Idiots Write About Sports

As we rolled off the ferry and began heading north toward Husky Stadium, it started to sprinkle. By the time we got to our friends Steve and Marsha’s house, it was a full downpour. We ate breakfast at their place to the sound of water pouring off the roof.
We planned this little Sept. 10 journey to Seattle specifically to avoid weather like this, but it looked like we were getting no such luck. So rather than leisurely walk to the stadium, we drove to the Red Square parking garage and began to dash across campus.
We settled into our damp seats in the endzone with gray skies and a soaking wet track below us:

Just as the game started, however, something crazy happened: the sun came out. A warm, late-summer sun. Things were looking up… until Joe Ayoob through an interception on his first play and UW followed it up by throwing a 50-plus-yard touchdown pass on the very next snap.
The classic Cal Fan tummy rumble (Or was it the Holiday Bowl tummy rumble? They’re similar.) began hitting me then. But you’ve gotta factor in two things: first, losing Aaron Rodgers and J.J. Arrington hasn’t made Jeff Tedford into a drooling idiot — this is the guy who turned Kyle Boller from bust to first-round pick in one season. Second, this is UW — and as my poor, sad friend Steve pointed out to me, even with Ty Willingham coaching them, UW has essentially no players. Well, I take that back — they’ve got a kicker who can kick perfect field goals from 45 yards out, and that’s something a Cal fan in the post-Doug Brien/Ryan Longwell era can appreciate.
And so, not long after, we were looking at a rapidly accelerating Husky Stadium scoreboard, leading to the final score of 56-17. For four years in a row, Cal has beaten Washington. Wait, there’s more: for three years in a row, Cal has pasted Washington. If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it.
I have to say it was fun sitting in the Cal section, even if we were squashed in tight. It’s a testament to UW’s fans — and my long history with sparse Cal attendance — that the stadium felt pretty full even though it was the worst-attended UW game at Husky Stadium game in years. And for those first few minutes, the noise from that crowd was incredible. But it was a lot of fun when we got to be the annoying little section making all the noise in the stadium. That was a blast.
In the fourth quarter, we moved down a dozen rows so that we could stretch out a little bit and let the baby do some crawling. I’ve got to hand it to Husky Stadium: the benches may be a little narrow, but they’ve got built-in seatbacks and much more leg room than the benches at Cal. Future Memorial Stadium designers, take note.
Now a few more football-related notes. Lynch looked good while he was in there, and I suspect that if this was a do-or-die game, he would’ve taped up his broken pinkie and played through it. Instead, Tedford plugged in three other runners who carried the load just fine — a good sign. Ayoob looked much better than he did last week (how could he not?), although his stats might make you think he’s a bit better than he really is.
Yes, Ayoob threw a bunch of touchdown passes and racked up the yardage. But lots of his short passes were not exactly thrown to the numbers — receivers were having to stop or even come back to balls in order to grab them. There were some drops, but also several incompletions caused by Ayoob’s inaccuracy. And even his completions were inaccurate, none more than a long TD pass that was thrown so far behind the receiver that he had to stop and come back several feet to make the catch, fortunately crossing up the defender in the process. Ayoob’s good, no question — and he’s really a very good scrambler — but he’s visibly lacking in the accuracy I saw from Rodgers last year.
One final note: we got to see the debut of Instant Replay in the Pac-10, and it was useful, because the officiating was awful (on both sides — my friend Steve backed me up on this). Two plays were reviewed, the most important one being a touchdown pass that was ruled incomplete. Since the reception happened right in front of me, I had a better view of it than anyone on TV did, so let me tell you: the fact that the referee called the pass incomplete was the result of sheer incompetence. The reception happened right at the pylon in the front of the end zone, and as I watched, the ref clearly focused on the pylon, as if trying to figure out whether the receiver had broken the plane of the goal line. As a result, he apparently paid no attention to whether the receiver actually got his feet down in-bounds (what’s the logic there?) and so apparently decided to punt the entire decision by ruling the pass incomplete. Just shockingly incompetent. Fortunately, the replay official was not shockingly incompetent and ruled correctly that the receiver was undeniably in.
But the worst abuse of referee power I witnessed Saturday was actually a set of penalties that make you wonder who’s running the show when it comes to Pac-10 officiating. On a close play on the sidelines, a Cal player tried to tackle a Washington player who was heading out of bounds. Just as the Cal player reached the Husky, he stepped out. The Cal player pivoted away from the Husky so as to avoid hitting him with his body, although he did use at least one hand for leverage. Two officials who saw the player spin chose to not call a personal foul. A third official, who must’ve been at least 10 or 20 yards away and at an angle where he couldn’t really see the Cal player pivot away from the Husky, threw a flag. The officials huddled, and here’s the part I don’t get — they decided to call the penalty. Clearly the two officials who had seen the guy get out of the way felt it wasn’t a penalty, but for whatever reason they chose to assess the penalty anyway.
I don’t pretend to understand the complexity of politics on an officiating crew, but I knew exactly what was coming next: a make-up call. And indeed, one of the two officials who had seen that the play was not a personal foul flagged Washington for holding on the very next play, negating most of the original penalty. What a joke. I’ve lambasted the Pac-10 before for its meager choice of bowl games — they’re the only major conference without a New Year’s Day bowl berth for its second-place team — and now I guess I’ve got to do the same for how it runs its officiating. It’s just disgraceful — and this is coming from someone whose team won the game by 39 points.