All right, another game in Memorial Stadium and another victory!

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned it before on this blog but I took my son Gregory to the 2003 Big Game for his first game when he was 3 months old and he’s attended every home game (minus last year’s ASU game which was a night game and the opening game this season because he had the flu) since then and he’s NEVER experienced a loss. If Cal were some perennial powerhouse that would be one thing, but the Cal undefeated home stretch (including games at Stanford as “home” games) only started a couple weeks before Gregory’s first game against the routinely week Arizona. We would have beat them anyway. But the moment I start taking my son, we start winning. Need I say more? My boy is the best good luck charm money can buy (don’t worry, he’s not for sale). To sweeten the pot, when Gregory had the flu my younger son Andrew went to his first game at 7 months old (yes, I take BOTH my now 8 month old and 2 year old boys to the game), to ensure that the Crawford boy good luck would be maintained. It’s clear after 3 home games that he has the good luck as well. I hope my point is obvious by now: the USC game is coming up in a month. I think it is clear that we, as the Cal faithful, need to make a group effort to make sure my boys are in good health and able to attend that game if we hope to win.

In any case, back to Saturday’s victory.

Cal looked more polished this week than they have all season. Ayoob looked comfortable, threw a number of good passes and made very few mistakes. The running game looked as strong as ever even when Arizona put what looked like 14 defenders in the box (those were some big guys!).

But what was truly impressive was the play of the defense. These guys were on fire and I was particularly impressed with the secondary. They were hit with a few pathetically bad pass interference calls (one was so bad that I couldn’t help myself from yelling out despite the fact that there was a sleeping 8 month old in my lap. I mean come on, he didn’t even touch the player. What, did he interfere the ball?) but were completely undeterred from making good plays. In fact the goalline pass interference call seemed to provide the ammunition for the shutout maintaining stand. Speaking of which, the run defense was as good as ever and did a very good job of adjusting between the pass and rushing plays as well as wrapping up players, a weakness in previous games. Additionally, they really did a good job of making sure every play was disrupted right from the get go.

The big weakness for the team was the deep pass. Ayoob’s touch on long passes still isn’t there. Early in the season he was skying his short passes and under throwing the bombs. He’s solved the short passes but is now overthrowing his VERY speedy receivers, which is surprising and in an odd way impressive. The score easily would have been 45-0 if he could have completed the long passes to open receivers which made up about half of his incompletions.

I guess there is one other area that has been a little suspect and that is the kickoff/punt return teams. They’ve been giving up too many big plays and not keeping their lanes to prevent the big runbacks. They also seemed to have trouble wrapping up players. This area wasn’t horrific, but in a tight game could become an issue.

Overall this is a team that is starting to click and one that will only continue to get better as they work out these last few issues. Along those lines, I have every reason to believe that they will work out these issues as every game to date the Bears have shored up the biggest weaknesses from the previous game without losing anything in other areas. Tedford said in his press conference that long passes and special teams were the two areas of concern. Consider it done.

Finally, Ray Ratto in his traditionally jovial way pointed to Tedford’s continued dissatisfaction with his practice facilities, particularly with having to have the whole team practice on one field. To quote the article: “a not-entirely-subtle advertisement for Tedford’s Web site, ineedanewpracticefacilitysoondammit.com”.

For all of you more wealthy Bears fans, that domain name is still available.

OK, another perfect weekend: 5-0. I feel pretty good about my picks and my margin of victory picks were darned good with the exception of ASU giving USC a bigger scare than I thought. I still continue to, on average, under estimate the amount of scoring that’ll happen. I think I’m giving Pac-10 defenses too much credit!

The updated metrics are as follows:
Winning percentage: 89.5%
Margin of Victory Delta (MVD) average: 14.2
Total Points Scored Delta (TPD) average: 16.2

I’ll give picks for this upcoming weeks games on Friday:
-Cal at UCLA
-Arizona at USC
-Oregon at ASU
-Stanford at WaZoo
(Both UW and OSU have a bye)

Have you ever seen the original trailer for the movie “The Shining”? Click on the above link to see why this movie so impacted people when they first saw it.

A little misleading isn’t it?

Everyone who knows me knows that I love metrics to measure things. So here’s my past Pac-10 picks and their accuracy based on 3 metrics:

Winner (percentage)
Margin of Victory Delta (average), MVD
Total Points Scored Delta (average), TPD

So here are my past picks:
(format is: my picks -> actual score: metrics)

Last week:
Cal 56, New Mexico State 7 -> Cal 41, NMSU 13: MVD=21, TPD=9
Washington 17, Notre Dame 35 -> UW 17, ND 36: MVD=1, TPD=1
USC 42, Oregon 31 -> USC 45, Oregon 13: MVD=21, TPD=15
ASU 41, OSU 20 -> ASU 42, OSU 24: MVD=4 TPD=4

