Wednesday, November 07, 2007

San Jose Mercury: Cal vs. USC: The big letdown

Don’t know about Hotline readers near and far, but I’m depressed about this Cal-USC situation. I wanted it to be the game of the year in the Pac-10 and one of the two or three biggest of the year nationally. I wanted it to be the biggest game Cal’s played in a half-century. I wanted both teams to be undefeated and ranked in the top-five. I wanted the Rose Bowl to be on the line. I wanted there to be major BCS implications. I wanted to see two Heisman candidates making their cases on national TV. Instead, we get No. 12 against No. 24. Instead, we the teams that were ranked No. 2 (USC) and No. 3 (Cal) in the country just over a month ago now have that many losses each — two for the Trojans and three for the Bears. USC is tied for third in the Pac-10, still in the Rose Bowl race but not in control of its own destiny. Cal is tied for fifth, needing so much help to get to Pasadena it’s not even worth mentioning unless the Bears win Saturday.

There’s not even a Heisman candidate on the field.  USC quarterback John David Booty was playing poorly, broke his finger and disappeared from the race. Cal receiver DeSean Jackson … does he even play for Cal anymore? Oh, yeah — he’s the guy who seems to argue for pass interference on every play. (Half-joking on that: Jackson has had a good season with a few great moments.) I wasn’t rooting for a Cal-USC mega-collision because I’m a fan of either team, and I wouldn’t have cared who won. But as a fan of college football in general and a watcher/chronicler of Bay Area college football specifically, I wanted to see a game that meant EVERYTHING. Now we get a game that only means SOMETHING.

Granted, SOMETHING is not NOTHING:  It’s still Cal vs. USC, the two best programs in the Pac-10 over the past five years. It’s still Tedford vs. Carroll, offensive wiz against defensive mastermind.  It’s still two ranked teams, still has Rose Bowl implications, still means a ton to both teams. But SOMETHING sure ain’t EVERYTHING. What happened? (I’ll get to the “why” in a minute.)  On Oct. 6, USC was undefeated and ranked No. 2, Cal undefeated and ranked No. 3. That evening, the Trojans were stunned by Stanford in the greatest upset in college football history — a 40-point underdog with a rookie quarterback beat the nation’s best program on its home field, where it hadn’t lost in six years.

The following week, Cal rose to No. 2 and, after LSU lost, was hours from being No. 1. But the Bears stumbled against Oregon State when Tedford bypassed a tying field goal with 14 seconds left and backup QB Kevin Riley was tackled in-bounds, ending the game. Then Cal lost the next week, Oct. 20, at UCLA. Then both teams lost on Oct. 27, Cal at Arizona State, USC at Oregon. So here they are: the Bears have three Ls, the Trojans two. And there’s still a month to go. Unreal.  Turns out, this is probably the fifth-most important game of Cal’s season, behind Tennessee, Oregon, Oregon State and UCLA. Doubly unreal. That’s the “what happened,” but how about the “why”? In general …  Both teams have been derailed by a variety of issues, including bad breaks and opponents who turned out to be better than anyone thought when the season began. No question, injuries to the starting quarterbacks, Booty and Nate Longshore, have played a huge role in the events. Longshore was not available against Oregon State and hasn’t fully recovered from that sprained ankle. Booty broke the finger during the Arizona game, which contributed to his subpar performance (and USC’s five turnovers), and his replacement, Mark Sanchez, couldn’t get it done at Oregon. It’s no coincidence that the two teams atop the Pac-10 standings, Oregon and ASU, have had healthy quarterbacks all season (except for the end of their game last weekend when Dennis Dixon went down with a minor knee injury).

I also think Carroll and Tedford and their staffs have made a blunder or two. Carroll should have gotten Booty out of the Stanford game instead of letting him continue to play (and play poorly) with the broken finger.  Also, the Trojans did not have Sanchez as prepared to play subsequent games as they should have, given his three years in the program. Tedford should have taken the tying field goal against Oregon State, rather than letting Kevin Riley try for the end zone with 14 seconds left and not timeouts. When two of the four outcomes of a single play (TD, INT, sack, tackle) lose the game for you, you kick.  Also, the Bears probably should have been more creative and aggressive defensively in a few of those losses. But mostly, the mega-collision between Cal and USC is no longer possible because those things rarely materialize.  So much can go wrong over the course of two months, and there are so many potential pitfalls — especially in a tough conference like the Pac-10 — that you almost never see two undefeated teams from the same league on the second Saturday of November. It happened last year in the Big Ten (a week later than this) with Ohio State and Michigan, but that Big Ten wasn’t as good as this Pac-10 and those teams didn’t have to go weeks without healthy starting quarterbacks. So what we’re left with Saturday in Berkeley is an important game between two ranked rivals trying to make the most of seasons that didn’t meet expectations. That’s not nothing. But it’s not everything.

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