Idiots Write About Sports

So it turns out that, not to take anything away from the ingrates who voted in the polls or put together the BCS system, Cal wasn’t the No. 4 team in the country.
All this season I’d been shushing that voice in my head, the one saying, “Come on — a Top Five team doesn’t play like this.” I figured that, since I’ve never seen Cal have a team this good, I must just not know what a Top Five team feels like. The sluggish halves, the terrible special teams and secondary. It all got shrugged off, as they kept winning and winning.
Well, we now know a few things:
1. Texas Tech was the perfect bad match-up for Cal. The Red Raiders played an amazing game, but they are one bizarre little team. It’s as if their head coach was whipped as a child when he would run the ball instead of pass: this team is pathologically afraid of running. Even late in the game with a two-touchdown lead, Texas Tech insisted on passing on every single down. Run out the clock? We’ll do that on passes completed over the middle, mister!
Meanwhile, Cal has had an amazingly good run defense, but their secondary has been suspect all year. UCLA and Oregon picked them apart effectively in spots, but in reality no team has had the pass focus that Texas Tech had. Other teams tried to run on Cal, failed, and then failed to successfully convert to the pass. Texas Tech is geared to be all pass, and that’s the way to beat this year’s Cal team. And so they did.
2. I can’t take anything away from Texas Tech. They were one seriously good offensive team. Their defense wasn’t so hot — Cal’s failure to score more points had to do with a combination of some bad passes by Aaron Rodgers, a mystifying reluctance by Tedford and Co. to run the ball more in the first half (especially on 3rd-and-short), a complete lack of qualified receivers, and one of the worst non-calls I’ve ever seen from a ref. But that Red Raider offense? Wow. Good receivers, good passers, lots of movement, very hard to defend. Cal wasn’t confused out there — they just couldn’t stop ‘em.
3. Cal’s offense was more run than pass for a reason. I’m not sure why — the receiver injuries were part of it, but not all of it — but after the USC game Aaron Rodgers seemed to regress. He was much less accurate in the second half of the year. People talk about Rodgers having trouble because his receivers dropped a lot of balls, and that’s true — but Rodgers mis-threw a lot of balls too. Not all of Rodgers’ late-season problems can be chalked up to the hurt receivers. Given that he’s only had a year and a half as a starter and that he showed some regression late this season, I’d prescribe another year of tutelage under Dr. Tedford before leaving for the NFL. Then again, if I were in his shoes I’d take the money and run… but I’d be worried that the ghost of Akili Smith would appear to me in the night, warning that the first NFL paycheck isn’t so awesome if there’s never a second one.
4. You can go 10-1 by spacing out your terrible halves. Cal has had lots of terrible halves, most of them first halves. But those halves have been balanced out by the other. This week they couldn’t get it together for two halves. It could have happened earlier (UCLA, Oregon, Southern Miss) but for some reason it didn’t. Turns out you can’t go 11-1 by this method, but you can go 10-2.
There’s much more to say about the Holiday Bowl — we took pictures, we got choked and deafened by a laughable fireworks show, and the anecdotes go on. More about that later. But I couldn’t let this day (and year) go by without at least getting started with my observations. Congratulations to Texas Tech for an awesome performance, and congratulations to Cal for having their best season since 1992. It was a lot of fun to watch.