Tedford's Last Stand

I make no secret about the fact that the football team was a major factor in my decision to enroll at Cal; given my love of the sport and the school’s reputation as one of the better football schools on the West Coast, and overlooking dismissals along the lines of “It’s only a game,” it was a logical move. Yet as so often happens, the disconnect between the ideal and reality has proven vast. Despite being denied student section tickets each of my first two years at Berkeley, I’ve attended every football game (except those that conflicted with family or religious commitments), and mustered far more school spirit than would be suggested by my extreme enmity towards Berkeley as a university and a city. Suffice it to say by the inclusion of a football entry in this blog, my efforts have not been rewarded.

Since 2006, I’ve seen meltdowns and collapses by teams good and bad; heard 70,000 screaming people fall silent in an instant; sat through a downpour that left me returning home in clothes that weighed 15 pounds and shivering through a hot shower; and heard no fewer than 15 sorority girls discussing at full volume who they’d had sex with since the semester began. I’ve watched the uninspiring efforts of players less athletic than me, coaching decisions that showed less foresight than Custer’s declaration of victory at Little Bighorn, and execution far more brutal than that of Louis XVI. Yet the last 2 games have been the worst of my tenure here – indeed, of the Tedford Era – and have thrown the team’s inadequacies into the spotlight beyond the point of return. In Cal’s two losses to Oregon and USC, the team was outscored 72-6; they went 108 minutes and 12 seconds between their two made field goals. The coaching, incredibly, managed consistently to overshadow the team’s atrocious play, as evidenced by the almost comical number of times the team resorted to running its offense in the gimmicky “wildcat” formation – which, as former NFL coach Brian Billick was heard to say in an NFL game two weeks ago, “never works.”

Like the school’s problems in other departments (discussed in the backlog of posts here), the football woes would seem to be inescapable. There are two contributing factors. First, the self-perpetuating “black hole of talent” seen in today’s college football means that underperforming schools recruit inferior talent – and are thus, usually, forever robbed of the chance to escape mediocrity. More damningly, though, just as UC administration is unwilling to “trim the fat” in response to the current financial abyss, so too is the management of the football team unwilling to recognize that the coaching of this team does not work. History has already shown that head coach Jeff Tedford did a miraculous job of turning an abysmal program into a distinctly above-average one, but also that his self-destructively conservative play-calling and inability to instill a disciplined, winning attitude in his squads make him unable to transform Cal football into a good program, much less an elite one. Yet he will stay in place as long as the University’s systemic complacency remains intact, as, for the most part, will his squad of assistant coaches and coordinators.

Today’s contest was the Joe Roth Memorial Game – the annual home game against USC or UCLA designated to honor the only man whose jersey has been retired by the University, and whose outstanding career and life were cut short by melanoma at the age of 21. Though the team’s disgraceful performance was more than enough to render this a woefully unbefitting tribute to one of the greatest players in school history, even worse was the fact that the sole reference to the night’s being dedicated to Roth was an advertisement for the sale of a memorial T-shirt during a media timeout. It’s abundantly clear that despite whatever our fish-out-of-water Canadian Chancellor Robert Birgeneau tries to suggest at games, the football team is nothing more than a cashcow for Berkeley, and one which will, on the strength of the unflinching loyalty of fans like me, remain profitable no matter how badly the program is allowed to stagnate. It’s an unpleasant discovery to make and one that provides a dreary outlook for the decade to come: records wavering between 7-5 and 8-4, and boring, inappropriately close victories in the Sun, Emerald, and Vegas Bowls.

I maintain that choosing a football team is a perfectly legitimate reason to select a university for those so inclined, and believe I always will. I’m also certain now that anyone doing so should save themselves the ordeal and forgo becoming a Golden Bear.