Zach Maynard can’t throw. Jeff Tedford can’t coach. Such is the general consensus in the persistently morose Cal football community.
But I’m here to tell you: Really, everything is just fine.
Sure, Maynard may have succeeded Tebow as Turf’s favorite quarterback, and Tedford may rival Solyndra as the state’s worst investment. But even for a fan base that hasn’t been truly happy since the 1937 Rose Bowl win, we have to admit that we’ve got it pretty good right now — especially compared to what other universities have endured over the past year.
Across the country, college football experienced its most tumultuous offseason of all time. Conference realignment and money grabs vied with academic scandals and sordid personal affairs for ESPN’s top billing, and Cal managed to avoid all of them. Here’s a glance at what we dodged:
- Our coach crashing both his motorcycle and his mistress, a la Bobby Petrino.
- An academic scandal that implicated our top players, like the University of North Carolina or Harvard. (Although, our academic scores are pathetically low compared to our Pac-12 peers. And you thought Maynard’s missed tutoring session was an anomaly, rather than indicative of a wider trend?)
- Our administration pimping us from conference to conference in search of a bigger payday, like the officials at West Virginia or Texas Christian University.
This is why I love Cal football.
Since I arrived in Berkeley in ’09, Cal has embodied the middle route: Its record is a near-perfectly-average 20 wins and 18 losses. It’s as if Memorial Stadium can breed both erratic play and consistent results, an ironic but logical consequence of the team’s on-field performance.
Maybe we don’t win all the time, but we don’t always lose, either. We send a few players to the NFL every other year, and occasionally our punter may be the best player on the team, but who cares? Cal is the Baby Bear of college football: not too good, not too bad, but juuuust right.
So as the Golden Bears travel to Ohio State’s Horseshoe this weekend, where Braxton Miller’s athleticism and Urban Meyer’s brain will likely obliterate our porous defense, remember: At least our boys got their tattoos legitimately.
If I had attended in the days of Pappy Waldorf, perhaps I would feel differently. But when conditioned for mediocrity, it is impossible to expect more. And nor should I — it is unfair to hold the present to the standard of the past.
Such nostalgia always leads to sadness, as Owen Wilson learned in Midnight in Paris when Marion Cotillard disappeared into the 19th century with Gauguin and Degas. So please, let’s not be those people who live in eras of bygone glory, and instead embrace this team in its current iteration, flaws and all.
We can enjoy the Keenan Allens while lamenting every pass out of his reach, marvel at the packed student section while noting the empty seats across the gridiron. Gloom is not mutually exclusive from fun, but in excessive quantities always leads to doom.
Of course, this short essay will soon be derided as the blathering of a faux-Bear. A former colleague — who I fancy knows more about Cal sports than than the entire class of 2013 — presented a much more nuanced argument toward a point similar to mine, yet still received a pummeling from those devoted fans who faithfully police the Daily Cal comment section.
So to head off at least the bluntest of those criticisms: I want to assure you all that, like the folks who run Golden Blogs, I risk life and death while watching the football team. It’s just that instead of my fate hinging on the result, it rests more on the firmness of my grip as I chase after that forty skittering away down Tightwad Hill.
Contact Jordan Bach-Lombardo at [email protected]
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The Rose Bowl you refer to was played in 1938. January 1, 1938.
There are plenty of programs that have high ethical and academic standards and still produce competitive football programs. Just look across the Bay – Stanford has been a top 5 football program the last several years. It is sad (and offensive) that you think we should be congratulated for not getting caught for anything and and being a bottom dweller in football
I don’t understand the rationale of comparing us to problem programs. I don’t compare my behavior to criminals and then feel good about myself even I might be the most abhorable extrovert. If you’re trying to make a point that everything in life is relative, I won’t dispute that. But it makes no sense to settle for mediocrity and feel good about ourselves.
Fans should have the back of their team no matter what. That doesn’t accepting everything they do, but it does mean through thick and thin sticking with them. Watching the final seconds run down even if it is a blowout loss. I wonder how many Cal fans felt like crap after leaving Big Game before The Play happened.
It’s sad to see that so many Cal fans get caught up in this vicious cycle of negativity. I wonder how much of this inferiority complex gets back to the players and to an extent creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Games are won and lost in football and in life. You prepare to your fullest and push you and your teammates to be their best and that’s all you can ask for. May be you still lose or make mistakes. That doesn’t matter. Mistakes happen. Failure happens. It’s how you respond afterwards that makes the difference. You can lament it and start tearing everyone down with negativity or you can own the results and be there together for your team no matter what — come hell or high water. I for one, choose the latter.
-Googs
“The Bear will not quit, the Bear will not die.”
Among the list of programs we are better than (presumably) also includes the one using little boys for entertainment … funny how you missed that one.
More to the point, the greatest of all public universities in the land has been reduced to “whew, glad we aren’t them”?? That’s not exactly what we bargained for when we signed Tedford to his ginormous contract. It’s not about not winning, having a losing conference record over the last 5 years or even getting embarrassed for 3 quarters from an FCS team. It’s about recruiting talented players and then continually seeing that talent squandered in a program which does not know how to make them better. There are those who have overcome Tedford’s program but few (if any) who have improved as a result of it. That’s not what a program is supposed to do.
The University owes it to its student football athletes to give them better than Tedford can, apparently, deliver. Some have likened Tedford to a serial career killer and, from where this alum stands, that is not an unfair comparison. It is time to end the madness. Sooner than later.
How pathetic is Cal football? We have a Cal writer extolling the virtues of being mediocre and the silver lining is that our team hasn’t been caught breaking any laws. Jordan, may your life be filled with not too much employment, but not too little. May your girlfriends be plain but not ugly or pretty. May your children get into community college. May your writing experience remain with free publications. In other words, may you have a Cal football life that you enjoy so much.
This may be more of a reflection of Daily Cal standards…
You left out Pedophile Penn St.- where there is now an abundance of Bronze due to the rapid meltdown of all Paterno/ Sandusky statues that littered just about every corner of the campus. They are also at a loss for ideas to rename all the buildings that were named after all those that were associated with Sandusky’s criminality. The cost of reprogramming all those fans, so now they can roam around mindlessly asking; Joe Paterno who?
Instead of wasting my money on what Cal tries to pass off as football. I’ll take the advice of others and watch Water Polo, or support other sports that Cal has success at. The only way to get rid of Tedford is to shame him into retiring, and that will only happen if you boycott Cal football.
We are seeing the indirect boycott. On game days you can see a lot of empty seats over in the ESP seating section. The football website is now celebrating how 70% of the seats have been filled. They sound as excited as Jordan is about a .500 season.