As most of my readers know, I take my two children (both boys 3 and 1 1/2) to the Bears games.  Some people think it must be really difficult but it’s really not.  There is so much excitement for them.  Other than occasionally having to get up to let them walk around, they’re no bother at all.

In fact, it’s a great joy to take them.  Everything is SO big to them.  Those steps inside the stadium up to the stands are their personal Mount Everest.  Plus, the public transportation that is a big hassle for you and I are the thrill of their trip (we had been in the stadium for less that a half hour when the older one was already asking for another bus ride… and don’t get me started about the potential BART rides).

Then, everything comes alive for them once the bands start to play.  They love the music and jump and clap their hands.  The whole experience is a big party to them.

Is it a bit long?  Yeah, it is.  Sitting there for 3+ hours is tough on them.  But if you take the time to walk them around (I highly recommend going up and down the stairs: you can catch a glimpse of the game while they get a vigorous workout) and to bounce them on your knee and hold them up high when there is a big play… all of these things make the game a joy to them.

So: bring your kids if you’ve got ‘em.  It doesn’t matter if they’re 3 months old or 30 years old, going to the Bears games is a great joy.

Well, the Bears finally showed up for their first football game.  Unfortunately, it took two games for that to happen.

The first series of the game had a “Tennessee” feel to it with the Bears going three and out and the Gophers taking advantage of poor pass coverage to turn a big play into a touchdown drive (at least this time the Bears tackled them before the endzone and they had to earn the last 20 yards or so).  After that, Tedford’s Bears finally took the field and although the game was tied up until the mid second quarter and in reach until the early 4th quarter, I had no doubt the Bears were going to win once Longshore marched the Bears down the field to tie it 7 to 7 and the defense stopped the gopher run game in its tracks on the following possesion.

I think the biggest revelation from this game is that there is no more quarterback controversy.  As I said in last week’s commentary, Longshore is still young and he needs time to mature.  Well, count this week as proof of his maturing… and fast.  He looked confident, he picked the right receivers, did a good job of avoiding the rush when he could and didn’t throw too many ill-advised passes.  Yes he’s got a ways to go, but he’s definitely on the “Tedford track” and I think he’ll be the quarterback we need.  Next week will give him time to refine his game for the ASU game in two weeks.

The second revelation is that this hybrid spread/pro offense can work.  While I don’t know that it is a improvement over the pure pro-set, it’s not a step back either.  We’ll be able to accomplish what we need with it.

The final revelation is that Syd Thompson is going to be OK at cornerback.  I was hopeful before the game that he too was on a learning curve and he proved it yesterday with solid play.

The biggest disappointment with the game was the penalties.  The players need to realize that it doesn’t matter what the other team does to you, you can’t retalliate.  It always seems to be the case that the retalliation is what gets the flag and this game was no different.  I still think the refs were calling a biased game and there were two or three plays where the Bears didn’t retalliate to plays that should have been called for personal fouls, but nevertheless, the Bears can’t afford to lose yards because of personal fouls.

While we’re on the topic of refs, that “blocking the punter when he’s out of the play” penalty was a J…O…K…E.  Are you stinking kidding me?  The guy was running straight at the play!  If Jackson had managed to elude the tacklers, that block on the punter would have been the difference between a TD and a 20-30 yard return.  That was by far the worst call by the refs.

So, what do we have in summary?  The Bears have a team that has a LOT of potential but is still young in a few more positions than they’d like.  I’m very hopeful, particularly with the schedule the Bears have (particularly remembering that ASU has a soft spot for flopping in Memorial Stadium) that the team will have the time they need to mature as the season progresses while still keeping the Bears in contention for a Rose Bowl bid.  The key games on the schedule still remain Oregon on October 7th at home and USC on the road on November 18th.

