Oh Yeah, I Won
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, I refer you to the Play in CA’s bold declaration. I treaded last place throughout the entire contest, but Kansas and Memphis pulled through for me, saved us from a Hansborough-Love slobberfest, and catapulted my bracket into an impregnable first. Everyone else had UCLA and North Carolina winning, so the lead is mine and will stay mine, regardless of the outcome of the final.
Current results
Bears Necessity-100 (132 possible, only one who can get the final prediction right)
Gossip on Sports-91
The Battle of California-82
The Sports Lounge-80
The Play in California-76
Apples and Moustaches-75
So…this is going to be strange. There’s no way I’m going to be able to generate a week full of posts for this site, for The Play in CA, plus another four posts for four other sites all at once. I’m thinking of doing this in a staggered formation, but I’m not sure how this would work. In the meantime, production here might be a little slower and will probably only get slower as we enter dead season. The idea of guest posters for this site has floated around my mind; I’ll probably set something up for readers to contribute their input.
Anyway I have a bracket for money pool that needs Memphis to win tonight (plus that’d land me another guest spot at the Golden Blogs, which sounds thrilling), so you can tell where my allegiances lie–either I win a load of money and have one more post to write, or lose money and am writing ten more posts at a profit loss. Go Tigers.
EDIT: And now I lost my pool. Blowing a nine point lead with two minutes left in regulation is something special. Even the Kings didn’t pull crap that bad. I despise college basketball, I despise Memphis for not committing a remotely smart foul over the last eight minutes, I despise Derrick Rose for not showing up in overtime, I despise that Roberts dude for not pulling into his free throw motion, I despise Rock Chalk Talk and the entire state of Kansas, I despise myself because I originally had Kansas winning and threw my stock behind the sexy pick with an obvious Achilles’ heel that revealed itself at the most inopportune time.
AND I have seven posts to write about topics I could care less about and no money to compensate me. My loathing knows no bounds.
Turf Wars Part II: Bears Slowfooted on Grass
Hydrotech pointed out on my first post on turf performance that looking solely at turf versus grass because we have six games at home on turf, and it’s easier to win at home than on the road. Upon further review, I completely agree. I’m guessing a Cal victory achieved at Memorial Stadium is significantly less difficult than winning at Autzen or Pullman. So I decided to appropriately separate the two. Interestingly, the turf-grass performance disparity remains highly significant.
| 2007 Rush | G | Yds/Att | TD | Att/G | Yds/G | |||
| Turf (Home) | 6 | 5.00 | 14 | 39.50 | 197.7 | |||
| Turf (Road) | 3 | 5.57 | 6 | 30.33 | 169 | |||
| Grass (Road) | 3 | 3.46 | 0 | 26.33 | 91 | |||
| 2007 Pass | G | Comp. % | Yd/Att | INT | TD | Efficiency | Att/G | Yds/G |
| Turf (Home) | 6 | 58.3 | 7.1 | 6 | 8 | 125.1 | 33.2 | 235.3 |
| Turf (Road) | 3 | 67.0 | 6.7 | 1 | 5 | 137.5 | 33.3 | 222.3 |
| Grass (Road) | 3 | 53.0 | 6.4 | 7 | 5 | 108.6 | 39.0 | 248.3 |
| 2006 Rush | G | Yds/Att | TD | Att/G | Yds/G | |||
| Turf (Home) | 7 | 5.13 | 11 | 35.7 | 183.1 | |||
| Turf (Road) | 2 | 4.37 | 4 | 36.5 | 159.5 | |||
| Grass (Road) | 3 | 3.74 | 1 | 24 | 89.7 | |||
| 2006 Pass | G | Comp. % | Yd/Att | INT | TD | Efficiency | Att/G | Yds/G |
| Turf (Home) | 7 | 63.0 | 8.7 | 3 | 17 | 160.11 | 30.1 | 263.1 |
| Turf (Road) | 2 | 62.9 | 8.3 | 3 | 4 | 144.6 | 31 | 258.5 |
| Grass (Road) | 3 | 46.6 | 6.0 | 7 | 3 | 93.6 | 38.7 | 232.7 |
You can see a few things: Nate Longshore performs just as well on road turf as he does on home turf–his efficiency rating was actually higher on road turf games (he had very effective performances against Oregon, Washington, and CSU, and strong ones against the Cougars and Beavers last year) than they were on his home turf. He completes a bigger majority of his passes. Most importantly of all, he does not toss picks–Longshore threw 9 TDs and 4 INTs on road turf (about on par with his home stats) as opposed to 8 TDs and 14 INTs on road grass in 2006-07.
