By BARRY KELLY
Monday, September 12, 2005
SEATTLE—I know it’s only two games into the year, but let’s take a quick look at a telling early season statistic. Marcus O’Keith has rushed eight times for 172 yards and two touchdowns this season. I’ll pause for a moment while you digest that. And let me throw something else out there—O’Keith is the third-string tailback on the Cal football team. Such is the state of the Bears’ running attack in this wonderful world known as The Jeff Tedford Era. The coach of the No. 15 Bears is renown for his ability to mold quarterbacks into first-round NFL Draft picks, but people seem to either forget or ignore that in addition to being a quarterback guru, Tedford is a running back master, and he keeps getting better. Joe Igber begat Adimchinobe Echemandu begat J.J. Arrington begat Marshawn Lynch. And the list of backs behind Lynch is so deep, the Cal coaches and players hardly batted an eyelid after Saturday’s 56-17 drubbing of Washington at Husky Stadium even when Lynch broke his finger midway through the game.
Running back coach Ron Gould—the lone holdover from Tom Holmoe’s woeful stint as the Bears’ head coach—is practically inundated in talent. His third-stringer has an average of 21.5 yards per carry over two games. The team’s second-stringer, Justin Forsett, carried the ball 11 times for 77 yards against the Huskies. “They’re my boys, I love ‘em. And T-Dub!” Lynch said, referencing Terrell Williams, a senior tailback who ran four times for 23 yards Saturday. Tedford has turned Cal into a college version of the NFL’s Denver Broncos—the kind of team that seems to be able to plug in any running back and have success. He thinks so highly of all the backs on the team that he regularly refuses to rank them on a depth chart, insisting that after Lynch, they are all “slashed,” meaning he doesn’t regard one as being better or more valuable than another. “Our running backs are deep and they’re great,” said offensive tackle Ryan O’Callaghan, one of the men who has a huge impact in the Bears’ ground attack, regardless of who is carrying the ball. The key to Tedford’s success with tailbacks seems to be the give-and-take relationship he has developed with them. All the backups—Forsett, O’Keith, even Williams—could be starters on a different team. Yet they remain at Cal, loyal to Tedford and his system. After all, it was Tedford who recognized their talent in the first place.
Here’s an example—Forsett was a spectacular back at Grace Prep in Arlington, Texas. In his junior and senior seasons, he ran for almost 5,000 yards and scored 63 touchdowns. He was recruited by then-Notre Dame coach Tyrone Willingham and was set to move to South Bend, Ind., when the Irish pulled out at the last minute, leaving Forsett without a college team. Tedford swooped in and offered him a scholarship. A true sophomore like Lynch, Forsett likely won’t have an opportunity to start until 2007, if Lynch decides to declare for the NFL Draft following his junior campaign. In Saturday’s game, Tedford seemed to reward Forsett by putting him in for a dive play with seconds left in the fourth quarter.
Forsett took the handoff and ran 35 yards into the end zone, as if saying, “Remember me?” to Willingham, who is now at Washington. Odds are, Willingham won’t soon overlook Forsett again.
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