Jeff Tedford outcoached Urban Meyer on Saturday

My last post was intended to draw attention to the rising tides in the Pac-12 conference in terms of coaching quality. The obvious point was to underline how stagnant Jeff Tedford has been as the leader of the Cal football program and explain how the game is flying past us as we stay treading water with Tedford. However, I'll unequivocally say it: Tedford had a superior game plan to Urban Meyer and it almost led the Bears to what would have been one of their top three road wins in the entire Tedford era (the other two being the 2007 win at Autzen and the 2002 win in East Lansing).

Zach Maynard found a nice rhythm against Ohio State.

Tedford's game plan was to keep things short and simple for Zach Maynard and the Cal offense. The premise (a simple one, really, but executed well) was that Cal's offense could compete with the OSU defense in 3rd-and-5 or less situations, and take short chunks to make it down the field. This worked well, along with a nice running game that frankly surprised me. The offensive line, which has been pretty bad this year, continued to not protect Maynard very well in instances where his first read wasn't available in the passing game. However, they got a nice push in the running game and created some problems for the Buckeyes. Tedford seemed to mix run and pass very well in this game, and this conservative "ball possession" offense served the Bears well.



Meyer, on the other hand, couldn't seem to get his passing game off the ground, and the Cal defense, it's safe to say, got the better of their OSU counterparts for large swaths of Saturday's tilt. After all, OSU scored 5 TDs and didn't attempt a field goal. Two of their TDs were longer than 50 yards and they didn't attempt a field goal or try for a 4th down conversion. What this means is that in 60 minutes of football, the Buckeyes, playing in front of 106,000 red-clad fans, mustered only three real drives where they marched down the field and scored. There's a reason Meyer gave a sigh of relief afterwards at the press conference. He knew he had been outcoached and his team had been outplayed for most of the game.

Of course the topic every Cal fan has been ruminating over has been the FG attempt on 4th-and-1 from the OSU 25 yard line with 4 minutes and change left in the game. While I'm obviously not going to strongly defend Tedford in this case, the people who are screaming about how the play is a perfect illustration of why the man should be fired need to implement the 24 hour rule, calm down, and then come back and talk to me like rational adults that use critical thinking skills. First of all, Tedford has been making conservative calls like that since about the day he took office. If you hate those type of calls, I hope you were consistent and were bitching about them in 2003, 2004, and 2006 when Cal was winning games. I hope you were mad in 2009 when Cal beat Stanford at the Farm after taking a more conservative approach at the end. I'm not saying they were winning as a direct result of his conservative play calling, but if it's such a reason he should be fired now, then the difference in your mind is that we're losing because of these 4th down FGs (or punts, whatever), and if you honestly think that the only reason we are losing games is because of Tedford's conservative approach to 4th downs, then I'm at a loss for what to say, but I venture to guess you might want to re-think things a bit.

This is veering off point a bit, and we'll have plenty of other posts to discuss Tedford's future and the reason it might be prudent to shift gears in the near future, but back to the specifics of this particular 4th-and-1. The way I see it is simple: 4 minutes left, let's take the lead on a 42 yard field goal. D'Amato's missed two already, it's not absurd to think he would make one eventually. You turn the game back in the hands of our defense, which at that point had forced three 3-and-outs and one interception in the last five possessions for Ohio State. At the end of the day, I would have loved to go for it, because I think we would have converted and then maybe scored a TD or kicked a FG from a shorter distance, but there are no guarantees that any outcome at that point in the game would have decided the contest, and this instance should really just be a small talking point among many in what was really a very entertaining game. Instead, of course, Cal fans fixate on it to death due to their pre-disposition to hate all things Tedford. I say there is plenty of time to find faults in Jeff Tedford's recent seasons in Berkeley -- let's keep our credibility by criticizing him when he deserves it, not after he goes toe-to-toe with Urban Meyer.

Couple more thoughts

A typical conversation between my group of Cal fans and any Ohio State fan Saturday:
OSU fan: "Hey, how did you guys get here from California?"
Us: "Uh, well, we flew out yesterday."
OSU fan: "Wow, you came all the way out here for a football game."
Us: "Well, yeah, we, uh, like football."

Ohio Stadium was a sight to behold, but the crowd was very quiet compared to many other road venues I've visited. I think Reser Stadium with 38,000 or so fans in it is a more hostile atmosphere than the Horseshoe.

Is OSU's "Best Damn Band in the Land" a knockoff of ours or vice versa? Many aspects of their band and our brand (from uniforms, to marching style, etc.) were quite similar.

Buckeye fans can't hold a candle to Tennessee fans in terms of knowledge of the opposition. The Vols' faithful practically knew our own 2-deep better than I did (a Daily Cal reporter at the time) in 2006. OSU fans thought that Cal and UCLA were the same school and didn't know who our biggest rival was.