2 weeks ago:
OSU 20, Louisville, 24 -> OSU 27, Louisville 63: MVD=32, TPD=46
Cal 45, Illinios 20 -> Cal 35, Illinios 20: MVD=1o, TPD=10
UCLA 20, Oklahoma 24 -> UCLA 41, OK 24: MVD=21, TPD=21
WaZoo 49, Grambling 31 -> WaZoo 48, Grambling 7: MVD=23, TPD=25
Oregon 28, Fresno 20 -> Oregon 37, Fresno 34: MVD=5, TPD=23
USC 42, Arkansas 13 -> USC 70, Arkansas 17: MVD=24, TPD=32
ASU 35, Northwestern 17 -> ASU 52, NW 21: MVD=13, TPD=21
Stanford 38, UC Davis 10 -> Stanford 17, UC Davis 20: MVD 31, TPD=11
Arizona 14, Purdue 28 -> UA 24, Purdue 31: MVD=7,TPD=13
Washington 35, Idaho 24 -> UW 34, Idaho 6: MVD: 17, TPD=19

Total metrics
Winner: 85.7%
MVD: 16.0
TPD: 18.5

So, while I did a pretty good job of picking the winner, the victories were usually bigger than I expected which hurt both my margin of victory and toptal points scored. I was surprising accurate at getting the losers score.

We’ll see how I do this week! Tune in Monday for results.

So a friend of mine at work and I have been making picks for the Pac-10 games of the week for the last couple weeks. I figured I’d start making those picks more public so that Brian can pick on me and then be humiliated later.

Here we go:

USC 49, ASU 20: ASU is one of those teams that can light it up when it doesn’t matter but never seems to have the defense to win when it matters. The LSU game a couple weeks ago is a perfect example. Everyone remembers last year how they choked (and I mean CHOKED) against both Cal and USC. Expect the same this year against USC.

WSU 20, OSU 28: This is the game I’m least sure about. WSU, from now on referred to as WaZoo, has killed all of their opponents to date but when the strongest team on the list is Idaho, what does that tell us. They’re even more untested than Cal. OSU on the other hand has been beat around by a couple of good teams and pulled out a tough win against a under-rated Boise State. My gut says the battle tested team wins this one, especially at home.

Oregon 49, Stanford 17: This is probably the easiest game to pick if it weren’t for both the “redemption” factor and the crushing defeat factor. I’m not even talking about Stanford. Oregon doesn’t do well after a crushing defeat but somehow I think the UC Davis wannabees… er Stanford can have any motivation they want and still lose this game.

Arizona 13, Cal 38: This is Cal’s warm up game of the season. Yeah we’ve played powder-puff teams for 4 weeks but they week we only have to play a gravel-puff team. Cal may be a little slow out of the gate on this one, but runs (literally) away with it in the end.

Washington 13, UCLA 24: I so desperately want to call the upset here. UCLA’s ranking is all predicated on their big upset of Oklahoma but THAT’s all predicated on Oklahoma actually being an upset. People seem to forget that the only reason Oklahoma was ranked was because of pre-season hype. They’ve done literally NOTHING this season to justify any ranking. Washington on the other hand, looked fairly strong last week against Notre Dame. So this feels like an upset in the making. But, seeing as how Washington got spanked by Cal, my gut tells me Notre Dame is overrated and the game is at the Rose Bowl, I don’t see this being the week it’ll actually happen.

OK, I’m 12-2 to date (4-0 last week and 8-2 the week before (stupid Stanford and Oklahoma…))

OK, somebody got my humble blog in their comment spam list. Thankfully my spam detector is properly throwing them in the moderation queue, but I’ve gotten 40 in the last couple days.

My question is why they care to do this when they all get moderated. I know there desire is to up the number of links that reference them so that they’ll be elevated in search engines. But when those comments get moderated, they don’t accomplish their goal.

I guess they don’t check to see whether the comments get moderated.

He says:

How can you tell a baby has two of their favorite things to chew on in their mouth?

When they don’t freak out when you remove the first one.

I can attest to the truth of that one as recently as last night when I pulled the first, second and finally third fragment of paper from Andrew’s mouth.

Only 22 senators voted against Roberts for Supreme Court justice. Fienstien was one of them. The only reason she seems at all moderate is because the other senator from the state (Barbara Boxer) is so liberal that the Green party won’t take her if she decided to abandon the democratic party because it is being “taken over by conservatives”.

As all my Netflix friends know, I’ve had the same 3 movies for a long time. Well, we finally watched Coach Carter (it was alright, I guess) and I finally started watching the show Monk that so many people who’s opinions I respect liked.

It was REALLY good. I particularly liked the under-current about Monk’s disorder and people’s sympathy or lack of sympathy there of. I can’t wait to watch the 2nd DVD of the first season.

I’d like to thank the Oakland A’s for freeing up my weekend. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend the weekend watching/attending games when I think we all know would end up turning out the same way it did.

But you gave it quite a run and made an amazing turn around mid-seasion. Here’s to next year!