The running game is also significantly stronger. The Cal ground game was a well oiled-machine on road turf, with 5.57 yards/attempt, 169 yards/game, 6 TDs in 2007 (as opposed to a meager 3.46 yards/attempt, 91 yards/game and NO TDs on road grass). There was a more linear drop-off from home turf to road turf to road grass in 2006, but the Cal offense became ordinary again on grass while holding their own on the opposing turf (159.5 yards/game and 4 TDs in 2 games on turf; 89.7 yards/game and 1 TD in 3 games on grass).
Defensive stats follow after the jump.
Updated Pac-10 Helmet Schedule
Tennessee and UCLA rescheduled their matchup to Labor Day, so the original Pac-10 helmet schedule had to be updated. I have a feeling I’ll be updating this about ten more times before the season starts, but no biggie.
Again, you can click on the image above for something visually readable, and you can also download it as an Excel file by right-clicking on the link at the end and choosing “Save Link As”, which gives you the option to click on the helmets for direct links to buying tickets for most games. Enjoy.
EDIT: My bad–I forgot to say that Oregon St. and Stanford are facing one another on Thursday night, opening night. That’s fixed now in the uploaded version. Sorry about that.
Pac-10 2008 Helmet Schedule (Excel file)
Ask the Readers: Q&A
It’s going to be a strange week. Either I’m going to be doing double-duty on two blogs or I’m taking a week off from writing about Cal football. Not the worst thing in the world, although this blog might look super strange for a week. In all honesty I don’t know whether to root for winning my bracket or what-not.
So during this offweek, this might be a good time for you guys to ask any questions you’d like me to find answers to. Why was Cal’s collapse so sudden and unprecedented? What did the rest of the Pac-10 do that Cal didn’t during the 2nd half of the year? Who’s performing the best in spring practices? What pieces of Golden Bear gamefilm would you like me to review? What are the issues that you want to discuss? Who are the most beautiful Berkeley athletes not named Allison Stokke? Do you guys have any questions for me?
You can leave these questions in the comments or email them to me directly. This should be good inspiration for post ideas and provide a more detailed “About the Author” section, which is pretty bare-boned right now.
I’ll answer these questions hopefully by next week. For those of you who’ve hung around, thanks. I hope to get better at this as the weeks pass.
Mike Montgomery to Cal
I swear when I read the opening headlines on the Cal sites this morning, my football-addled mind thought James Montgomery was coming back.
Former Stanford and Golden State Warriors coach Mike Montgomery has agreed in principle to replace Ben Braun at rival California, according to a source with knowledge of the negotiations.
Braun was fired as coach last Wednesday after 12 years at Cal.
Montgomery led Stanford to the 1998 Final Four and helped resurrect the Cardinal into a national program.
The move to Stanford’s chief rival comes as a surprise given Montgomery’s former and current links to the Cardinal. His former assistant, Trent Johnson, replaced Montgomery at Stanford. Most recently, Montgomery has been working as an assistant to Stanford athletic director Bob Bowlsby, as well as working in television for Fox Sports Net.
Montgomery compiled a 393-167 record with 12 NCAA tournament appearances in his 18 seasons at Stanford, making him the school’s winningest men’s basketball coach.
Here are my preliminary, uninformed, thoughts, which I move to strike from the record if I choose to.
