Cal Bears vs Sac State game review
I was at the Cal Bearts game yesterday and as a fan who has sat through the good years and the bad years, I think I can offer some good insight into their play and their outlook for the season. I’ll post in list format, starting with the good news:
-The defense looked surprisingly strong. There are those who will discount their performance because it was only against Sac State need only look around the conference at the scores this weekend. A lot of powder puff teams put double digit scores against good Pac-10 teams. The reality is that when you’re team puts up 40+ points, you’re likely to have a more relaxed “don’t give up the big play” mindset. The Cal defense shut the door all day long, applying good pressure and having mostly good pass coverage (minus one should have been a touchdown, boy did we get lucky, coverage failure). Even the 3 points were not given up easily and a couple of lucky plays were key to them getting in field goal territory. Heck, we only gave up 121 yards through the air and 71 yards on the ground. Even against Sac State, those are stats to be proud of. In my opinion a lot of questions were answered on defense and in a good way.
-Nate Longshore (the starting QB) played as advertised and it is clear why he got the starting job. While there were some jitters, overall he had good arm strength, good decision making skills and fairly good touch. In fact the only area he didn’t live up to the hype was in lower leg bone strength… such a shame. More on this later.
-The wide receiver core looked good. They were running sharp routes, finding the seams, and they were FAST. This is one of the fastest receiving cores I’ve ever seen at Memorial stadium. Actually, I’m almost as excited about this crew as I was about the duo we had last year. In some ways it is even better as we have a lot more depth, so the 2005 equivalent of Lyman going down the USC game won’t be nearly as devestating.
-Marshawn Lynch (the main running back) lived up to the high expectations and definitely seems able to be a every down back. In fact, he seemed to get stronger as the game went on. Along those lines, I think his intensity to start the game was a little low. Tedford had said that the coaching staff had been telling him to know when to give up so that he doesn’t cough up the ball when he has no chance of making extra yards. I think part way into the game either he and/or the coaches realized that you can’t keep that man on a leash because he seemed to step it up a notch. The only question mark I saw from that point was his ability to rush inside the tackles because he didn’t do nearly as well as I would have hoped, especially against a division I-AA team. Supposedly, run defense is one of Sac State’s strengths, so lets hope that’s true and that the offensive line was having first game jitters.
-Now things start to go downhill from here… Particularly in the first half, the offense didn’t seem to be in sync. As Tedford said, it seemed like they hadn’t practiced in two weeks. I suspect this is because it was the first game for a lot of players and there were a lot of jitters. I suspect that between the experience of playing in an actual game and Tedford taking them out to the woodshack tomorrow at practice, this’ll be cleared up by next week.
-Ayoob, the highly touted JC transfer quarterback, STUNK. I mean he couldn’t hit the side of a… there’s got to be a witty thing besides ‘barn’ to say here. In any case, the good news is that his decision making skills were good and he was more nimble in the pocket than Longshore. One has to believe that he threw the ball better than that at his JC college, so there is hope. However, some players can not make the adjustment to the next level if nothing else because they crack under the increased pressure. Let’s hope that’s not the case here. But let’s not minimize the fact that a two man quarterback controversy should be solved when one of them gets injured. When the third guy is all of sudden the new quarterback of controversy, that speaks to how poorly Ayoob played.
So overall, outside of the quarterback situation, I’m encouraged. They’ll still be some growning pains, but with Washington (even Wilmingham can’t save us), Illinois (we need overtime to beat Rutgers), New Mexico State (can we really field two football teams in this state?) and Arizona (it can only go up from last year) on our schedule for the next 4 weeks, I think we’ll be able to work out those kinks before our first big challenge at UCLA on October 8th.
So all that remains in the quarterback situation… ugh.