I have some exposure to all of the stuff that happens behind the scenes in politics and it continues to amaze me to what levels political groups will go to.

And today I saw another example of this.

See the key to politics is peer pressure/influence.  They’ve done study after study that shows people vote not on a politicians record but based on what the voter’s peers say about him/her.  What this means is that they key to winning elections is making it seem like the regular joes out there that we know support the right guy.

And of course they’re using every tool they can to make it seem this way.  The Internet is on the bleeding edge of this.  See, a single person can seem like 200 people online.  So when I read the article about whether my congressman is a fraud my political manipulation censor started going off when I read the reader comments on the article.

In my opinion, this is clearly a case where two or three political operatives for the democratic candidate are purposefully posting tons of comments under multiple names to make it seem like the public is ready to fry the incumbant.  The comments are just WAY too imbalanced to be anything else.  Heck, even the “is this comment helpful” numbers are way out of what with each of the comments slamming the incumbant having near perfect “approval” numbers.

To be clear, I’m undecided whether Doolittle will get my vote.  I’m suspicious that he has indeed been a tool of business interests without any political checking.  However, it’s ridiculous that his opponent will go around acting like the general public is in their corner.  Nice to see that politics has delved to this low level.

Whenever I watch a football game there are always a few plays that make me wonder, “What happened there?”  It then bugs me to no end how infrequently reporters ask about those plays.  They’ll spend an hour peppering them about how the feel and then not talk about the details of the game.

Well this time I got my answer.  In the 3rd quarter of the ASU game, there was clearly a miscommunication between Longshore and his snapper, Mack.  Clearly Longshore was not expecting the ball when it was snapped to him in the shotgun.  According to Contra Costa Times reporter Jay Heater, Longshore made a miscalculation.  I’ll let him tell it:

Quarterback Nate Longshore and center Alex Mack were joking about the shotgun snap that hit Longshore in the chest. It turns out that Longshore decides what count to go on. He tried to surprise ASU by going on first sound. What he didn’t consider was that if somebody was not lined up right, he would have to deal with it. He tried to move one of the players, Mack heard the first sound and BOOM.

Now THAT is funny.

After Saturday’s demolishing of ASU, Cal may have created another Ayoob in ASU quarterback Rudy Carpenter.  Compare and contrast these two quotes from their respective head coaches:

“We just need to get back to good fundamentals. Rudy is carrying the ball too low. When he scrambles he is dropping the ball out of his left hand. He is throwing off his back foot. He has been there before, he’ll get it back. It’s not like he’s never had fundamentals. He has picked up a couple of bad habits trying to make big plays. We just have to get back to solid mechanics. We’ll get that straight this week.”

-ASU Head Coach Dirk Koetter 9/25/2006

“Confidence and fundamentals, they both go hand-in-hand. When you start pressing – that becomes a confidence issue. He’s (Ayoob) very competitive, very tough. But we need to work harder on fundamentals to hopefully help him get his confidence back.”

-Cal Head Coach Jeff Tedford 11/12/2005

As Yogi Berra would say: “It’s De Ja Vu all over again.”

Over at my brother’s blog he shares a quote about San Francisco, Oakland and sports:

“Oakland teams will always be second fiddle to the San Francisco teams — regardless of records — because Oakland is a second-class city. When people around the country think of the Bay Area, they think of San Francisco. If there was no San Francisco, nobody would ever even hear of a city called Oakland, except when they break their own record for homicides each year.”

I’m going to ignore the sports angle (mostly because it is ludicrous to state that teams deserve coverage based on the size/prestige of their city (Green Bay Packers anyone?)) and focus on the merits of the two cities.

First of all, there is no denying that SF is an elite city, higher in stature than Oakland.  It’s in that list of cities everyone in the world has heard of: New York, Chicago, Paris, London, etc..  That said, I think it is a stretch to call Oakland 2nd-class unless we’re scoring on an 10 class scale where SF is greater than Oakland is greater than Sacramento is greater than Modesto is greater than Roseville is greater than Rocklin is greater than Newcastle is greater than Gridley is greater than Biggs is greater than nothing kinda way.  The reality is that any city in the US that has 3 pro-sports franchises is in the top tier, at least in the tiers I would have.

But more importantly, since the above argument is just an argument for how to split up the tiers, is that this person seems to think that SF is a better city because of the people and the way the city is run.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  If you look at 9 out of 10 elite cities, they are elite cities because of geography.  They are in genuinely unique places often very a great shipping port, well sheltered from the ocean.  The reality is that SF would be an elite city no matter what they did.  Heck, the current policies of SF pretty much prove the point.

So his statement “If there was no San Francisco, nobody would ever even hear of a city called Oakland” is completely false.  If SF were to fall into the ocean Superman I style, some other city in the Bay Area would be the elite one (and I’m guessing it would be Oakland).  The geography of the area dictates it.

