Sunday Shout-Out picks out the week’s stories that simply slipped our minds.

What can we say about yesterday’s game? (Without bursting into hysterical tears, that is.) [DailyCal]

There, there—drown your sorrows in a glass of red wine. Or, hey, how ’bout this handful of blueberries? Wash it all down with some tasty peanuts and you might guarantee yourself a few extra years. Nom nom resveratrol. [UCB Wellness Letter]

Americans agree: Behavioral targeting is creepy. No! Really? There’s nothing dystopian-novel-esque about “following consumers’ actions and then tailoring advertisements for the consumers based on those actions.” Nothing at all. [Media Newswire]

According to wisdom garnered from the UC Berkeley Media Technology Summit, newspapers need to “be part of the disruption.” Good thing we wrote the book on disruption, yo. [Media Bistro]

Image Source: Victoria Chow, Daily Cal [ASIB]
Earlier: Get Some!

Sunday Shout-Out picks out the week’s stories that simply slipped our minds.

* The rest of us might be suffering the brunt of budget cuts up the ying-yang, but the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is, thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, still rollin’ in the dough. [Nanotechwire]

* In other victorious news, Cal football owns—in case you hadn’t heard. [Golden Blogs]

* Staying up all night texting leads to sleep deprivation. OMG NO WAY. [MercuryNews]

Image Source: David Herschorn [DailyCal]
Earlier: Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems

Although Stanford somehow managed to take home the axe after last year’s Big Game, this year they were hacked into firewood and pulverized into sawdust, so to speak, in a 37-16 victory on Saturday. Their “mascot,” which looked like a bunch of poinsettia-inspired potholders attached to a metal rack with bloodshot eyes and a creepily smiley mouth hanging off it like a Christmas ornament, was basically just a redder and more infuriated version of last year’s just as unsightly counterpart.

read more »

Hurrah for a night of legitimized barbarism and college fun! Berkeley’s finest clappers will be hosting the traditional Big Game Bonfire Rally, and we hear it’s supposed to be hot stuff (hah). We love fires. A lot.

This night is so huge that one online encyclopedia felt the need to define it. It’s also not so huge that Wikipedia felt no need to define it. Jerks.

What: Big Game Bonfire Rally
Where: Greek Theatre
When: Friday, Nov. 21 at 7:00 p.m., doors open at 6:00 p.m.
Cost: Free, no ticket required read more »

As promised, the Clog is giving you the low-down on a preview of the kick-off for massive fund raising effort for Cal football.

Cal dreams of expanding the school’s $50 million sports endowment to a whopping $1 billion in the next 30 years. Criminy. Before you start creating your “1,000,000 strong for keeping UC fees down” Facebook groups, worry not–Cal plans to hit up the wealthiest among us as their first step to big, fat checks. And what faster way towards $1 billion than a little piece of property in the Cal stadium? We’re talking individual seats for up to $225,000 each. As usual, these monied football fans’ first-class section includes complimentary food, parking (a privelege for which most Berkeleyans would give up their first-born) and lounge access. read more »

 

 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]