Loading ...No surprise here.
For the fifth consecutive year, the Pac-10 media have picked the boys from Troy to finish atop the conference.
And for the fourth consecutive year, Cal was picked to finish second behind Pete Carroll’s USC team.
There really isn’t too much to read into this. Every year, every conference has these preseason rankings, and every year, they’re pretty much wrong in some sense. But we all like our preseason rankings.
If you’d like to know, UCLA was picked to finish at No. 3, and our good friends at Stanfurd were picked to finish last. Wow, that’s a gutsy call, especially since the Card won only one game last year.
But speaking of rankings, ESPN has been ranking all 119 Division I-A football teams in terms of their performance in the last decade.
The Bears land in at No. 35, which is a pretty fair assessment.
You have to remember that Cal was pretty much the doormat of the Pac-10 for most of the late 1990s. Also note that the Bears had won only one game in 2001, the year before Jeff Tedford became Cal’s head coach.
Also note that of the 55 games won in the last 10 years, 43 have come under Tedford.
We don’t know which number is more impressive—the 12 games the Bears won in the five years before Tedford or the 43 in the Tedford era.
Image Source: Ben Gallup, Daily Cal
Pac-10 football: Cal picked No. 2, Stanford last in poll [Mercury-News]
Middling major conference teams, top mid-majors among Nos. 25-50 [ESPN]
Teams just outside top 25 include big names, underachieving programs [ESPN]
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