Dave Albee
SAN FRANCISCO
FIVE YEARS AGO this month when Cal coach Jeff Tedford attended his first Bay Area college football media day as the Bears rookie head coach, the landscape was quite different all around him. Stanford and San Jose State already had their houses in order, but Cal was shopping in the lumberyard at the Home Depot, so to speak. Stanford's football program was so universally respected coming off a 9-3 season that Notre Dame lured Cardinal coach Tyrone Willingham to come to work for the Fighting Irish in South Bend. San Jose State's football program, under energetic second-year head coach Dr. Fitz Hill, figured it was on the upswing, which indeed it was. The Spartans were on the verge of a six-win season, only its second six-win season in a decade. But Cal's football program was off the radar and in the gutter.
"The 1-and-10 thing," Tedford said. Cal, after enduring its first 10-loss season in the 119-year history of the sport in Berkeley, was so far on the bottom of the proverbial Bay Area college football totem pole that its mouth was covered with dirt. Under this backdrop, Tedford was placed in front of a podium and microphone to sell his team in a room full of journalists who doubted he had the wherewithal to win them over. "More than anything the transition was to get to know you people at that point," Tedford said to a large group of reporters surrounding his table Thursday at the annual media day at a San Francisco restaurant. "The landscape at this event (in 2001), I was really more focused on getting to know everybody here than what was going to happen with our team. It's just the opposite now. I'm more comfortable in here than what's going to happen with our team." The Bears have won 26 games the past three seasons, each ending with bowl game appearances. They return 18 starters from last year's eight-win team and they are currently ranked in the top 10 in five different publications. Cal obviously is now the sovereign saint in the Bay Area college football scene and it upgraded its schedule to start this season against two touted teams from power conferences - at Tennessee on Sept. 2 and at home against Minnesota on Sept. 9. "I'm not sure to play Tennessee and Minnesota in the same year that any combination of those two type of teams you want to live on year after year," Tedford said. "This (Cal) team is a team that can hopefully handle that challenge. I think we are."
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