He’s old. I mean, 61 is old in college basketball. Even John Wooden didn’t last past 65. Bob Knight seems to have exhausted himself at 67. He’s ratched down for 6 years and $10 mil, which means he’ll be 67 when he’s done. Is he really going to fit in on the sidelines? Cal basketball certainly does not attract as well as Cal football does.
He was terrible in the NBA. This doesn’t need much disputing, although the Warriors were a far worse team during this tenure.
His resume speaks for itself–25 winning seasons, 10 NCAA tournament appearances. So we should at least make the bump back to a decent team. I think.
I’ve heard some rumors about him being a so-so recruiter. Which doesn’t mean anything to me, since it’s not as if Braun was gifted in this realm either. Incremental steps is the term of the day, methinks.
Here are the voices you can listen to in the meantime, because this has to be the worst article I’ve ever written:
Monty to Cal!
Intro To Monty
Monty’s coming to Cal
Purdy: Montgomery will make Cal a winner
The commenters are going to have to be smarter than me here: What does Mike Montgomery bring to the table?
Which Conference Proved The Most in Bowl Season?
Extending with our deep and important discussion from regular season into bowl season, which conference had the toughest slate of opponents? Which conference had it easy goings?
Well let’s look at the bowl performance. We can get a good examination by taking a look at this chart, with each row featuring a game, starting with the most important one and going down from there (I’m sure there are some contentions you can make at the end about which game should go over which, but let’s not be too technical). Winners highlighted in bold.
So let’s analyze each conference as we did in the regular season post. Opponents of each conference are listed in order by the table (in the case of the ACC, #1 team in the ACC facing Kansas, followed by #2 team facing Michigan St, etc.), followed by a W or L for win-loss.
ACC (2-6)
#8 Kansas L
Michigan St. W
#22 Auburn L
Texas Tech L
Oregon St. L
Kentucky L
UConn W
Fresno St. L
Now it’s the ACC’s turn to bite dust. The Big 10 was plagued with a terrible OOC schedule and no marquee wins; the ACC replicated that conference’s performance come the holidays.
Most impressive win: Wake Forest knocking off 9-4 UConn. What sport is this again?
Most embarrassing loss: Virginia Tech really never matched up well with Kansas, and the Jayhawks controlled the majority of the game. Even though it was only a three point win, the Kansas defense took the reins and didn’t let go.
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Leftovers: Florida State was playing without half of its players and still kept it close with Kentucky…Virginia blew the Texas Tech game (up 14 with THREE minutes left), but almost every team in the Big 12 blows a Texas Tech game, so we’ll give them a pass…Clemson lost to Auburn in the ho-hum Bowl, etc. etc.
Toughness: 5th, making it all the more mystifying how badly the ACC performed. What the hell happened? You could argue that they were in each of these games until the end, but one would still think that they’d pull more wins out of these opponents than just two.
Grade: D- (and there’s some serious grade inflation going on here).
Big 10 (3-5)
#2 LSU L
#6 USC L
#9 Florida W
#14 BC L
#16 Tennessee L
Texas A&M W
Oklahoma St. L
Central Michigan W
Most impressive win: Total emasculation for the conference was avoided by Florida’s unexpected meltdown against an energetic Wolverine attack. It was clear Rich Rodriguez had already made his presence felt as Michigan went to the spread, lived by the spread, KILLED by the spread. Welcome to speed, Big Ten.
[youtube xFIAoIPSKek]
Most embarrassing loss: The Illinois game was over in a matter of six minutes. When the hell are the SEC and the Pac-10 going to play in the Rose Bowl again?
Other game notes: Michigan State barely finished over .500 and took a highly ranked BC team the distance. Wisconsin-Tennessee came down to the final drive. The other victory against a big conference came against a team without a coach, which is about as impressive as it sounds. I heard the Purdue-Central Michigan game was entertaining, if you really really hate defense.
