San Francisco Chronicle: Win Both Convincing and Entertaining

Ray Ratto

Like most Holiday Bowls, this one will be neither long remembered nor particularly noteworthy. The Pacific 10 and Big 12 conferences make strange bedfellows, given that they have little enough common history and therefore no burning rivalries. Indeed, the closest the two groups ever got was decades ago, when Texas and Colorado showed interest in joining the Pac-10 during the breakup of the Southwest Conference.  But for the California Golden Bears, this was plenty good enough. As strange as it seems for a 10-win team, they needed a strong send-off to eradicate the ambivalence they had engendered over the last four games of the regular season, and to reinforce for the fresh doubters why, in fact, these are the best times the football program has had since the Pappy Waldorf era.  And so they got it, a 45-10 throttling of Texas A&M at Qualcomm Stadium that finished off a year that will feel better in retrospect than it did in November.  No, this did not wipe out the sting of the loss to USC that essentially resigned them to the Holiday Bowl for the second time in three years, but it did provide some serious end-time feelgood to a season that seemed at times to be less than its numbers.

Marshawn Lynch's 112 yards and two touchdowns looked like classic Chuck Muncie. Justin Forsett's 125 yards and a score on eight carries looked a lot like Lynch. Nate Longshore's 235 yards on 19-of-24 passing looked like Pat Barnes circa 1996. DeSean Jackson was the spitting image of Geoff MacArthur in 2003.  And head coach Jeff Tedford got to beat back the brushfires of criticism that licked at the outer edges of the program with the school's most convincing postseason performance since the 37-3 win over Iowa in the '93 Alamo Bowl.  The biggest question left for 2006 is to determine when Lynch will announce that he is forgoing the rest of his college career for the rich, green pastures of the NFL, for few people believe he sees much personal value in staying.  But it must be said that he went out not as an observer, as he had against Stanford in the dry-as-bone-meal Big Game, but as the most obvious contributor on a night that featured many of them. His two touchdowns essentially molded an intriguing game into a hunch rout, and he attacked both the blocking lanes and the Aggies who tried to clog them with the verve and aggression that suggests a long and lucrative future in the running-into-large-men-for-money game.  It was more than just Lynch, though. Longshore, the occasionally maligned quarterback, was almost chillingly efficient, and the only cross moment he seemed to have the entire night was after he short-hopped the game's first pass to Jackson; Jackson had a wide-receiver-scorned on-field chat with Longshore.  Jackson controlled his space, finding seams and backing the A&M secondary away from his favorite curl and fade routes, ending up with 82 yards on five catches that helped cement his reputation as the best receiver north of Dwayne Jarrett. Oh, the defense was outstanding as well, reacting well after some early confusion over the Aggies' option offense. They bent a bit but broke only the one time, and if your taste runs toward that sort of thing, you got your dough's worth.  But if defense floats your fleet, you are in the minority among the folks who sit in your section. Cal was being doubted as a national player by its most ardent supporters because its offense wasn't full of jaw-dropping magic, trickery and effervescence.

Indeed, there has been for some time now a suspicion that the Golden Bear offense promises more than it delivers, which is another way of saying folks are more willing to be oversold on its virtues than chastened by its occasional stutters.

Thursday, though, Tedford used the back of the playbook on a number of occasions, making the attack less about the game-breaking abilities of Lynch and Jackson, and more about keeping A&M off-balance in general and suspicious of every shift and use of motion. In short, the Holiday Bowl brought out the tactical imp in Tedford, and his willingness to break programming early opened up the more straightforward Lynch here/Jackson there attack that broke the game open in the second half.  Put another way, doing things like the direct snap to Lynch on Cal's second touchdown made it easier to shake Jackson free for the 27-yard out that set up Cal's third touchdown.  As a result, this season ended for the Bears in a far more uplifting way than either of the past two seasons, because (a) the Golden Bears won their final game, and (b) showed more of the sizzle that keeps the customers interested in the steak.  That's the thing about Cal - even more than winning in the good times, its constituency demands a fair amount of wow to go with it. Cal can never be a stout defensive team, winning 13-7 and passing it off as a great afternoon for the ticket-buyers. They want Lynch and Jackson, like anyone with a brain listed higher than Turnip, Third Class, but they also want to suspect that every play holds the possibility of wonder to go with the heavy lifting.  Which is why Tedford had been kicked about a bit by the rank and file after the USC loss, and almost as much after the desultory win over Stanford. It was as if Cal had backed into the Holiday Bowl, some sort of mutant NFC team descending upon the college game.  And why, as a result of Thursday's convincing and entertaining victory, those complainers will downshift into second gear for awhile. Whatever they may define as the proper context for whipping up on Texas A&M, they cannot deny that it was forceful and unambiguous, and an evening well spent for those who enjoy that sort of thing.  And as 10th wins go, it was not only one of their best, but exactly what a program unsure of its place in the bigger picture or of the love of its most ardent fans desperately needed.