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Cal Coach Jeff Tedford Rooting for Aaron Rodgers in Super Bowl

January 27, 2011   Michelle Smith   No comments

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How fitting that Cal football coach Jeff Tedford was on the two-lane road heading into Chico for a recruiting trip Wednesday — just days after his last success story from the same small California college town earned a ticket to the biggest show in sports.

Tedford watched his former quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, lead the Green Bay Packers to Super Bowl XLV by winning the NFC Championship Game on Sunday. He watched as a fan, cheering for Rodgers and another former Cal player and Packers linebacker Desmond Bishop. And he watched as a coach.

“I’ll break it down, watch tendencies, that kind of thing,” Tedford said. “But mostly, I was rooting for him and Des. I was watching both sides of the ball.”

Tedford is the coach who discovered Rodgers. Rodgers had not been offered a Division I scholarship and he was playing at Butte College in Chico when Tedford spotted him while there to recruit another player.

Tedford, who had previously mentored Trent Dilfer, Kyle Boller and David Carr, turned Rodgers from an under-regarded passer into a star college quarterback. Rodgers was named the starting quarterback by the fifth game of his debut season at Cal. He led Cal to bowl games at the end of the 2003 and 2004 seasons, finishing 10-1 in 2004, including a loss at USC in which Rodgers tied an NCAA record with 23 consecutive passes completed in one game.

 

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Cal’s Shane Vereen Headed to NFL Draft

January 01, 2011   Michelle Smith   No comments

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Cal tailback Shane Vereen is headed to the NFL. Vereen announced through the university Saturday night that he will enter the NFL Draft in April.

Vereen graduated from Cal in December with a degree in media studies. He said he has been discussing his decision with his family for more nearly a month since the season ended.

Cal finished with 5-7 record and failed to make a bowl game for the first time in eight years.

“After much thought and deliberation we decided that this was the best time for us to move forward and enter the 2011 NFL Draft,” Vereen said in a released statement. “I cherish my time at Cal and wouldn’t trade it for anything. This is one of the toughest decisions I have made, but feel like I will always be a part of the Cal family.”

 

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Cal Addressed Fake Injury Issue, Suspended Defensive Line Coach

November 27, 2010   Michelle Smith   No comments

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Cal suspended defensive line coach Tosh Lupoi for Saturday’s season finale against Washington for instructing a player to fake an injury in the 15-13 loss to Oregon on Nov. 13.

The announcement came after the Bears lost 16-13 to Washington, a defeat that knocks Cal out of bowl contention for the first time since Jeff Tedford came to the program in 2002.

Athletic director Sandy Barbour addressed the media after the game.

“This is a young coach who made a mistake. We make mistakes in life a lot,” Barbour said, according to a report by the Associated Press. “He stood up and he accepted responsibility for it. The head coach accepted responsibility for it and I accepted responsibility for it. That’s what we do as educators.”

Tedford reportedly said after the game that Lupoi would remain on staff.

 

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Pac-10 Report: The Season Has Been Rough on Quarterbacks

November 24, 2010   Michelle Smith   No comments

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It started as the Year of the Quarterback in the Pac-10, the conference feeling pretty good about its collective of talented passers.

Instead, It has turned out to be a rough year to be a quarterback in the Pac-10.

Eight starting quarterbacks have been knocked out of games this season.

Three quarterbacks — two starters, Cal’s Kevin Riley and UCLA‘s Kevin Prince and Oregon’s No. 2 Nate Costa — have been knocked out for the season with knee injuries.

Arizona’s Nick Foles and Washington’s Jake Locker have missed games because of injuries. Foles’ backup Matt Scott was injured as well.

Oregon’s Darron Thomas and Arizona State’s Steven Threet were knocked out of games, only to return the following week.

And the hits keep coming.

 

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Stanford Proving Jim Harbaugh Correct

November 20, 2010   Michelle Smith   No comments

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BERKELEY, Calif. — At the end of last season, when Jim Harbaugh was doing his postseason media wrap after an 8-5 campaign that ended with the program’s first bowl berth since 2002, he let loose with three magic letters: “BCS.”

He viewed his program, Stanford — the place where elite recruits have been tossed aside by the admissions office, where roster depth has been a near-impossibility, where opposing fans have outnumbered the home crowd on too many recent occasions, where good was always good enough and great was too much to expect — as a BCS-caliber program.

Let the eye-rolling begin.

“You guys thought, ‘More Harbaugh-isms’, right?” Harbaugh said.

He is, after all, Mr. Enthusiasm Unknown To Mankind. And now he’s Mr. Right.

Stanford is 10-1 after Saturday’s 48-14 thrashing of rival Cal. The Cardinal are undeniably the second-best team in the Pac-10 behind top-ranked Oregon. They are the No. 6 team in the nation, well within sight of an automatic berth in a BCS bowl game if they can only nudge up a couple more spots. How did this happen? How does Stanford have any business being this good?

“It’s been players and coaches and improvement,” Harbaugh said, emerging from the tunnel under Memorial Stadium after winning the 113th Big Game. “I’m not going to make any big statements.”

