SF Chroncle: One-dimensional Bears show best, worst in L.A.

Ray Ratto

Sunday, October 9, 2005

In the end, California ran out of ... oh, who the hell knows? Tailbacks? Luck? Stout defense? The smile of whatever deity has been guiding their football program the last couple of years?  Take your choice. The Golden Bears will certainly make their own bile-filled guesses at what happened in the Rose Bowl, knowing it to be the punishment that comes with losing a game that seemed to have been won at least thrice.  Saturday's galling 47-40 loss to UCLA at the Rose Bowl showed the Golden Bears at their best, and worst, and most confounding. And now, with a BCS bowl all but someone else's concern, and the slight hope of the Pacific-10 conference title largely dependent upon the kindnesses of strangers, they will have all the time they need to contemplate what was, what wasn't, and what could have been.  

There. Time's up.

The 10th-ranked Bears moved the ball a lot, largely because of Marshawn Lynch and Justin Forsett, otherwise known until further notice as The Offense. The two combined for 290 yards on their own; when Forsett wasn't finding small holes to slip through unnoticed, Lynch was ignoring them for the singular joy of dragging five tacklers with him to his destination.  But theirs were unsatisfying triumphs (Lynch, in fact, did not play at all in the first quarter for missing a position meeting earlier in the week, which was particularly unsatisfying indeed), because UCLA was plainly better in what head coach Karl Dorrell called "a gut check for a team that's young and undersized."  As well as a team that has all the Maurice Drew anyone can handle.  In blowing leads of 14-0, 27-14, and 40-28, the Bears displayed the fullness of their gifts (two tailbacks who seem like three), and the depths of their shortcomings -- a defense that ran out of ways to deal with Drew, who scored five times and made plays with nearly every touch, and the continuing major-in-hard-knocks-with-a-minor-in-no-don't-do-that-now education of quarterback Joe Ayoob.  And in failing to hold those leads, they showed the rest of the Pac-10 that they can be regarded as a one-dimensional offensive team until further notice because their passing game is unconvincing at best, and that they can be stopped, as they were three times Saturday night, settling for field goals that could have been converted into 12 more points.  "We had plenty of opportunities," coach Jeff Tedford lamented afterward, making it clear that he regarded the failures to be team-wide, all the better for film study tortures this coming week.

Are these hanging offenses? Well, that depends on whether you were keeping New Year's Week open. In truth, almost certainly not, but that's the answer that comes with perspective, and after a game like this, perspective doesn't come all that easily.  The defense, for example, had not been fully tested by an opponent until Saturday, and came up floppy way too many times, including five times in their own red zone. They weren't crushed statistically by quarterback Drew Olson, or even by Drew for that matter. They held the Bruins to 150 fewer yards and nine fewer first downs than their own offense amassed, after all.  But five scores from one guy are still five scores, and if one of them is an 81-yard punt return, that only shows one more thing the Bruins could do that Cal didn't.  Cal is now 5-1, with two seemingly easy opponents ahead in Oregon State and Washington, a potentially difficult game at Eugene against Oregon, and then the game that could have determined so many things for the Golden Bears, USC on Nov. 12.  Instead, the Golden Bears are playing catch-up. Not just with the Trojans, who likely would never have been caught anyway, but with their own aspirations and expectations.

The Bears are now a team that has noticeable weaknesses to go with their equally identifiable strengths. They are now part of the great better-than-average muddle, somewhere in the high teens in the rankings and roaming with other good but not great teams like Minnesota, Boston College and  TCU.

But that's the national view. The local view is that they run almost too well and throw not well enough, and that their defense is better than they advertised Saturday (Drew can stupid people up without half trying, you see), but still not an overwhelming unit. The special teams are still an occasional annoyance, but that is an ongoing struggle even by Jeff Tedford's own admission.  Are these things fixable? Some are, others may take the rest of the schedule and a full offseason. Can the Bears still end up 9-2 and get a good bowl invitation out of this season? They ought to, though the Oregon game now becomes the wild card rather than an affirmation.  But Saturday's was a game that leaves scars. It ought to. Three wins, four losses, all in one night (albeit a long night in keeping with the TBS tradition of having games last upward of four hours no matter what), and in every sport with extended playoffs, that fourth loss will get you every time.