Well another week is done with in the Pac-10 and we’ve learned quite a lot.  We’ve learned that Stanford must be worse than Washington, being unable to beat lowly San Jose St..  (On a side note, we need to start a pool on just how many public California Universities Stanford can schedule before they win one.  You’d think after the UC Davis debacle last year, they’d be ready… so it looks like another year where they’ll likely lose to 3 public California Universities.  We know what would happen if they scheduled Fresno next year… what about Humboldt guys?  You might be able to beat them…)  But enough with what we learned, on to how good of a prediction guy I am:

If it weren’t for the rest of my predictions I would be dolling out a big dose of “I told you so” because of just how well I predicted the Cal game.  Was it not a game that the Bears stuck it to the Gophers?  The defense definitely stepped up as I suggested.  But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself.  I’ll save the review for another entry.

For the rest of the games, I did a pretty good job with TPD, but not so much with margin of victory:

• TPD: 12.0 (down from 13.1 with scores of 18, 4, 5, 4, 24, 11, 9, 18 and 7)
• MVD: 19.3 (down from 19.7 with scores of 4, 32, 7, 35, 10, 25, 29, 24 and 7)
• Winning percentage: 75.0% (up from 71.4%)

So we can see why I suck at the Cal pick’em, because I’m having a bad year at guessing the margin of victory and hence can’t guess if the spread will be covered or not.  I’d be doing great if I was just picking the victor.

Tune in later today or tomorrow for the Bears Game Wrap up.

OK, after a mediocre first week, I think I’ll be back on my game this week:

Cal 31, Minn. 10:  I know people will think I’ve been eating some of the nasty pot brownies in Berkeley this week but bare with me.  This game is either going to be a statement week for the Bears or a nightmare.  The Bears have too much talent for anything in-between.  And I’m firmly on the Bears side.  Last week was a tough one in a tough environment.  At home against a less fierce opponent, I think they’re going to make a statement.  Longshore is going to get his act together and while I expect a few mistakes, he’ll abuse their defense for enough long plays to open up the running lanes for Lynch who’ll finish off whatever is left of the burrowing Gophers.  Add that to the fact that UM is supposedly an all ground-game team and the best part of the Bears game last week was their run-control (minus one play) and I think this is going to be a romp.  Heck, I’ve even scaled my official prediction back from the 42-3 game my heart tells me we’re in for.  So to recap: on Monday you’ll think I’m either a genious or a complete fraud.

OSU 28, BS-U 24: Good ol’ Boise St… this is a tough game for me.  The Boise boys play pretty well on their blue turf and I’m not sure what I think of OSU even though they took E. Wash. to the woodshack last week.  In the end, I’ve got to go with OSU.  I think they’re stronger than people give them credit for and Boise St. is on a down-trend.

Stanford 35, SJ St. 29: The question that’ll be on most Cal fans mind when seeing this match-up will be: who’s better UC Davis or SJ St.?  And while that is a valid question (SJ is the answer) I think the more appropriate question is who is going to take the doghouse position in the Pac-10 this year Stanford or Washington?  I think it’s a toss-up and their scores vs SJ St. will be the same.

WaZoo 38, Idaho 24: Ah, good ol’ WaZoo.  Fresh from their expected roll-over to Auburn, they get back to their normal ways to take on Idaho.  This game is the same every year: Idaho comes out and makes a statement to the overly-lax WaZoo “football” players.  But in the end, a Pac-10 team is just too good to lose to Idaho and WaZoo comes roaring back to win.

UDub 13, OK 20: I think people are expecting OK to blow away Washington and in a sense they’re right.  But this game is going to be slow with all of the stunted drives.  In the end, I think OK will slowly grind out a decisive victory, but a couple lucky drives by UW and a self-defeating OK offense will keep the score closer than the actual game.

UA 21, LSU 38: Arizona will do a pretty good job on defense in this game… in the first half.  In the end, they just won’t have the offense necessary to keep LSU off the field and no defense will keep LSU out of the endzone forever.

