After being bored out of my mind at the Cal vs. Portland St. game, I was rewarded for picking the Bears game over sailing yesterday.  I had SOOOO much fun.

The thing I will be most interested to see in regards to this game is how it affect’s Cal’s ranking.  One would hope that the pollsters would begin to see the Cal vs. Tennessee game as an aberation with 3 straight 42+ point blowout games particularly with the most recent of them coming over a ranked team.  However, we know how there are those “anchor” games that stick in the pollsters mind.  It may be that the pollsters see this as further evidence that the Pac-10 is weak because they “know” that Cal is mediocre and that must mean that ASU, supposedly one of the better teams in the Pac-10, is really pretty weak (along with the rest of the Pac-10).  If that’s what happens, then Cal won’t be able to redeem itself until it plays Oregon in two weeks.  Oregon is the one Pac-10 team with a quality non-conference victory so provides the only opportunity to cause pollsters to rethink Cal’s ranking.

(UPDATE: We’re up to 20 in both polls but it is hard to tell from that as almost all teams in the top 25 won.  Basically, the win wasn’t good enough to leapfrog lots of teams, but at the same time we weren’t leapfrogged by a bunch of teams like last week either.)

On to the game, as much as I feel vindicated, I think it is important for us not to get over-confident.  The reality is that the Cal running game has still not developed into what everyone was hoping/expecting and our run defense was downright pathetic vs. ASU.  To some degree I’m willing to discount the run defense issue because as I said in my preview, Cal was focusing on stopping the passing game of ASU and was willing to accept a moderate ASU running game as a penalty for that.  There were a lot of two linebacker sets that Cal ran.

But that run offense… I’m starting to get worried.  Marshawn has not had the consistency I’d like to see from him.  It’s great that he can break a 70 yard run at any time, but his ability to get 5 yards every run is seriously diminshed from last year.  The reason a strong running game is so valuable is because of the ability to control the clock and the tempo of the game.  For that to work, you need to be able to consistently get yards on every play.  That hasn’t been happening this year and there have been WAY too many tackles for losses against the Bears.

On the other side, the pass offense is clicking so well.  It’s funny to think we’re just two games removed from the quarterback controversy because it couldn’t be further behind us.  Longshore has the composure, the accuracy, the intelligence, he’s the real deal.  In years to come (remember he is only a sophmore) he will be considered a Heisman candidate.

The final two things to be concerned about is the slow starts and the lack of production in the 2nd half.  While the slow start is not a big deal against teams that we can handle, particularly on the road (remember that we’ve only had one road game: Tennessee) and against more difficult teams, we can’t afford to be spotting the opposition a touchdown and a bunch of momentum every game.  Additionally, there will be a game or two where we’re going to need a strong second half and thus far we haven’t shown that we can do it.  I’m hopeful because necessity is the father of all ingenuity and thus far we haven’t had the necessity.  However, I’d sure like to see that we can do it before necessity requires it.

To close out this post on a couple of positive notes:

1. What an improvement with penalties!  A big part of the success of Cal in the first half was the lack of penalties.  Once the game was a blowout, the Bears had more penalty problems (and it should be noted that it stalled a handful of drives that could have turned this game from a blowout to a ridiculous dismantling) but overall the penalty situation was far improved.

2.  How about Hughes?  That guy is amazing and just seems to get better every week.  While it obviously wasn’t his intention to do so (he wanted to jump over him), but the stomp on the chest of Carpenter after intercepting his pass on the way to the endzone was a moment of brilliance.  It had a Delta O’Neil like swagger to it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 24th, 2006 at 10:11 am and is filed under Sports, Sports - Cal Football. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.