PETERSON: TIMES COLUMNIST
BERKELEY - What Cal quarterback Joe Ayoob needs Saturday afternoon is something as safe as a baby aspirin and as certain as a Chicago mayoral election. Ayoob needs a gimme right out of the chute, a layup, a no-brainer. He needs to throw a football from this side of the page to the other. And he needs for someone on his team to catch it. That's all. He needs to be delivered from Schneidville. He needs to complete a pass, something he was unable to do in 10 attempts in his Division I debut last Saturday. Forget footwork, follow-throughs and progressions. This isn't a technical consideration. It's purely psychological. Ayoob's first pass against Washington on Saturday should be a confidence booster. It should help him get his groove back, so he can forget about the 0-fers and go about the business of playing quarterback. Not to tell Cal coach Jeff Tedford what to do or anything, but wouldn't that be the smart play? I mean, wouldn't it? "Yeah," Tedford said Tuesday, with impish understatement. "That would probably be a good idea."
You know the story. Ayoob was Cal's second-string quarterback for about 28 minutes of Saturday's season-opening game against Sacramento State, having lost out to redshirt freshman Nate Longshore during training camp. But Longshore suffered a broken leg in the waning moments of the half. Ayoob, a junior college transfer, was rushed in just in time to oversee the two-minute drill. "It's always good to get the first (completion) out of the way," he said. "I'd like to have done that last week, but it didn't happen. My first six balls were all 30 yards down the field." They were aggressive, ambitious passes. They also were incomplete. "That kind of rattled me," he said. Ayoob was 0-for-10 when Tedford mercifully replaced him in the third quarter. "At that point you're trying to save the kid more than anything," Tedford said.
The education of Joe Ayoob will continue at practice this week, and while there are plenty of mechanical elements to review, Tedford's work will be as much inside the helmet as outside. And, in fact, that work began on Tuesday as Tedford attempted to spritz a little reality on the five-alarm expectations of Cal football fans. "We've got to give him a chance," Tedford said. "We've had Kyle Boller here, Aaron Rodgers here. People almost get used to perfection. Of course when (a quarterback) misses some, they're going to say, 'What's going on here?'" Tedford reminded anyone who would listen that Rodgers was far from a finished product in his first game (a 9-for-13 effort against Kansas State). And he recalled the afternoon Rodgers went 9-for-34 for 52 yards against Oregon State and would have been benched had he not been part of a collective meltdown.
What Tedford could have added had he been here at the time is that Sam Clemons -- you remember Sam, right? -- started at quarterback in the first game of Boller's Cal career. It's the oldest truism on the college football books, that when you throw newbies into the fire, a large percentage of them tend to go snap, crackle and pop. Tedford is pushing it for all it's worth in the interest of creating a milder climate for Ayoob. "I'm watching all these games on tape, and I see quarterbacks throwing the ball high, into the ground," he said. "We've just become spoiled watching Kyle and Aaron throw BBs all over the field." It also is true, however, that no coach in the wide world of sports is going to tell his team, "One last thing -- let's go easy on the other team's quarterback. He's a new kid, and he's following a tough act over there." That would go double for Washington's Tyrone Willingham, who, as his 7-0 career record against Cal would suggest, has delighted in tormenting Golden Bears of every positional persuasion over the years.
The bottom line is this: At some point, Ayoob is going to have to validate the faith Tedford is investing in him. The inner player personnel director in your soul might have its own views on the odds of that happening. First, however, Ayoob needs to complete a pass -- just one pass -- to get back on familiar ground and rid himself of the dead weight that a 00.0 completion percentage and an 0.00 efficiency rating can carry. Let him feel what it's like to be 1-for-his-last-1. Then let's see what he can do. "All you need is one to get going," he said. "You're just playing football after that." That goes without saying, though Tedford would gladly repeat it back to you if you ask nicely enough.
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