Maybe you missed it — Cal quietly gave Jeff Tedford a two-year contract extension, announcing it New Year's Day while a lot of people were still sleeping off New Year's Eve. The job offer(s) which likely triggered the extension never went public, a remarkable thing considering the cache of a smartly played, anonymously sourced rumor. According to reports, the deal does not include a raise. If this isn't unprecedented it certainly runs contrary to the SOP regarding the care and feeding of big-time college football coaches. It happened so quickly, the locals never even had time to work through the seven stages of We Might Lose Our Coach. With all the fanfare of a guy stopping at the ATM to pull out a quick $40 for the weekend, it was announced as a done deal. It was so matter-of-fact that Tedford finally may have established himself as that rarest of coaching breeds — the nester. He's been working on us for years, rolling his eyes every time his name was attached to a head coaching vacancy. He has insisted he likes it here, that his family likes it here, that he was willing to outwait the tree sitters for the program upgrade a student high-performance center would represent, that he could see himself retiring from the first head coaching job he ever had.
In doing so, of course, he sounded like every other highly regarded coach who professed his love for his current job even as he was negotiating the terms of his next one. It's nobody's fault, really. We're a skeptical lot to begin with, and Tedford's chosen profession is one in which Nick Saban is the rule almost without exception. Now, however, we pretty much have to consider the possibility that Tedford means what he says. That's snap judgment No. 1.
Snap judgment No. 1A: If this doesn't signal a transition in Tedford's career arc, it at least spotlights it. He has built a program — now that program is building a legacy. Should Tedford fulfill the terms of his contract as it is currently written, he'll coach through the 2015 season. And if he does that, he'll establish a body of work unparalleled at Cal. He's already bearing down on school standards. His seven seasons as coach (football, James Schaefer fans, not rugby) rank fifth — Pappy Waldorf, Stub Allison and Andy Smith hold the record with 10. He's fourth in games coached (89; the record is 103), and wins (59; the record is 74). His .663 winning percentage is third among Cal coaches with 20 games or more. Of the 10 bowl wins in Cal history, Tedford has accounted for half.
There are holes on the resume, to be sure. He has yet to win an outright Pac-10 championship. Then there's the Rose Bowl thing. But if he hasn't delivered Old Blues and their clinical obsession to Pasadena, he's at least revived the notion as a possibility. Even bigger than that, he has resolved a monstrous, long-standing parochial "what if?" — as in, what if Cal ever combined its considerable resources with a good football coach who stuck around. What would happen then? Steve Mariucci referred to the program as a sleeping giant when he took the head coaching position in 1996. He was right then, he was right when he left for the 49ers after one season at Cal, and he was right until the moment Tedford showed up in 2002.
The program isn't sleeping anymore. Its highly regarded coach has it annually competitive pretty much to the extent that resources and institutional philosophy permit. He's got the full support of donors and the administration. He runs a relatively clean machine, and by all appearances he has dropped anchor. What does that kind of thing get a fellow at Cal? Well, Waldorf won 103 games, and he's got a statue on campus. Smith won 97 games, and is immortalized by the Andy Smith bench on the Cal sideline at Memorial Stadium. The team's annual most inspirational award is named for Allison (102 wins). Jeff Tedford Field at the New Memorial Stadium? There have been longer shots at Cal. We've been watching one the past seven years.
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