Toughness: To be fair to the Big 10, they drew a very tough slate of opponents, in my estimation the toughest in the country–three ranked SEC opponents, the Pac-10 champ and the ACC runnerup. They weren’t facing cupcakes here like they were in the regular season. Nevertheless, while the second-tier bowl games were at least competitive, it was clear the top of the Big 10 could not keep up with the best of the Pac-10 and the SEC for the second straight year.
Grade: C
The New Design
And at last, the new design has been revealed. So far, no kinks (included in with an upgrade to WordPress 2.5, it looks like everything has gone smoothly). Hopefully this will last for as long as necessary–web designs are a long, drawn-out process, and I’m glad to have the majority of the big issues for
First I must thank LawVol from Gate21.net for his diligent work in upgrading this site. We Q&Aed back and forth for several weeks about what to do with installing the header, and didn’t hit on the final design until a week or so ago. He spent the last week tinkering around with it. I owe him a great deal for this, so for now I owe him my thanks (in the future I’ll think of something better).
Three big differences:
1) 3 columns instead of 2. There was way too much clutter on my old site, so now we can split up the widgets to where they belong.
2) We actually have an image on the header! At least the new visitor will have an idea what the hell this blog might be about. The last theme had no real marker that immediately let the audience know this was a site focused on Cal sports. Hopefully that should be cleared up.
3) Everything looks like it wasn’t cobbled together in seven minutes. Thank God for a somewhat professional-looking site.
Also the Google search engine in the sidebar has been replaced by a Lijit search engine, which is pretty cool–you can search through my Cal-related del.icio.us and youtube links along with all the content in my site, as well as choose to search on the regular web as well. It definitely looks more streamlined than the old Google search engine.
I’m sure there will be criticism of sorts, so feel free to leave your thoughts on the new design in the comments. What could be changed about the functionality of the site, what could be improved, what you miss from the old design, etc. I’ll certainly think about it for the next offseason, but hopefully this theme will last for a bit.
“A Turn For The Awesome” (Ben Braun Memories)
Because I only caught the tail end of Cal basketball under Braun (the NBA consumes too much of my life to follow college in earnest), I can really add nothing to personal memories of Ben Braun. I just watched what I saw on TV, and it was kind of like watching paint dry, then repainting over it wand watching that paint dry.
So here are some memories from people who know him better, who love him, enjoyed him, or well…you know.
Rod Benson
“I still remember when we were in Trieste, Italy. Our team got into a fight with the Italian team were playing against. Later that night, everybody had their stories about what they did during the fight. There were only two stories that never added up once we saw the tape. The first was Leon Powe’s story about “two of the biggest guys holding him back.” Leon was the largest guy there by far, so we were all wondering who in the world could hold HIM back. When we saw the video, we saw that Leon was clearly free to hit whoever he wanted and just stood there. That was probably a smart move even though we did laugh at him for it. The second story with a hole in it was that coach Braun was breaking the fight up. The tape showed him by himself in the corner, doing what appeared to be the cha-cha slide. He kept sidestepping around by himself with his hands up.”
This is not like the Holmoe thing, where it was a done deal, where even he knew he had to quit. This could have gone either way, and he knew it was happening on Monday Night. You could just tell looking at him and at the team. I wonder if the team knew then, or if they just could sense it. Either way, they played like crap. But I think that was the wake. The murder happened when only 1900 folks showed up to see the Bears play in the NIT opener.
Ray Ratto seems to think the odds of Cal landing such a person are not good, calling Cal “a school with a largely mid-major profile.” OK, leaving aside the major media market and the new facilities and the local recruiting talent and the major conference exposure and the sterling academic reputation, he’s got a point (don’t tell Kevin over at TheBand that). Still, Ratto could’ve written (and probably did) the same article following Tom Holmoe’s resignation in 2001. I think that coaching search turned out OK.
Boykin noted that Braun took things in stride as he met with the players midday. “He pretty much just said that he wishes us the best of luck in the future, that he’s proud of what we accomplished and that he wants us to stick together and work hard in the off-season and take care of ourselves,” said Boykin.
