Now That's More Like It

Zack Follett has had his sights on Erik Ainge for almost 365 days.

So it didn’t come as a surprise to the linebacker that the only sack the Cal football team got on the Tennessee quarterback came from him—364 days after the Bears dropped last season’s opener in Knoxville, Tenn.

And if you ask Follett, the hit that he unloaded onto Ainge was just a precursor of what was to come, as No. 12 Cal made up for last year’s embarrassing loss to the No. 15 Volunteers with a 45-31 victory at Memorial Stadium on Saturday.

“I had Ainge’s picture on the back of my MySpace page and I would just look at it every day,” Follett said. “One day I was staring at it and I said to myself, ‘We had to hit this guy.’ Last year, I was looking at the film, and he didn’t get touched. The No. 1 goal was for me to hit Erik Ainge. The first time I did it kind of set the tone.”

The pressure created by the blitz packages—though used sparingly—seemed to bother Ainge.

On the opening drive of the game, the Bears sent Follett on a blitz, hitting Ainge and forcing the senior to fumble the football into the hands of linebacker Worrell Williams. Williams then waltzed into the end zone with a 44-yard touchdown return to put Cal up 7-0.

While it may not show up in the stat book, the pressure was enough to force Ainge into committing the small number of mistakes he made.

Midway through the third quarter, with the Bears leading 38-21, Tennessee (0-1) had the ball on fourth and goal from Cal’s one yard line. The Bears sent linebackers Anthony Felder and Williams on a blitz up the middle, harassing Ainge and causing him to throw an off-balance pass towards tailback Arian Foster, who dropped the ball.

“Our defense stiffened up right there,” Cal coach Jeff Tedford said about the team’s goal line stand. “That was a big set of downs. It was really getting physical down there and I’m really proud of the guys.”

Other than a few of those mishaps, Ainge showed why the Volunteers think of him as a Heisman Trophy contender—even with the broken pinky finger on his throwing hand.

Ainge threw for 271 yards and three touchdowns, showing precision with the football. Ainge, with his broken pinky taped to his ring finger, completed his first 10 attempts and was 32-for-47 on pass attempts for the game.

“Maybe he could have thrown a little harder, but he did make his reads,” Follett said of Ainge. “He didn’t throw any interceptions. I thought it would have had more effect on him than it did.”

It looked like it was the Volunteers who were out-hustled and out-muscled in this contest, especially in comparison to last year’s season opener.

Last season at Neyland Stadium, the Bears managed to rush for 64 yards; in this year’s opener, the team ran roughshod through the Tennessee defense to the tune of 230 yards.

Senior Justin Forsett had 156 of those yards to lead Cal (1-0), including 13 yards on a touchdown scamper that capped the scoring at the 9:10 mark in the fourth quarter.

Forsett also outrushed the opponent—the Vols managed 111 yards on the ground without last year’s team leader LaMarcus Coker, who did not travel with the team.

But the old adage that the running game sets up the passing game seemed to be reversed. Tennessee looked like it was more concerned with quarterback Nate Longshore and his bevy of receivers—DeSean Jackson, Robert Jordan and Lavelle Hawkins—than it was with the running game.

Longshore threw for 241 yards and two scores—one each to Jordan and Hawkins.

“This game we were able to move the ball every time we got a chance to,” Forsett said. “With the receivers being so well known, they have to respect them. They took a lot of people out of the box more than usual. It opened up things.”

Cal Heisman hopeful Jackson showed off some of his flair with a 77-yard punt return for a touchdown.

But Vols coach Phillip Fulmer seemed to learn from Jackson’s burst. Tennessee did not allow Jackson to return another punt, kicking the ball out of bounds or short of where Jackson was lined up, each time being met with a chorus of boos from the sellout crowd of 72,516.

“The guy is electrifying, as we saw today,” said Fulmer, who is now 14-2 in season openers. “We did a good job on him last year, but today he got away from us.”

There was talk before the game about how much last season’s contest haunted Cal throughout the past year. Even though the Bears ended the 2006 campaign with a bowl victory and 10 wins, it seemed that all anyone wanted to talk about was what happened in Knoxville.

That won’t be the case this season.

“We had a great year last year, but everyone was saying, ‘But Tennessee—but the thumping in Tennessee,’” Follett said. “And now we can start the season with the thumping we put on them.”

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