Jonathan Okanes
The film room has not been kind to Cal's football team so far this season. For the second time in three games, the Bears are preparing for an opponent with a new defensive coordinator. It happened in the season opener against Maryland and is taking place again as Cal gets ready to visit Minnesota on Saturday. Just like the opener against the Terrapins, when the Bears tried to figure out the tendencies of new defensive coordinator Don Brown, Cal is in the position of preparing for a defense without much film to study. The Gophers have played just two games under new co-defensive coordinator Kevin Cosgrove.
The Bears had no current film of the Terps to study because they had yet to play a game under Brown. They did watch tape of Brown's defense at his previous stop, the University of Massachusetts. The Gophers have played two games with Cosgrove, but one was against Air Force, which runs the spread option. The Bears won't bother watching much of that game, because the defensive schemes Minnesota employed against the Falcons will be nothing like what Cal will see Saturday.
"We haven't had great film this year to try to prepare from, and this is no different," Cal coach Jeff Tedford said. "Really, you're only going off the Syracuse game (Minnesota's opener). Every time Air Force is on someone's schedule, you pretty much have to throw that game out because everybody does something specific to the option that they typically don't do on an every-down basis."
As far as watching Cosgrove's defense at a previous stop? He didn't even coach last season after getting fired along with Bill Callahan's entire coaching staff at Nebraska in 2007. "It always makes it a little more difficult," Cal quarterback Kevin Riley said. "The first game we had an idea of what they were going to do, and they did it. So it worked out. It's not the first time we've had to go through this. We'll be ready to play, that's all I know."
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