So the next time somebody tries to sell you some crap about how awesome their elite city is, especially if that person is from the pathetically run San Franciso that no longer even has a substantial port despite being in one of the worlds best locations for one (and it should be noted that the reason is because the Port of Oakland put them out of business), know in your heart that their arogance is unfounded.

There is nothing more important in sports than sportsmanship and the safety of the players.  That’s why I completely agree with Idiots Who Write About Sports that #4 for ASU, Jason Tyron is the worst football player on earth.  All of the above should happen:

1. The Pac-10 should apologize for the ref not throwing #4 out.
2. The Pac-10 should suspend #4 for a game.
3. ASU coach Koetter should apologize for not sitting #4 for AT LEAST a series as opposed to putting him in the next play.
4. Tyron should apologize himself for the cheap shot.

This cracked me up:

Announcer: In Palo Alto, Stanford 0, Washington St. 2.

Fan: Boy, you know that these two teams suck when the only scoring is a safety.

(an hour passes)

Announcer: An update from Palo Alto, Stanford 0, Washington St. 22.

Fan: Wow!  11 safeties… now THAT’s impressive!

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.

Well, I knew the Washington vs. UCLA game was the game I didn’t know enough about to predict and sure enough, it was the one game I didn’t call the winner correctly.

Here are the rest of the metrics:

• MVD: 15.6 (down from 16.3 with new scores of 10, 18, 1, 8 and 23)
• TPD: 14.6 (down from 14.7 with new scores of 26, 0, 1, 28 and 17)
• Winning Percentage: 79.4 (up from 79.2 after going 4-1)

So my numbers are starting to get closer to the targets I have (80% of wins and under 14 points for both MVD and TPD).  With a couple more solid weeks I can hopefully get on the good side of those targets.

But while we’re on the topic of predictions, I have a form letter for everyone out there who doubted Cal’s ability to beat ASU:

I, (your name here), will no longer doubt that Cal has ASU’s number, particularly in Berkeley.  I will remember that ASU is never as good as their numbers suggest until they’ve reached the meat of their Pac-10 schedule.  I will also remember not to let a complete dismantling of ASU cause me to be over confident regarding Cal’s future opponents because it is not that Cal is that good but because ASU is that bad against the big teams in the Pac-10.  This I pledge as a reader of the Bear Territory blog.

Signed (your name here)

OK, time for this weeks picks:

Cal 31, ASU 13: See here for details.

Washington 20, UCLA 28: This is a pretty hard call for me.  Neither team has had a non-conference schedule that brings clarity to their situation.  The best think I’ve got going is that Utah is kicking butt after their sound defeat to UCLA.  However, Washington did beat Fresno St., and Fresno St. scared the living daylights out of Oregon the previous week.  That said Washington barely squeeked by San Jose St..  However, UCLA didn’t exactly stick it to lowly Rice either.  Confused yet?  All in all, despite the fact that the game is in Washington, I’ve got to go with UCLA.  Coach Dorrell has that program moving in the right direction and they’ve showed some strength in their non-conference schedule.

Stanford 10, WaZoo 35: If these were pro teams I’d call this the Reggie Bush Bowl redux because these two teams are going to be the basement of the Pac-10 this year.  Unless I’m given a reason to have faith in either one of these teams as the season goes on, expect this to be the only time one of them is predicted to win by yours truly.

Arizona 13, USC 38: Man, USC has the sweetest schedule possible for a rebuilding year.  They start off with all the weak teams and build up to the tough ones.  The only downside for them is they have to play all of the tough teams in order at the end of the season.  As a consolation, they’ve got all 4 of those games at home.  In any case, I’m sure you can tell by the nature of these comments that I don’t see anything interesting in this game to comment on.

OSU 35, Idaho 20: OK, I’m giving OSU a second chance!  I think that theBoise St. game was an aberation.  While I don’t think they’d beat Boise St. no matter how many times you played them, I think that the game would normally have been a great deal closer.  Since Idaho is no Boise, I think OSU will have what it takes to walk away with this one pretty easily.

OK, that’s this weeks predictions (it’s a lot shorter when we get into Pac-10 conference games isn’t it?).  Tune in on Monday for updated metrics and a Bears game wrappup.

Well, after getting another pessimistic comment about the likelihood of a Bears victory this Saturday vs. ASU, I feel compelled to do my prediction for the Cal game before the rest of my Pac-10 predictions tomorrow.