UCLA 45, Cream-of-Wheat… er Rice 6: Man, how did UCLA get the joy of scheduling these powder-puffs?  Did the WaZoo AD take a job at UCLA?  Particularly considering how UCLA stuck it to Utah and that Rice lost to Houston last week, this one is going to be a walk in the park.

ASU 31, Nevada 24: ASU had better be careful in this one.  Nevada may be just south of Idaho and you’d expect their two football teams to perform similarly, but you’d be mistaken.  Nevada won the WAC last year and challenged Fresno St. last week.  In the end I think ASU will win this one, but if they come in as rusty as they did against N. Arizona, this could be the upset of the week.

Oregon 38, Fresno St. 24: Fresno St. is one of those teams that lives off of Pac-10 upsets.  They always seem to be better in September when playing the Pac-10 than in October when they get to the heart of their WAC schedule.  Don’t forget that this is the same team that gave USC a scare last year.  That said, Oregon is just too strong this year and they are always immaculately prepared.  Bulldog stadium will have no effect on them and they’ll walk away with this one pretty easily.

OK, that’s all folks!  USC is on a bye this week.  Tune in on Monday for an update on on the Cal game and my prediction metrics.

Well it’s official: Tedford is going to stick with Longshore for next week and will likely give Ayoob time late in the game, similar to Tennessee.

I think this is a good decision, although I’d like to see Levy replace Ayoob as the backup, although I guess it is reasonable to give Ayoob one more week.

My feeling, as I expressed in my Tenn. game review, is that Longshore is just young and at least has the potential to grow into a good solid QB.  Tennessee is a TOUGH place to start that growth process (and let’s not kid ourselves that last year’s 3/8ths of a game vs Sac. St. counts for anything).  I’m hopeful that he’ll do a lot better this week.

Ayoob on the other hand has gone through that growth process and isn’t going to improve dramatically at this point.  I was willing to believe that he could have made a dramatic improvement over the off-season.  I’ve seen it before, a weak QB figures it out once he has time to reflect on his mistakes.  But not Ayoob, not after Tennessee.  He was the same old Ayoob and I don’t think he’s improved any.

Which brings us to Levy.  Levy is our safe guy, he’s already proved it.  Safe however is not going to get us to the Rose Bowl.  So we have to look elsewhere until we have nothing better.  Elsewhere for right now is Longshore.

Taking a worst case scenario (both Longshore and Ayoob stink it up indefinitely), I suspect that Tedford will insert Levy into the mix after Minnesota.  Likely he gives Longshore one more start to get his act in gear vs. Portland St. but Levy will be up to taking snaps in practice over Ayoob and will mop up for Longshore.  If Longshore doesn’t turn the corner by then, Levy will get the start by the ASU game.

That’s what I’d do… and I’m betting that’s about what Tedford will do if we have to go down that road.  But here’s to hoping that Longshore is just young.  I’m pretty hopeful that by the time we meet ASU, he’ll be confident and in control.

As I mentioned early last week, I didn’t get to watch Saturday’s Cal game on Saturday because I was out of town.  That’s why my game summary post wasn’t up until Monday night.

But I wanted to make sure that everyone knows that my strategy for avoiding learning the score worked and I watch the game on Monday afternoon (TiVo’ed) completely unaware of the disaster that was awaiting me.  Make sure you review the strategy before you have to miss a game in the future.

OK, maybe I should say started Pac-10 metrics.

Well, this year I didn’t start out nearly as well as in the past.  My winning percentage in the first week was only 71.4% although I take some comfort in the only game I missed in which I wasn’t blinded by bias was the UCLA vs. Utah game, which I wasn’t very comfortable with not knowing much about Utah this year.

My margin of victory was also way out of whack generally expecting closer games than actually existed.  I was an average of 19.7 points off.

The only metric in which I had a reasonable shot was the over/under or TPD as I call it. Other than the USC blowout I did pretty well for an average of 13.1 points off.

