By Jon Wilner
Cal's home opener Saturday against Minnesota means everything. It also means nothing. It's a chance for the Bears to recover their confidence, find a quarterback, generate momentum for the conference season and flush the Tennessee loss from their system. But in the larger sense -- the national championship sense, the Bowl Championship Series at-large-berth sense -- the game is essentially meaningless. In the eyes of Heisman voters, the minds of top-25 voters and the circuitry of BCS computers, the Bears cannot recover from the Knoxville debacle. Programs like Cal get precious few chances to impress college football fans in the South and Midwest who believe that West Coast teams, with the exception of USC, are soft. Beat an SEC school on its home turf in front of 100,000-plus fans and a national-television audience, and respect will follow. Even a close loss can bring a modicum of clout. But Cal's colossal swing and miss will haunt the Bears for months, if not years. No matter what Cal does the rest of the season -- and that includes beating USC -- fans and voters in other time zones will see the Bears as the team that trailed Tennessee 35-0. The team that got hit and did not hit back. The team that cowered on the SEC stage.
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1 comment:
It's funny to read articles that both accept and deny the short term memory of reporters. Are you telling me that if we smack around Minnesota there won't be a contingent that says "Hey, maybe these Bears aren't so bad after all."? And I guarantee you that if we beat USC on the road while they're ranked in the top 5, Tennessee will be a distant memory.
But I will agree with him in one way: If we are vying for a at-large BCS bid, we won't get one. Why? Because it'll mean we lost to USC (or Oregon or UCLA) because they have the automatic berth. A two loss team doesn't get in to the BCS, particularly one that "loses to the only two good teams they played" (as the reporters will say).
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