There are 5 reasons I think Cal will win on Saturday (in no particular order):

1. ASU is soft after weak non-conference schedule
2. Strong run defense/weak ASU run offense will allow Cal to shutdown the passing game
3. Cal has too many offensive weapons for ASU’s defense 
4. ASU struggles in Berkeley
5. Tedford has ASU/Koetter’s number

Let’s start with the weak non-conference schedule…

I accept no statistics of how strong ASU is from how they’ve done thus far this season, particularly their defense.  The reality is that they’ve had a WSU worthy non-conference schedule (although how were they to know how much Colorado was going to stink when they scheduled them).  Northern Arizona is a joke and is 1-2 having beaten Dixie St. (who?) (and remember that they were up 14-0 over ASU in the 2nd quarter), Nevada lost a great deal of their 2005 talent and is struggling this year (they’re 1-2), and Colorado is 0-3 having lost to Montana St. and Colorado St. as well as ASU.  So don’t tell me about ASU’s 18 sacks and only giving up 4 touchdowns.  There’s no way to know what those numbers mean against the craptastic schedule they’ve had.

Beyond that, a weak schedule means a soft team.  They don’t know what a hard hitting team feels like.  They won’t be used to the speed of play.  This wouldn’t be a big deal if they were going to play Stanford first and could ease into Pac-10 play.  ASU doesn’t get that luxury.  They’re coming to Berkeley and are going to play one of the hardest hitting fastest teams in the Pac-10.  They won’t be fully ready for it.

Now, compare that schedule with Cal’s: Tennessee, Minnesota (which by the way has shutout both of their other opponents 106-0) and Portland St..  While I’ll agree that Portland’s offense was nothing spectacular, their defensive line was, as advertised, the best I-AA line I have ever seen.  That makes three teams with stout defenses all of whom hit hard.  The only team in the Pac-10 who may be more battle tested than the Bears is Oregon.  The Bears are ready for anything.

But if you’re a fan of statistics, we can talk about those too.  Statistics like, ASU hasn’t beat Cal in Berkeley since 1997 (even Holmoe only lost to ASU once in Berkeley).  Or how about ASU is 0-10 in the state of California in their last 10 games.  Or how about the one where Tedford has never lost to ASU.  Let’s face it, ASU has a soft spot for Cal and particularly in Berkeley.  Doesn’t everyone remember the 2004 game where Cal was going to face it’s toughest opponent yet when ASU came to Berkeley and we shut them out?

But enough with the statistics and schedules, let’s talk about the two teams.

ASU is going to have a very hard time keeping track of all of Cal’s offensive weapons.  The Cal offensive line is definitely a grade below last year’s line and it’s been readily apparent.  What that means is that Cal will not be able to run the ball when strong defenses are loading the box.  However, unlike last year, Cal’s passing game is vastly improved and Cal will make ASU pay if they try and shut down the Cal running game.  Expect Tedford to come out of the gate throwing to loosen up the ASU defense.

On the other side of the ball, ASU does present the strongest passing attack Cal has seen to date.  But, just like balance will be the key to Cal’s offense, a lack of balance will be ASU’s demise.  ASU has always had a weak running game and I haven’t seen anything in them that suggests an improvement this year.  (Again, don’t tell me about the 158 yards per game… that’s meaningless against their opponents.)  Cal will be able to keep it’s safeties back and drop a line-backer or two into coverage while still having the push needed to keep the ASU running game in check.  If this was a balanced team, I’d be worried, but they’re not so I’m not.

So, as I’ve said, I’m confident.  However, there are three things that worry me:

1. Turnovers – Turnovers can kill any team and Cal has had just a little bit too much fumblitis this season.  I think we can afford a couple of turnovers but no more.  Thankfully, Longshore looks to be much more disciplined that Booya in the INT category.
2. Penalties – In some sense this is the one that bothers me the most because Cal usually plays a very disciplined game.  The last couple weeks have been very distressing in this sense.  However, those games were blowouts and sometimes teams get sloppy when they’re way ahead. I’m hopeful that Cal returns to its disciplined track-record for this game.
3. SydQuad Thompson – OK, I’ll admit it, I miss Mixon too.  The key to this area is that Bob Gregory (the defensive coordinator) gives Thompson the help he needs as a young defensive back.  Thompson has got the speed to play the position, he’s just not experienced yet (although getting better).  If he knows he’s got a safety inside him and a linebacker underneath, he’ll be able to focus on not getting beat deep.  That’ll be the key, not getting beat deep.  My biggest fear however is that Gregory won’t modify the gameplan to account for his defensive weaknesses (which is what killed us against Tennessee).  Luckily, from the last two games, it seems that Gregory learned his lesson.

These weaknesses are very overcomable and I expect the Bears to be ready to play.  They’re still hungry for respect after the Tennessee game and are not going to let another National audience see them fail.  They’ll be hitting hard, playing with intensity with a loud home crowd behind them (Cal has one of the most under-rated home field advantages) and win this one with ease: 31-13

Now do you guys see why I’m confident?