Twenty wins earned the Cal rugby team the top overall seed in the playoffs.

Four more wins earn it a national championship.

The Bears have not taken the pitch in nearly a month, but their return to action signals the beginning of a postseason tournament that is anything but foreign to them.

The team has won 23 of the last 28 titles, including 16 of the last 17, and not a single player on the current roster has ever experienced a loss in the playoffs.

Today at 2:30 p.m., Cal begins its quest for a fifth consecutive championship against Tennessee in the Round of 16 at Balloon Fiesta Park in Albuquerque, N.M.

But having history on its side is like having weight on its shoulders.

"Every year is a new challenge," sophomore flanker Tom Rooke said. "The next game we play could be the last game we play."

The Bears (20-1) will compete as the top seed from the Pacific Coast region, which has a total of four teams in the tournament.

The Volunteers (10-2-1) are the lower-seeded of the two squads from the South region. They had a chance to avoid playing against Cal in the first round when they faced Arkansas State late in the regular season. The match ended in a 13-13 stalemate, and tiebreakers gave the Tribe a No. 10 seed in the playoffs.

If the Bears defeat 16th-seeded Tennessee, they will play Saturday in the Round of 8 against the winner of today's match between eighth-seeded Cal Poly and ninth-seeded Army.

The postseason format, which requires the champion to win back-to-back matches on two different weekends, caused the coaching staff to put a good deal of emphasis on the time between matches.

"Coach (Jack Clark) talked about winning the interval," senior scrumhalf Zachary Triplett said. "One of the most important things is being really smart in what you do between the two games. You've gotta rest up, do exactly what you need to do. If you can do a good job in the interval you set yourself in very good position to do well in the game."

It helps Cal that Clark has given ample playing time to the reserves, who could rack up a majority of the minutes against the Volunteers in order to rest the starters for Saturday's match.

And while the Bears have not played a match since March 26, that doesn't mean they are rusty. After falling to British Columbia, Cal dedicated more than three weeks to training for the postseason during its annual April Drive.

"April Drive was a little different from last year because we went into April Drive (with a loss)," Rooke said. "It really revealed some of the aspects of the game that we struggled in over the season."

The team worked especially hard on tackling and scrummaging while gearing up for the playoffs.

Perhaps more importantly, the Bears will likely need to cut down on their penalties. They committed more penalties than their opponents for much of the regular season, and it cost them their perfect record. Against the Thunderbirds, two infractions in the closing moments of the match led to Cal's only loss of the regular season.

"We have to make sure we don't beat ourselves," Rooke said.

The Bears have not faced Tennessee since 2005, when they won 65-3 in the Round of 8.

"It's always an unknown quantity," Triplett said. "You just have to put in the performance that you spent all year preparing for."

Tags: RUGBY NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP