I don’t know how many of my readers use the cal.thecrawfordfamily.net/blog link to just get sports related blog posts (and the cal color scheme) but it no longer is working properly.  My web provider upgraded the blogging software and it overwrote all of my templates.  In fairmess to them, they told me to backup my templates with plenty of warning and I failed to do so.

I will try to get them back up and running next week.  In the meantime, I’m sure you’ll be able to manage seeing the standard look and feel of my full blog.

I watched a clip of the Daily Show just after Dick Cheney shot his hunting partner. The host was complaining that it had been a slow news month until this beautifully wonderful story dropped in his lap giving him all the comic content he could ever want. In his words, “Thank you Jesus!”

Well, us Cal fans were given a similarly blessed gift recently when we found out that the person inside the Stanford mascot was fired from said job for being intoxicated while doing it.

Putting aside for the moment that I think they’ll have a hard time finding someone who’s willing to do the job while sober, I want to focus on the supposed mission of the Stanford band. As it says in the article about this “tragic” firing, the band spokesman Sam Urmy said, “We don’t want to risk our core mission of rocking out and bringing funk to the funkless.”

THAT’S their core mission!?!

Did anybody else pick up on this from the numerous times they’ve been subjected to watching the Stanford band? I’ve seen them more times than I care to remember and I think everyone who has seen the Stanford band perform can attest to the fact that not only did they fail in their apparent mission to “bring funk to the funkless” but that it was entirely unclear that to “bring funk to the funkless” was indeed their mission to begin with.

Hat tip to my brother.

For those not in the know, today is the first day that future students of colleges can sign commitment letters to attend those schools with the intent of playing football. That doesn’t sound like a big deal at first, but it turns out it is a VERY big deal. Coaches have been traveling all over the country for the last 3 months courting the best high school football players. Up until now, none of them have been able to sign on the dotted line so other coaches come in a try to sway those who intend to go to one school or another. Today is the day that the coaches get the majority of their recruits to sign on the dotted line.

Click here for a list of the Cal recruits who have signed as of today.

In general, it seems like a pretty good lot, ranked by most as the 4th best in the Pac-10 (USC, Arizona, UCLA in that order being better). However, the QB, Kevin Riley is supposed to be incredible and there are THREE highly touted running backs: R.J. Garrett, James Montgomery and Tracy Slocum. This is an indication that Cal is getting a reputation with running backs as being one of the premiere running schools on the west coast, and why wouldn’t it with all the talent that has gone through here in the last few years. Also of note are two junior college transfers who will be immediate help on the depleated offensive line.

Things continue to look up in Berkeley…

For those not in the know, Tightwad Hill is a hill just behind Memorial Stadium that is high enough to allow very good viewing of the games in the stadium. For just about every Cal football game there can be multiple hundreds of fans watching the game from this free location.

Well, it turns out that there is an official website (Hat tip: The Seventh inning Stretch)

UPDATE: updated to include my brother’s contribution to the trip

Well it seems of all the Cal Bloggerbacks that I read, I’m the only one who actually went to the game. So here’s a wrapup of both the game and the event:

My brother Brian and I left Sacramento on Weds. the 21st at 6 PM headed for Vegas after I had a long day of work trying to wrap things up before my Christmas break. Brian works an early day (5 AM to noon) and met me at my place for the trip after driving up from Oakland. 9 hours and a refresher clutch driving lesson for my brother later we arrived in Vegas (my first ever trip) and checked into the Hard Rock Hotel, the official hotel of the Cal Bears for the Las Vegas bowl. The Hard Rock Hotel is about 6 blocks off the strip and let me tell you it was DEAD. Granted, it was 3 in the morning, but there was absolutely ZERO sign of a partying Cal contingent. When I woke up, after remembering just how loud my brother can snore, I showered and we checked out of my room, the place had transformed itself into a Cal dominated hotel, but a very mellow one. I thought we were in Vegas?

Besides driving the strip to see the various hotels, Brian and I knew one of the important sights to see in Vegas was the buffet line. After a long decision making process including calling one of Brian’s long lost friends who lives in Vegas and accounting for Brian’s numerous food aversions, we ended up going to the MGM grand for a lunch. The cash register lady looked none to pleased to see us approaching, knowing it was a losing proposition to let us eat…

Tailgating at Sam Boyd stadium was relaxed and jovial. Cal fans just aren’t experienced tailgaters. May have something to do with the fact that there is no where to tailgate in Berkeley… BYU fans seemed to be similarly as inexperienced at tailgating because despite the fact that Cal fans were greatly outnumbered in the stands, Cal tailgaters outnumbered BYU tailgaters 2 to 1. The first true sign of us being in Vegas was the cadre of Cal fans (OK, only two of them) who came over asking for food because they spent all their money on beer.

Sam Boyd stadium is nice enough and has a TON more legroom that Memorial stadium. The entire seating areas is elevated, so even being in the 6th row, we had pretty good depth perception and no visibility problems. The stadium also has remarkably little sideline room so the stands are VERY close to the field. The TV announcers greatly over estimated the dominance of the BYU fans at the stadium. Basically the BYU fans took one side of the field plus the endzone while the Cal contingent took the other side (the second endzone having no stands). I’d say the crowd breakdown was 15K to 25K in BYU’s favor. While their cheers were loud, the fact that they were opposite the press box I think made them sound louder than they were compared to the Cal fans who were below and facing away from the announcers. In other words, Cal fans made plenty of noise. In fact, there seemed to be moments where the BYU players seemed a little surprised to hear so much Cal noise when they were expecting a home crowd.

OK, on to the game.

I think Cal played below their potential and BYU played above theirs. They also got some VERY generous penalty calls and Cal didn’t get any penalty breaks. Said another way, there was only one way this game could have been closer than the 35 to 28 Cal victory that occured: Cal turnovers. That is the #1 thing to be happy about in the game. Cal made ZERO big mistakes. No bad penalties, no turnovers, no special teams mistakes, nothing. In fact, the worst play of the game was a 50 yard pass play that the defense gave up. Other than that Cal made BYU earn every point they got and didn’t leave any points on the board that they should have got.

Levy played OK. Mistake free, no doubt, but his accuracy left something to be desired. It’s harder to see on TV, but receivers had to make a lot of corrections to get to his balls. In fact, the just before halftime touchdown catch and run was facilitated by a bad throw that required the receiver to make a correction (and the defender was unable to adjust). He also threw a number of low balls that hurt the ability of the receivers to get yards after the catch. All and all, he did his job, but he didn’t impress me for next season. I’d take him any day of the week over ‘booya in reverse’, but he’s not the QB who is going to take us to the Rose Bowl or to a National Title.

The BYU quarterback on the other hand was pretty darned good. He threw a number of VERY impressive passes and did a very good job of keeping out of trouble. One has to remember that both of his interceptions were off of balls thrown as he was hit. The reality was that he kept them in the game by making key throws to some VERY tight spots. The Cal DB’s did a very good job of pass coverage, particulary on the ouside and deep and the few passes they made there were because the QB threaded the needle. The one place the Cal defense could have played better was protecting the underneath passes to the TEs. A great deal of the offense BYU had came from those plays. For some reason Cal had a tough time adjusting to that. I think they were trying to get more pressure on the QB and as a result were one linebacker short on the underneath protection.

I watched the TV coverage of the game when I got home and laughed to see them spend time focusing on number 76 or “lunchbox” the offensive lineman of BYU. This guy was PATHETIC. He looked like a pregnant woman woddling on and off the field. He couldn’t block, was falling down all over the place, and was useless for just about anything. For those watching the TV coverage, they may have noticed that they didn’t focus on him later in the game. He was basically benched in the 2nd half for not getting the job done.

Looking forward to next season, I’m really optimistic if we can just find that QB to give us balance. Everyone knows Ayoob isn’t it and it is my opinion that Levy isn’t it either. We could be 9-2 with him but not the 10-1 we need to be to get to the Rose Bowl. I’m hopeful that either Longshore or Reed will be the QB we’re looking for. Everything else seems to be falling into place. We’ve got great and improving WR’s, the offensive line will have a lot of experience after this injury plagued year for the graduating seniors, we seem to have enough depth at our DB positions to make up for the loss of our safeties and our defensive linemen are all back next year. I don’t even need to mention how awesome Lynch and Forsett are…

GO BEARS!

Sorry for the delay on this, it has been a busy week:

Well, I got both games right this week, although I SERIOUSLY underestimated Stanford’s ability to score. Why is it that they can’t score 10 points agianst Cal in two years but can put up 31 against Notre Dame. Cal must be better than ND…

Here are the updated metrics:
-Winning percentage: 71.6% (up from 70.5% last week)
-MVD: 14.4 (down (that’s good) from 14.7 last week with additions of 0 and 15 )
-TPD: 15.2 (down (that’s good) from 15.3 last week with additions of 8 and 21)

And seeing how there is only one Pac-10 game this week, I might as well do that prediction now:

UCLA 24, USC 38: UCLA will keep this game just interesting enough to merit a watching but USC will control the game from start to end by effectively running the ball with Reggie Bush and the precision passing by Leinart. There’s an outside chance that UCLA will get too desperate too early and turnovers will turn the game into a USC blowout before half time, but I think there will be just enough intensity on the UCLA sideline to keep the game respectible.

Tune in next week for the final regular season metrics (I’ll do metrics for the bowl games as well) and for an update on whether Cal ends up at the Sun Bowl with Oregon in the Fiesta Bowl or in the Las Vegas bowl because the Pac-10 got the BCS shaft yet again.

Oh man, I almost forgot to post my picks! I don’t have much time but here I go:

Notre Dame 35, Stanford 13: I think Stanford will come to play in this game but will just be overwhelmed. I’m sure Weis and Co. are dutifully watching the Cal game footage to see how they can break the 9 sack mark we set.

Arizona 24, ASU 28: I am REALLY having a tough time figuring this one out. Which Arizona team is going to come to play? The one that killed UCLA or the one that bent over for Washington? My guess is that Washington was a post upset anomily and Arizona will come with their ‘A’ game. But will that be enough? The big question mark is whether ASU’s defense will come to play. They held the high flying WaZoo to 24 but gave up 45 to Stanford! My guess is that their ‘B+’ defense will come to play and that will be enough to win this tight game because Arizona’s offense will sputter too much and ASU will be able to put up just enough points to take home… the… um… er… sand? What the heck do they play for in their rivalry game? What’s the game even called? The cactus fight?

OK, enough for good fun. I might be flying through pheonix someday and don’t want to be blacklisted/put on the cavity search list for airport security like my brother is for talking smack about Pheonix while in the Pheonix airport.

Tune in Monday for updated metrics and an update on the likely bowl scenarios.

UPDATE: I just found out what they play for in the Arizona vs ASU rivalry game. Oh man this is great: the TERRITORIAL Cup. HA! HA! HA! I can’t make this stuff up.

I was reading the yahoo sports preview of the Stanford vs Notre Dame game when I came across this gem of a quote:

“The Cardinal have lost three of four, including a 51-21 defeat to top-ranked Southern California three weeks ago.”

Wait a minute, I thought this was the team that had won 4 of their last 6 a week ago? While it was technically true, it didn’t indicate that while having won 4 of their last 6, they had also lost 2 of their last 3 (and of course now 3 of their last 4).

See, there is always a streak that runs both ways for anything but a team on a sustained continuous win or loss streak (say more that 3 games). It’s all just a matter of when you cut it off. If you’re trying to promote Stanford, you go back to they’re last win of note and use that to say that they’ve won 4 of their last 7. If you want to make them look bad, they’ve lost 3 of their last 4. For Cal, you can do the same thing: won 7 of their last 11 or lost 2 of their last 3.

Streaks are meaningless unless their contiguous win or loss streaks.

After that wonderful Big Game, I get to come back to the joy of having mostly picked the winners of rivalry weekend. I was 3 out of 4 with the only game I got wrong being WaZoo vs. Washington. I would have been right if Washington had been able to do what every other Pac-10 team has been able to do: shut down WaZoo in the 4th quarter. For the first time WaZoo was actually able to come back. Such a shame…

For the rest of the games I called them about right. Sure, Oregon blew out OSU by a much bigger margin than I expected, but I still called the easy game. I also called the easy Big Game and called that the Fresno St., USC game would be a high scoring affair (although I undershot a little on just how much Fresno could score). So while from a metrics perspective it wasn’t incredible, overall it was a pretty good week.

Here are the updated metrics:
-Winning percentage: 70.5% (up from 70.2% last week)
-MVD: 14.7 (up (that’s bad) from 14.6 last week with additions of 9, 31, 12 and 8 )
-TPD: 15.3 (down (that’s good) from 15.5 last week with additions of 11, 19, 16 and 4)

Tune in on Wednesday for my prediction for the two games this week:
-Arizona at ASU
-Notre Dame at Stanford (I’m not sure I can count high enough)

I always record the Cal game even when I attend so that I can go back and see the plays that were confusing to me when in person. As I was watching the end of the game (which I completely missed while celebrating and taking pictures) I saw the effectively failed attempt of the Cal players to drench Tedford with Gatorade. Tedford made SUCH a sweet move, ducking and running under the cooler just as it was turned over. For a guy like me, I would have only been half way across when I got drenched but Tedford was fast enough that the gatorade barely caught his butt as he flew through.

Tedford’s got the moves!