So, after all the build up, victory came easily. We don’t know how to feel exactly. Hyping this game for longer than someone studies abroad was fun in some sort of sick way. Now, it’s over. We had nothing to be nervous about, and now we have nothing to do.Eh, it’s still good to have football back. And it’s great to defeat the hated neon orange people. Here are some very, very profound thoughts on Saturday’s action:

We WON!!! Yayyyyy!!!! Woo!!

The DeSean Jackson punt return was unreal. He’s a better PR man than Reggie Bush was in college.

Can he do the kickoffs too? That could be cool.

The obligatory “Berkeley is CRAZY” coverage is always galling. It’s not that we hate RunningWolf interviews or Oaks reporting in general (in fact, the war over the Oaks never ceases to enthrall us). We’re just sick of getting stereotyped as Flower Child U. Um, why couldn’t the media focus on all the Berkeley hippies, eccentrics and street preachers who weren’t living in trees?

Part of the Berkeleotyping effort was the insane focus on Nate Longshore’s new look (obvious crack: Uh, you mean he looks like a great quarterback who won’t fold under pressure?). ABC just had to seize on Nate’s turning into Shaggy from Scooby Doo and talk about the QB’s Berkeleyification for centuries.

Justin Forsett was great, but he’s no Marshawn Lynch. The lack of a big, griding back will hurt us eventually.

But our defense will hurt us more. Jeez, they were awful. That awesome forced fumble was deceptive. Were there really 11 guys out there on Saturday? It felt like five at most. And all five were named Syd’Quan Thompson.

Jahvid Best is too fast for description. We tried to come up with a way to talk about him but just ended up sounding football announcerish (That guy can really, really, run the ball!).

See ya next week. 

Look, we don’t want to get into that game from last year. It hurt too much. But, for those of you new to Cal football…When the Bears opened against the Vols in 2006, it was an unmitigated disaster. The Tennessee guys ripped us to the tune of a 35 point lead through the third quarter. Many Cal students had dreams of a championship. After that game? Ummm, not so much.So after an unbearable break from the great American sport, we face the same very orange team on opening day. Thankfully, this shot at sweet redemption is at home. Here’s what to look for.

• The Clog sobbing uncontrollably if DeSean Jackson gets injured. 
• No damned parking. Anywhere.
• The Bears owning, thanks to a key difference from last year’s debacle. The underrated change is simply that we won’t have to face the brain-cramping onslaught of neon orange. This is by far the most important aspect of home field advantage against these Vols. The sight of a puke-inducing, sea of highlighter fluid-colored shirts is enough to make even the best teams screw up. It’s unfair. You’re trying to win a football game, and your brain thinks you’ve been transported to the 1970s from hell. The NCAA should make this tactic illegal.
• Look, we don’t know about Longshore. He was inconsistent last year, and often faltered when it mattered most. But ESPN.com tells us that the pirate-named dude has improved massively. According to them, he’s an elite college quarterback. ESPN can never be wrong, so look for Nato to put up 300 yards.

The finally analysis is this: The Bears have the best player (The blur of light known as DeSean) and the better team. Last year was brutal, but we shouldn’t expect a repeat. The Vols don’t have WRs and their QB is a gimp. The Clog boldly predicts a glorious trouncing.Prediction: Bears 34, Vols 14.

It’s August, and that means college football training camps open up across the country. The Bears opened today and we had a few questions for this season’s Cal team.

Sure the Merc’s questions are important. They had three questions in particular:

* Who is going to replace Daymeion “I Can Intercept A Nuclear Missile” Hughes?

* Can Justin Forsett be as effective as Marshawn Lynch?

* And can the defensive line produce without guys like Brandon Mebane?

These are all great questions and all of them have to do with replacing key starters from last year. But isn’t that the case almost every year? So we pose three questions of our own and maybe you guys can answer them.

* Who will take up the title as hyphiest Cal football player?

There’s no doubt that that title went to Lynch last year. Remember this?

Yeah. Lynch ghost-riding a golf cart.

We’re going to suggest Lynch’s cousin, Robert Jordan. Just look at those teeth.

* Will Thomas DeCoud lay anyone else out with a bone-crunching hit?

Does anyone remember that hit DeCoud laid on UCLA’s Korey Bosworth last year? Yeah. Yeah. More of that this year, maybe?

If you don’t remember, here it is:

* And the question of the highest importance, which uniform will the Bears wear against Tennessee on Sept. 1?

We’re going to say that Cal has to go with the gold uniforms. Why you ask? One, they’re pretty classy. Two, the Bears are undefeated wearing the gold tops—Cal defeated Oregon, UCLA and Texas A&M last year wearing the gold unis.

Image Sources: Ben Gallup & Shamim Pakzad, Daily Cal
Longshore Trims Down, Bears Speeding Up [Daily Cal]
Replacements key to roses [Mercury-News]

Enough with all the preseason magazine powder-puff polls that don’t mean anything.

It’s time for the real polls to come out. And since the coaches’ poll is one-third of the equation that gives us the BCS, it’s probably a tad more important than the AP poll.

For the second straight year, Cal is ranked No. 12 in the first coaches’ poll of the year.

And again, the Bears will head into their season-opener ranked higher than Tennessee, which garnered enough votes to earn them No. 15. But by no means is Cal the favorite to beat the Vols on Sept. 1.

And hey, it looks like Athlon Sports got the Bears’ ranking sort of right. Athlon ranked Cal No. 11 in its preseason poll.

Of course USC was ranked No. 1, but the Trojans were not a consensus pick. USC only received 45 of the 60 first-place votes. No. 2 LSU received four first-place votes, No. 3 Florida got nine first-place votes and No. 5 Michigan was able to muster two first-place votes.