 

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Stanford Proving Jim Harbaugh Correct

November 20, 2010   Michelle Smith   No comments

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BERKELEY, Calif. — At the end of last season, when Jim Harbaugh was doing his postseason media wrap after an 8-5 campaign that ended with the program’s first bowl berth since 2002, he let loose with three magic letters: “BCS.”

He viewed his program, Stanford — the place where elite recruits have been tossed aside by the admissions office, where roster depth has been a near-impossibility, where opposing fans have outnumbered the home crowd on too many recent occasions, where good was always good enough and great was too much to expect — as a BCS-caliber program.

Let the eye-rolling begin.

“You guys thought, ‘More Harbaugh-isms’, right?” Harbaugh said.

He is, after all, Mr. Enthusiasm Unknown To Mankind. And now he’s Mr. Right.

Stanford is 10-1 after Saturday’s 48-14 thrashing of rival Cal. The Cardinal are undeniably the second-best team in the Pac-10 behind top-ranked Oregon. They are the No. 6 team in the nation, well within sight of an automatic berth in a BCS bowl game if they can only nudge up a couple more spots. How did this happen? How does Stanford have any business being this good?

“It’s been players and coaches and improvement,” Harbaugh said, emerging from the tunnel under Memorial Stadium after winning the 113th Big Game. “I’m not going to make any big statements.”

 

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Stanford Now Big Dog in Big Game

November 19, 2010   Michelle Smith   No comments

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For most of Jeff Tedford’s years at the Cal coach, his Bears team has been the big dog in its Big Game matchup with Stanford.

Cal was the ranked team, the team that hung around the top of Pac-10 standings, the team that had its bowl eligibility sewn up heading into game day, the roster with the NFL-bound star player.

But Saturday’s game represents a reversal of fortune for the Bay Area’s two Pac-10 schools.

Stanford is 9-1, ranked No. 6 in the BCS rankings and in line for the program’s biggest postseason opportunity since its 1999 trip to the Rose Bowl. The Cardinal are favored to win their first Big Game in Berkeley since 2000.

Cal, which has won seven of the last eight games before the 113th game of this series, is scrambling. The up-and-down Bears (5-5) need one more win to become bowl eligible for the eighth straight season. The Bears can win no more than seven games, matching the low win total in Tedford’s tenure at Cal. A 6-6 record would be the worst since Tedford arrived in 2002.

“If someone would have said we’d be 5-5 at this point, we’d have said you’re crazy,” linebacker Mike Mohamed said. “We had higher expectations. A bowl game would be great, but right now we’re just worried about the Big Game.”

Pac-10 Report: Cal Faking Injuries?

 

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Pac-10 Report: Are Opponents Faking Injuries to Slow Down Oregon?

November 17, 2010   Michelle Smith   No comments

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Oregon has seen it many times already this season.

The Ducks’ high-speed offense is rolling along at its standard blistering pace until … a player from the other team goes down with an injury, stopping play, stopping momentum.

Trainers come out, everybody waits as the player is taken off the field and the Ducks don’t get to play so fast after all.

Now the Ducks, they don’t want to say that anybody is faking … they’ll leave that to their fans and television commentators and bloggers. But they won’t say that they are not faking either.

Cal is the latest Pac-10 team to be the target of such soccer-esque accusations.

“If the league wants to look into stuff like that, that’s their prerogative. It’s not coming from me,” Ducks coach Chip Kelly said Tuesday. “I hear the boos sometimes when I’m calling plays, but I’m not sure what they are booing.”

Coy is not a look that works on Kelly very convincingly. It certainly doesn’t work on game day.

 

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Is Cal the One to Beat Oregon?

November 13, 2010   Michelle Smith   No comments

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The list of candidates is narrowing. Only Cal, Arizona and Oregon State stand between top-ranked Oregon and a ticket to the national championship game.

But in true Chip Kelly-style, we refuse to look any further than the next game. Adamantly refuse.

So here’s the salient question:

Could Cal be the the one? The one to knock the Ducks off the perch?

Odds say no, but let’s examine the possibilities.

The Bears can score. Keeping up with Oregon is more than half the battle. The Ducks put a lot of points on the board – a nation-leading 54.7 points per game — and only the offenses that are equally capable have any kind of chance.

Cal has been that team at times this season. The Bears have scored at least 50 points three times, but only once in conference play so far.

 

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Pac-10 Report: League Play Putting Hurt on Quarterbacks

November 03, 2010   Michelle Smith   No comments

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The year of the quarterback in the Pac-10 has gone a little wrong.

When the season began, the conference was chock-full of experienced, talented passers.

But with a month to go, some of those same experienced, talented guys are watching from the sidelines in warm-ups. Four of the 10 teams in the conference are currently, or have been, without their starting quarterback so far. Two starters are done for the year.

Washington quarterback Jake Locker is going to miss at least one game with a broken rib, a fracture that worsened during the Huskies’ 41-0 loss to Stanford last Saturday night. And the game he’s going to miss is a big one — the Huskies traveling to Eugene Saturday for a matchup against No. 1 Oregon. Washington coach Steve Sarkisian said that he’s hoping to get Locker back for the final three games of the season.

Cal’s fifth-year senior Kevin Riley, who was looking to finish his roller-coaster career on an up note, now ends his career with a serious knee injury, incurred last Saturday against Oregon State.

 

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