San Jose Mercury: Cal's outlook is sunny after win in the wet

By Mark Purdy

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The story behind the story: the Cal football team found Saturday's victory over Oregon in a trash can.  Coach Jeff Tedford rolled out the trash can last week at practice. The can was filled with water. Footballs were dunked inside. "Then we pulled out the footballs and kicked them and snapped them," Tedford explained. "That's how it works."  All of this was in preparation for what Tedford suspected would be a rainy and wet game at Memorial Stadium. Good scouting report. Saturday wasn't just rain and wet. It was flash-flood football.   In the end, Cal hydroplaned to a 26-16 slosh job over the good-but-not-great Ducks. The victory was huge because it kept Cal trailing USC by just half a game for the top spot in the Pac-10, and sets up a watershed game between the teams next weekend in Los Angeles.  And if nothing else, after Saturday, the Bears should be prepared for a watershed game.

One reason: After starting quarterback Kevin Riley went out with a concussion, Nate Longshore stepped in and did a good job of controlling the ball in the downpour. But the biggest play was a bobbled fourth-quarter punt return by Oregon's Jairus Bird. He mishandled the ball as it dropped out of the soggy sky and fumbled it away to the Bears at the Ducks' 6-yard line. Two plays later, Cal scored the clinching touchdown.  "As we preach with turnovers," Tedford said, "the team that had the last turnover today was the team that lost."

Which was a good thing for the Bears, because they had all sorts of trouble with turnovers in the first half. Fortunately, Oregon managed only six points from all those errors. Cal coughed it up four times — once on an interception by Riley, twice on fumbles by running back Jahvid Best and the other time on a fumble by runner Shane Vereen.

Perhaps the trash-can lesson didn't take until halftime. Or perhaps you can credit the, ahem, pep talk that Best and Vereen received from running-backs coach Ron Gould in the locker room. Because in the final two quarters, at crunch time, Best and Vereen were solid and didn't lose the ball once.  "He told us to wake up,'' Best said. "He chewed us out. But we deserved it." Something else to remember, though: The offense is not the only unit that handles the ball on wet days. And in the Bears' case, the defense must have used that trash-can preparation quite well. In the first half Cal twice intercepted passes by Oregon quarterback Jeremiah Masoli. The Ducks also gave up two points on a safety when the ball was snapped over punter Josh Syria's head and out of the end zone.

If you are scoring at home, that means Cal turned three of Oregon's miscues — the fumbled punt, one interception and a safety — into 16 points. Meanwhile, the Ducks only got those six points off Cal's turnovers. In a sense, the game turned into kind of a slurpy math equation.  And for the record, Oregon Coach Mike Bellotti did not like the math. He was especially perturbed by one aspect of the playing conditions. Memorial Stadium has artificial turf, which means mud was not a problem. But for some reason, all the water flowed toward the north end zone and created a puddle several inches deep that stretched out to the 25-yard line.

It was in this very puddle — Lake Tedford? — that Oregon kicker Matt Evensen lined up to attempt a 29-yard field goal that would have tied the score at 19-19 early in the fourth quarter. Hampered by the slosh, the kick was no good. "We were pretty much playing in a swamp,'' said Oregon center Max Unger.  Bellotti said, "It was a bad day to play football. It was a bad field to play football. There was standing water on the field. And in this day and age, that's unheard of." Tedford sympathized. "We're supposed to have better drainage. We've got to talk to the groundskeeping and facilities people."

But for the next six days, Cal can talk about something more dreamy. That, of course, would be the possibility of an upset victory over USC on Saturday. It's unlikely, of course. But Cal controls its own fate. The Bears could win out and finish first in the conference and make a Rose Bowl trip — not that Tedford wants to hear anything like that. "It's way too early to talk about any bowl," he said. Oops. He'd better talk to linebacker Mike Mohamed, who is excited about the USC challenge and said, "The Pac-10 championship and the Rose Bowl are definitely up for grabs."

The bottom line is this: Amid the puddles and breaking surf, Cal ended up getting a gulp of new life in the conference race. And the Bears deserved it. If someone tells you Cal does not deserve to be playing for a Rose Bowl invitation next week, here's what you can tell them:  That's trash.