Bears game wrap up
Man, these are so much easier when Cal wins…
First of all, I feel that is important to recognize an important rite of passage that occurred yesterday. Yes, my boys experienced their first heart-breaking Cal loss. It’s kind of like a circumcision: It hurts like hell but sooner or later (most likely sooner) it’s bound to happen.
After that, there are two words (besides heart-breaking) to explain yesterdays loss: Injuries and ineptitude.
Let’s start with the inepititude, shall we?:
When one person is responsible for 3 turnovers, I expect that person to do something to fix it. Going 13 for 39 ISN’T it! Simply stated, Ayoob isn’t a good quarterback. He has a lot of talent, but talent only gets you so far. What he completely lacks is the composure and the persistence that a good QB needs. In the 3rd quarter when things were looking easy, he completed a fair number of his passes. When things got dicey in the 4th quarter it looked like someone had greesed the football after giving Ayoob a mind-numbing concussion. We would have won this game with a good QB (not even a great one but just an acceptably good one). We lost it because Ayoob is mediocre at best and horrendous at his worst.
On to the injuries. Count them with me:
-3 offensive linemen
-Our best defensive lineman
-Our best running back (broken hand)
-The REAL starting QB
-A couple others I can’t think of
The reality was that we lost the line-battle on both the offensive and defensive sides of the ball because of injuries. OSU was able to run the ball effectively because we couldn’t get the penetration to stop them. When they passed, we couldn’t get the pressure (consistently) to force bad throws. Offensively, OSU was collapsing our running holes better than anyone else has this season and it had very little to do with how good they were and everything to do with how bad we were. Cal just didn’t have the talent to get the job done. This was particularly painful considering that Ayoob couldn’t pass the ball and was worsened because he couldn’t get the time to throw, again because of our weak offensive line.
So that’s all she wrote folks. Cal is going to be in big trouble for the rest of the season until Lynch can get that cast off his hand and actually be able to hold on the the ball, at least one of the starting offensive linemen return plus we get Membane back on the defensive line. Right now I’m predicting a 7-4 season with wins over WaZoo and Stanford and losses to USC and Oregon, but am getting more and more worried about the Stanford game as Stanford has gotten their act in gear and is beating the lower teams in the Pac-10.
Update: The injury list was even worse than I thought:
-3 offensive linemen
-Our best defensive lineman
-Our best running back
-Our REAL QB
-Linebacker Abu Ma’afala
-Our two best recievers each missed half the game
-Our 2nd Tight End
Count ‘em: 10 of 22 original starters on the bench. You just can win consistently with that.