Terrible to lose to ASU at home

At the beginning of the year I predicted a pedestrian 7-5 record. That means that at this point in the year, I had pegged our record to be at 3-2. Instead it's a pathetic 1-4. And looking ahead at my picks, it'll be hard for Cal to flip two additional games on top of what I over-optimistically at the time had them winning.

For example, I had Cal winning the following games from here: UCLA, @Wazzu, Stanford, and Washington.

I had them losing to: @Utah, Oregon, @Oregon State.

I like to think of myself as a pretty fair-minded Cal fan. I picked us to lose in the Daily Cal to USC back in 2006 and almost got jumped by Cal fans in the bathroom of an In 'n Out on the way down I-5 for "being a sellout". But it's clear now that while predicting how this year would go in August, I was seeing things through blue-and-gold goggles, or rather, the perspective of a Cal fan/student who attended the school during a truly different era of Cal football. For example, playing ASU at home would have never been a worry 5-6 years ago. Beating Nevada at home would be a gimmie too. The thing that has stood out to me in the Nevada and ASU losses has been the lack of anything too concrete to point to. It's more a general feel of malaise and an overall lack of talent at pretty much every position on the field except for WR1 (Allen) and LB (McCain).

Zach Maynard makes Kevin Riley look like Drew Brees.

Tedford can't recruit good players because this program is stale. It's too bad the university owes Tedford so much money making it very unlikely barring a 1-11 finish that any changes will be made. But I hope Sandy Barbour is starting to think of viable alternatives. She can be applauded for the job she did replacing Braun with Monty. For the football team, Steve Mariucci comes to mind. Pete Carroll would be everyone's dream, seeing as though he's a Bay Area native, but it looks like his Seahawk team is pretty good so any hope of him getting canned is probably wishful thinking.

Looking at our body of work through five games, I'll say Cal wins 1 or 2 of the 4 games above I had them winning, and losing all three of the ones I had them losing. That puts us at 3-9 or 2-10 -- truly embarrassing.