Looking at Cal football a few days beyond the loss.

[katster]

You know?

I was upset on Saturday and bitterly disappointed with the results of Cal football. It was oh so close for three quarters, and then they just kinda blew us away at the last. Sure, there's several places where it could have gone better, but we kept the USC offense out of the endzone for a large chunk of the game, and that's got to count for something.

Besides, there's a couple of things I've been thinking about. Between 1959 and 2001, Cal was really in contention for the Rose Bowl during two of those seasons (1975 and 1991). Since Tedford came along, we've been in contention twice in five years. So in some ways, Tedford is the victim of his own success. We whine about not winning the big ones when just five years ago, we couldn't beat Stanford once in seven tries. Forget about *being* in big games, we didn't have much success in the Big Game.

I was reading back in my journal in 2001, and found several comments of "well, another loss." About November, jokes were starting to be made about the "perfect" season. And then finally, the season ended on this note:

So...no perfect season  

But we WON a GAME. Yeah! No more losing streak!

California ends the season 1-10, with their lone win over Rutgers. We beat 'em 20-10.

Now...would things have been different if we'd played this game September 15th as scheduled? A confidence booster going into the brutal Pac-10 schedule...who knows. But at least we avoided losing to Rutgers... :)

To go from that, to five years later feeling punched in the gut because we lost to USC with the Rose Bowl on the line? Holee crap, y'know? A bit of perspective, that's all I needed. And yeah. We were *UP AT THE HALF* against USC. We'd scored a touchdown and they hadn't.

We'll break through.

In the meantime, though...GO BEARS! BEAT THE TREE! My ticket's sitting right on top of my drawer thingy, and I ain't missing this for the world.

Date	Opponent	Cal score	Opp. score	Cal total	Opp. total
9/2	@Tennessee	18	35	18	35
9/9	Minnesota	42	17	60	52
9/16	Portland State	42	16	102	68
9/23	Arizona State	49	21	151	89
9/30	@Oregon State	41	13	192	102
10/7	Oregon	45	24	237	126
10/14	@Washington State	21	3	258	129
10/21	Washington	31	24 (OT)	289	153
11/4	UCLA	38	24	327	177
11/11	@Arizona	20	24	347	201
11/18	@USC	9	23	356	224
12/2	109th Big Game v. Stanford
TBD	Bowl Game TBD
Total Wins		8	Cal Avg PPG		32.4
Total Losses		3	Opp Avg PPG		20.1