the actual original story is pretty sensible. These are not amateurs.
Stanford School of Engineering - Research Profiles
For longer term solutions Prof Kroo, according to the Stanford web site, is a big fan of the flying wing, or Blended Wing Body, design, which was first used before WW1 and could result in fuel savings of up to 25% by turning the fuselage into a lifting body. Boeing and Airbus are too afraid of each other for one of them to take the initiative (unless the government is paying, which Boeing unsuccessfully tried to get the Pentagon to do). Airlines are not keen as they want windows, and the flying wing would have very few, if any, in the passenger compartment.