“He was calm. He’s always handled things like this well. He’s been dealing with it all year. It was just hard to see him go through that because I think it was kind of unexpected, especially this early. It was really unexpected by a lot of people.”
“I know a lot of guys were really appreciative of things that Coach Braun brought to the team,” said Robertson. “He gave us an opportunity to play at this level and gave us a place to play and receive a top-flight education. But as for the overall feel of the day, I think a lot of guys right now are a little unsettled about what happened. It was such a quick turnaround with us just getting back. But as Jamal was saying, it’s a business and not just basketball –the game we love and play. I think from that standpoint, everyone understands the decision.”
The best part about being a writer for the Daily Cal wasn’t the tickets, the thrill of following the best Cal football season ever, or having a prime voice among a massive student body.
It was the food.
Free food. Salmon, sandwiches and big cookies at football press conferences. Boxed lunches at games. The occasional random free pizzas from the athletic department. When you are a college student working for $15 per story, free food is good.
Ben Braun took advantage of this – and I love him for it. Before the 2004-2005 season, Braun had me and another writer into his office. We ate sandwiches and talked about basketball and about his girlfriend and about our majors. We did this again a couple times later in the season. People were jealous – the paper thought we were giving up our integrity. I didn’t care. Instead, I taunted other writers with the fact that I had Braun’s cell phone number (I still have it too).
Braun always sincerely answered my questions, always took time for whatever I wanted to talk about, and always made sure players talked. Sure, he probably did this with some self-interest (Haas was just losing its homecourt advantage and we had direct access to students), but he always made me feel honest about what I was writing.
Finally, The Play in CA is utterly joyous, and I think you should just read the whole post. When I lose our brackets despite their worst efforts at bracketology, you’ll get to enjoy posts like these for a week.
Site Upgrades Expected Today
Technical difficulties expected this afternoon, so just hang in there while you keep on clicking that Allison Stokke post through the roof.
Turf Wars: How Much Does the Surface Affect Cal?
I conclude this week by talking about grass. No, I’m not talking about the bums on Telegraph, although that would make for great interviewing. Is there something in the grass fields of college football stadiums that slows our players down and eventually knocks our team out?
I bring this up because Cal football is a mysterious and painful 0-6 on grass the past two years during the regular season. I repeat: WE HAVEN’T WON A SINGLE GAME ON GRASS THE PAST TWO REGULAR SEASONS. Arizona, Tennessee, USC, UCLA, ASU, Stanford. Three of these teams were good, one was so-so, the other two flat-out stunk. We’ve managed to win our last two bowl games on grass, but it was not typical Cal football in those two games–we utilized a great power run game to throttle A&M and needed a miraculous comeback speared by Kevin Riley to take down Air Force. Neither of those games was decided until the 4th quarter (and yes, Cal won the Holiday Bowl by 35). So it’s safe to say we’ve been struggling on turf.
At least we’re partly able to explain two stats that must continually bite at Coach Tedford:
Rose Bowl: 0-3
LA Memorial Coliseum: 0-3
Perhaps this LA curse now has a partial explanation. Both the Rose Bowl and Coliseum are grass surfaces.
The 2006 season looks a little disconcerting in retrospect. Cal on turf? 9-0. Cal on grass? 0-3. The terrible Oregon State loss was compounded more by the fact that we had to go to the Rose Bowl and Sun Devil Stadium and lose two more–both grass fields. The Bears this season on the natural stuff were 0-3, stagnating on offense late in each of the three games. Since Tedford arrived at Cal, in the Pac-10, here are his records on turf and grass.
2002: 6-4 on turf, 0-2 on grass
2003: 5-5 on turf, 3-1 on grass
2004: 8-0 on turf, 2-2 on grass
2005: 6-3 on turf, 2-1 on grass
2006: 9-0 on turf, 1-3 on grass
2007: 6-3 on turf, 1-3 on grass
Note that in 2003 and 2005 (offensively sluggish, defensively solid years for the Bears) were the only years Cal football teams finished with winning records.
After the jump, a possible explanation of the disparity between the two surfaces.