Tune in late this week for week two predictions and updates on the Bears.

Ouch!  There aren’t many other words that more succinently state the feelings one should have after watching that drubbing.  This is also one of those games where it is hard to systematically approach the game because there is so much to discuss.  Well, let’s start with what the misconceptions will be about this game:

The first bit is that the game was as bad of a drubbing as it seems.  Really 4 of the 5 touchdowns were break-away plays, three of which wouldn’t have happened later in the season.  Syd Thompson is a YOUNG cornerback.  This game may have been completely different if we had Tim Mixon.  He wouldn’t have let those two breakaway passes happen.  Admittedly, Tennessee was still driving the ball well and may have gotten some of those points anyway, but you take away Syd’s two touchdown mistakes and the game is only 14-0 late in the 3rd quarter.  So the first falacy is that Cal was “blown away” by Tennessee.  No, Cal played a very mistake prone game.

The second misconception will be that Nate Longshore is a bad QB.  No, he’s just a young QB.  He was very hesitant and was clearly overwhelmed.  That’s a tough place and team to play for what is really your first game. So, while Longshore is no savior, he’s not chopped liver either.  I see promise in him.

OK, misconceptions out of the way, let’s get onto where the Bears truly are weaker than we hoped:

Offensive line.  I think we all forgot just how good last year’s line was.  While the line play today wasn’t horrible, we have to remember that the reason Lynch was able to abuse opposing teams last year had a lot to do with just how good the line was.  We can’t expect to be able to run against teams that can load the box and not worry about the passing game.  That’s basically what happened in this game.  And neither Longshore nor Ayoob really made them pay for doing so.  For us to be successful this year we’re going to need to keep defenses honest.  We just don’t have the offensive line to not do that.

Quarterback.  While it may seem odd to have this when Longshore was part of my misconception area but I think that it’s important not to go to the other extreme.  It seems that we don’t have a good QB yet.  We’ve got three choices:

1. Ayoob: Most likely to operate under pressure but also going to be very mistake prone and throw a lot of ill-advised passes.
2. Longshore: Young and hesitant
3. Levy: Gives the team an emotional boost and has that intangible quality… but let’s face it, he’s not our savior either.

My thought is that for the long term Longshore is the right guy.  Ayoob has no breathing room in my book and he showed that he’s the same QB who flushed last season’s promise down the toilet.  The number of ill-advised passes were far too many and he was also off-target on a number of other throws.  Longshore although young, will gain experience.  I think he’ll be able to grow into the role, but we have to accept that it is going to take a few games.  If Tedford can figure out how to put an end to “drop-itis” with the receivers and give Longshore a game plan that allows him to grow into the role, I’m hopeful by the ASU and Oregon games he’ll have matured a lot.  It’s a lot to ask of a young QB to go into Tennessee and perform.  Oh, and give the guy a break and don’t give him options to audible.

Speaking of which, I was very dissappointed with the coaching.  Tedford didn’t have a very good game plan.  He didn’t nearly enough stretch the field against a team that was just daring him to do so.  Also, he let Longshore die out there with all of the options.  I’ve never seen Tedford’s Bears so confused off the line and in a stadium like that you don’t give them the opportunity to be confused with audible options.

Looking to the future, I am still hopeful.  The only thing that was dashed with this game was Marshawn’s Heisman trophy.  Everything else, including a National Championship are still possibilities.  The Heisman is all about what people see on TV.  This was Marshawn’s chance.  He wasn’t able to make use of it.  But beyond that, are you honestly going to tell me that if they run the table and beat a USC team that’ll possibly be ranked #1 or #2 when we get to them in November (because they won’t have played anybody tough yet) that we can’t take their spot?  At some point the first game can become an aberation.

