BERKELEY-In most other regions of America, a top-10 ranked college football team would be a huge deal. The biggest deal around. But it's only a passing fancy in Northern California, where the rah-rah-sis-boom-bah is just above niche sport material, the fourth or fifth option in the sports pages and on your radio dials. Oh, it's not as if Cal's assault on national college football rankings is unimportant here. It's just that most people would rather first hear about who will displace that good-for-nothing Pedro Feliz on the Giants' roster. Or they want a breakdown of the 49ers' chances of holding opponents under 41 points in a half. God forbid that the nationally ranked Bears be more than just a hot ticket for Old Blues descending to watch the new Greatest Show on Turf at Memorial Stadium in Strawberry Canyon -- site of Saturday's game against UCLA, one of the biggest on the Berkeley campus in a half century. This is the first Cal team marching toward the Rose Bowl with such authority since Eisenhower was president, yet God forbid they be as important as the woeful 49ers, miserable Raiders, mediocre Warriors or a Kings team with more question marks than the Kings' future in Sacramento.
This week, Cal is No. 10 in the latest BCS standings and No. 10 in the Associated Press and USA Today polls. And when USC lost last Saturday to Oregon State, the Trojans fell a game behind a first-place Cal team in the Pacific-10 that last won its conference outright in 1958. That makes Saturday's game against UCLA a huge deal in the context of a potentially historic Bears season building toward a Nov. 18 showdown with the Trojans in Los Angeles. "I told (a teammate) that suddenly we went from being the hunters to being the hunted," said Worrell Williams, a sophomore defensive standout who graduated from Grant High School in Sacramento. Suddenly, every Cal game will have an impact on the Bears being in the national-championship conversation, a very real possibility next season if Cal wins the Pac-10 and prevails in the Rose Bowl against a national power this season. Just don't talk this way around Cal coach Jeff Tedford, who doesn't want to hear it, is trying to shield his players from it and grows chilly whenever taboo phrases such as "USC" and "Rose Bowl" are raised by oily scribes like me. "I told the players not to fall into the media's trap," Tedford said this week. Thus the underwhelming local media scope of Cal's ascension to the peaks of college football seems OK to the man who created all the excitement in the first place by turning around Cal's dying program in 2002. Tedford doesn't get off on the notoriety in his trade of 80-hour work weeks. He seems all about the journey, the million little details of creating a unit that looks glorious to the outside world yet keeps its secrets cloistered in the macho circle of coaches so driven they sleep in their offices during the week.
Shouldn't the exploits of his players -- scalding hot quarterback Nate Longshore; the best running back duo in the nation in Marshawn Lynch and Justin Forsett; and world-class wide receiver DeSean Jackson -- be getting more attention as they take Cal football to heights not reached since face masks were optional? "I don't really pay a lot of attention to that," Tedford said. "Whether we are ranked 30th or ranked 10th, I don't know that it really matters. Maybe it does." And what if all his offensive stars come back next season, a possibility since all are underclassmen? Wouldn't they put Cal in the hunt for a national championship? "I haven't put any thought into that whatsoever," Tedford said. "I'll think about it after the season."
It's a good thing then that replacing Feliz at third base for the Giants -- or the 49ers' betrayal of their golden legacy -- is so much more compelling to locals than Cal as a college football powerhouse. Otherwise, Tedford could really get annoyed.
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