And yes, EA Sports was almost right  with UCLA’s No. 19 ranking in NCAA Football ’08. The Bruins—on the laurels of their desperate win over USC last year—are ranked No. 17 by the coaches.

Image Source: Ben Gallup, Daily Cal
Cal Begins Season Ranked No. 12 According to ESPN/USA Today Preseason Coaches’ Poll [Cal Bears]
2007 NCAA Football Rankings – Preseason [ESPN]

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]

In college football hype is everything, and in college, video games are everything—almost. What do you get when you mix the two? How about EA Sports’ NCAA Football 08?

While it’s not a cultural icon like EA Sports NFL franchise, Madden, it still gives us some insight into the world of college football.

What insight? How about rankings? We all like preseason rankings—even if it is a video game company doing the rankings.

As it turns out, Cal is only one of three Pac-10 teams in the top 25. EA Sports gave the Bears a No. 16 ranking. OK, so it’s not as high as Athlon Sports’ rankings (which we think may be a little high), but at least Cal’s getting some love.

As Gamespot.com put it:

If it weren’t for those pesky Trojans, Cal fans would be in the midst of an in-conference renaissance practically unheard of in the history of the program. Coach Jeff Tedford led his team to a share of the Pac-10 title last year, thanks in part to UCLA’s late-season defeat of USC; it’s just another chapter in the team’s revival of fortunes, one that has seen the team go from an also-ran in the conference to a yearly contender. 2006 didn’t get off to the greatest of starts, as the Golden Bears made the trip to Knoxville and got stomped by Tennessee; this year they’ll be looking at the Volunteers with revenge on their minds, as the teams play the rematch in Berkeley. Should they win that game, and manage to beat in-conference opponents like Oregon and UCLA on the road, the looming November 10 home showdown against national-title favorite USC will be perhaps the biggest game ever played at Memorial Stadium.

How true. After years of wallowing in USC’s shadow, and of being a real bad football team, Bears fans forget that we’re in the middle of the resurrection of this football team. If Pete Carroll and the Trojans weren’t in Cal’s way, then maybe the Bears could have been in the Rose Bowl in 2004 and last year.

But we do have a few more questions about the rankings. Yes, USC is No. 1. There’s no dispute to that, but Michigan as No. 2?! Didn’t the Trojans embarrass Big Blue in the Rose Bowl earlier this year?

Also, we don’t mind that UCLA is the only other team from the Pac-10 in the top 25. They did return pretty much their whole team from last year, but remember this—the Bruins went 7-6 last year. We don’t think that’s good enough for a No. 19 ranking.

And who the hell picked Jared Zabransky as the cover boy? Sure Boise State was a great story last year, but there had to be someone better than Jared Zabransky to put on the cover.

NCAA 08 Top 25 [Gamespot]

The Daily Cal is reporting that ESPN has not yet chosen the Cal-Tennessee game as the site for their first show of the 2007 season of ESPN College GameDay, a highly popular college football pregame show.

TheBearInsider.com had reported that ESPN had chosen that game for the first College GameDay show of the year, but neither Cal nor ESPN could confirm that Chris Fowler, Lee Corso and Kirk Herbstreit will be in Berkeley on Sept. 1.

This is what John Sudsbury, a Cal spokesperson, told the Daily Cal:

The only thing we know right now is that we’re in consideration for it. Nothing has been decided yet and nothing has been confirmed, even though it was on that one website (BearInsider.com). They just said that we’re definitely in the consideration.

ESPN media guys have also denounced the rumor that Corso and Herbstreit will be checking out all the hot Tree-wok ladies on Sept. 1.

ESPN Senior Media Relations Director Rob Tobias said:

It’s unlikely that we’ve determined what sites we are going to visit in the fall just yet. I don’t think we’re even close to finalizing our schedule.

There are two possible scenarios for this fiasco: One, The Bear Insider jumped the gun. Or two, ESPN’s just being douchey and doesn’t want to announce that it’s coming to Berkeley just yet. You decide.

Earlier: ESPN College Gameday is Coming to Berkeley
ESPN Gameday Shoot At Cal Not a Certainty [Daily Cal]

About a month ago, SI.com’s Stewart Mandel offered us his infinite wisdom and gave us his post-spring, yet pre-summer college football rankings.

In those rankings, Cal was No. 20. Pretty good. But we like Athlon Sports’ ranking for the Bears a little bit better.

Athlon Sports, this year, is ranking their top 25 college football teams countdown style, finishing with the No. 1 team on June 1. We think that No. 1 team is going to be USC. But that’s just speculation.

Cal is just outside of the top 10, coming in at No. 11 for Athlon Sports.

And just like everyone else in America, Athlon Sports loves The Golden Blur we like to call DeSean Jackson.

If the Heisman Trophy were to go to the player with the ability to change the complexion of a game on one play better than anyone else in America, DeSean Jackson would be front and center at this year’s ceremony, and probably would have been last year. Jackson has been Cal’s leading receiver in both of his first two seasons, averaging 17.1 yards on 97 catches with 16 touchdowns. He also ran back four punts for touchdowns last year, giving him five for his career, and was the recipient of the Randy Moss Award as the top return man in the nation. He takes just about one out of every five punts he touches the distance.

There are great expectations looming for this Bears squad. With an almost top 10 ranking in one poll, a “primetime game” to kickoff the season and “College GameDay” coming to Berkeley, the hype surrounding this team is reaching levels never seen before since the Pappy Waldorf years.

Other Pac-10 teams of note already mentioned in Athlon Sports’ top 25 include No. 15 UCLA and No. 22 Oregon State. Our question, why does everyone love the Beavs? When was the last time they got this much love?

Electric offense sparks Bears in ‘07 [Athlon]