So what does it take for us to get that?  Well, it takes the team maturing.  They’ve got to do a little bit of it fast but after that they’ve got a few weeks before they’ve got to do the rest.  Longshore needs to get confidence and our cornerback opposite Hughes need to remember that there is nobody behind him.  I really think this team still has a lot of promise.  It just needs time to execute on that promise.  Thankfully, with the Gophers at home next week, I think a victory is doable.  After that we’ll have the time to mature before the tough games come later in the season.

I get all of my sports news from sports.yahoo.com.  I’ve found they’ve got a good balance of content and aren’t too intrusive with the ads.  Additionally, they get lots of great columns from various publications for their readers.

I’ve always liked both Dan Wetzel and Stewart Mandel, both who’s columns show up on sports.yahoo.com, but Stewart has been on fire this new college football season.  His top 20 reasons why college football is superior to pro football is awesome.  Add that to his great column on how to watch multiple games on one TV which I had previously linked to and his amazingly common sense column about the proper way to rank pre-season teams (a point that had bothered me before as well) and you’ve got the best columnist in sports.

Thanks for the great columns Stewart and keep it up!

Well, I didn’t realize that two teams were playing on Thursday night to open the season, so my first week predictions are going to be sans Oregon St. (who decimated E. Washington) and Arizona St. (who started slow but finally put N. Arizona away).  But for the remaining games…

Cal 27, Tenn. 16: This game is going to start out fast and furious but the defenses will adjust.  I expect to see two touchdowns out of Cal in their first few possessions.  After that, they’ll grind out a hard fought victory as their defense is able to handle Tennessee minus a couple break-away plays.

Oregon 31, Stanford 17: This game has a lot of question marks in it… but not so many that the final outcome will ever be in doubt.  Expect that Oregon, particularly at home, will just overwhelm Stanford and the only reason that the game will be reasonably respectible is because the Oregon defense is young.

Washington 35, SJ St. 10: Washington seems to be one of those teams that takes care of business when it’s taking care of business time and a serious choking hazard when the opponent is more reputable.  Seeing as how SJ St. is… well… how best to put this… a team that even Holmoe didn’t want to schedule any more, I’m pretty sure that Washington will do OK.  But don’t expect them to bust out the big numbers.

UCLA 17, Utah 24:  I think Utah is going to be a very tough team for a VERY young UCLA.  My only qualm with my score is that Dorrell seems to be a very good coach and gets the most out of his mediocre teams.  However, he lost his QB, RB and start TE.  That’s going to hurt.  Utah, after a rebuilding year, is going to be back on their game and one of the better non-BCS teams this year.  This is the game they need to prove that they’re back and I expect them to come out with all cylinders firing.

WaZoo 6, Auburn 45:  OK, I used to make fun of WaZoo for always playing weak non-conference games.  I take it back.  We’ve got to make a rule in the Pac-10 that they’re not allowed to play big conference teams from the East Coast.  They’re just going to make the Pac-10 look bad.

USC 24, Arkansas 13: Alright, I’m the first to state that USC isn’t going to be any good this year.  Depending on how this game looks, you may even see me pick Nebraska over USC next week.  However, Arkansas is still Arkansas and I don’t see them having the fire-power to beat USC particularly considering their one offensive strength (a power run game) plays right into the one solid, question mark free part of the USC team: their run defense.

Arizona 28, BYU 24: I think this is going to be a tough game for Arizona, even if “Lunchbox” graduated from BYU and will no longer “grace” their offensive line (see the 9th paragraph).  I think the Arizona defense will be the difference in this game and keep a potentially dangerous BYU team under control.

OK, that’s my predictions.  Unfortunately I haven’t had time to finish my “prediction challenge” website.  I’ll do my best to get it finished by week #2.  In the meantime, anyone who wants to put their predictions can do so in the comment box.  Because of the moderation feature I use, nobody will see your predictions until after the games are done since I’ll be out of town from basically now until after all the games are finished.

Check back early next week for metrics on the games and my wrap up on the Cal vs. Tenn. game.