I put “scrimmage” in quotes because it’s not really a scrimmage like it was before Tedford came along. It’s really just the one practice of the year that is open to the general public. In any case, this year it’s being held April 17th from 9 AM to 11 AM. You can find what few details there are here:

http://www.calbears.com/sports/m-footbl/spec-rel/040710aaa.html

I personally find it very enjoyable to go to this and I always make it a habit of going. I bring the kids and it’s a very relaxed environment. Usually they give out free food but there’s no mention of it in this year’s press release and seeing how its in the morning, not at noon like in past years, I suspect there won’t be any food.

The other thing it is nice for is for those who have never been to a regular practice is to see what they’re like. You get to see the warm-ups, the drills, the partial scrimmages (like the 5-on-5’s and the 7-on-7’s), the full scrimmages, how they order things, etc..

We tend to sit on the 50 yard line about 2/3rds of the way up (about row 30-40) so if you see two big guys (my brother is coming too) with 3 boys ages 2, 5 and 6, it’s probably us and feel free to come up and say hi.

Normally I’m one of the first to renew my season tickets so I don’t even make note of the deadline of when one has to renew to guarantee their same seats. But this year, we’ve been trying to figure out what to do parking wise after last year change to the shuttle buses that make it just as expensive for the family to take the bus in as to get a parking pass.

I literally was just bored when I decided to go to Calbears.com today and say that the deadline is TODAY!

Of course, I quickly renewed my tickets and therefore consider myself lucky. For whoever else out there has forgotten, renew TODAY! It’s the last day, April 8th.

This Saturday’s Big Game is Tedford’s 100th game. I wrote a column for BearTerritory.net about it (all the writers wrote something, it was a concerted effort). And because it’s a big deal, most of the columns are free for all to read, including mine.

I think that column is some of my best reporting work. A lot of research went into it, too much of which ended up on the cutting room floor as they say in the movies. So I wanted to share some more:

• 100 games is the 3rd most in Cal history behind Pappy (103) and Stub Allison (102). They’re both proof that one has to be pretty good as a coach to reach 100 games at Cal. (Pappy has 3 Rose Bowls to his name and Stub has 1)
• Tedford is 4th in all time wins, a game behind Pappy, and then in position to pass Andy Smith (74) and James Schaeffer (73) next year.
• His winning percentage is also exceptional. If the Bears can pull the upset Saturday he’ll be tied with Pappy for the best win percentage at 67% of their game (this excludes the coaches from 1925 and earlier, which includes Smith and Schaeffer. If you saw the percentage leaderboard, where there are 10 coaches in front of Tedford and Pappy, but all of them are 1925 and earlier, you’d readily understand why there is a tendency to focus on the “modern era” when it comes to winning percentage.)
• Probably the most “unfair” credit that Tedford gets is the number of bowl games, at least when it’s compared to previous coaches. The bowl revolution happened in the mid-90’s and so no coach other than Holmoe coached in an era when every bowl eligible team went to a bowl game. So the fact that no other Cal coach has been to 7 in a row doesn’t mean much in a historical context. Frankly, Pappy’s 3 Rose Bowls in a row is Cal’s most impressive Bowl stat.
• However, when one looks at the number of teams who have been bowl eligible each of the last eight seasons, it’s a pretty small list. After all, if Florida State can’t win one of it’s last two games, (Maryland and Florida), then the longest streak would be 19 (Florida). In the Pac-10, only USC has been bowl eligible every year during that stretch. While overall numbers were tough to come by (the best I could come up with is that through 2007’s bowls, only 12 teams had an eight year streak but one (Michigan) has fallen off that list) a team is in pretty elite company these days when they’ve been bowl eligible eight years in a row.

Point being, what Tedford has accomplished is pretty amazingly awesome.

I know, I know, we all want the Rose Bowl so bad we spit up blood every time the Bears are eliminated from contention. And yes, I know, we’re not looking in great shape to reach that mark in the next year or two. But, while I concede things aren’t as Rosy as I’d like, at the same time that’s not as true as one thinks. If the Bears had beaten Oregon State, we could have easily gotten a share of the conference title, and if the right teams lost in these last couple weeks, we still could have seen the chips fall the right way to end up in Pasadena. Said another way, our chances would be as good as Stanford’s are right now. Next year is an even year and generally, even years are the Bears good years minus continually losing to USC in LA. But you know what, if this year showed anything, it showed that there will be years where one doesn’t have to beat USC to go to the Rose Bowl.

I also know that the last three seasons have seen the Bears plateau a bit. But you know what, every coach hits a lull. People were ready to lynch Bellotti at Oregon after his slow stretch from 2002-2004, but guess what, 2005-2008 were his best years at Oregon. I know how much it’s like rubbing salt in one’s eyes to think that see Stanford leap-frog Cal with their new head coach and getting the wins we’ve been dying for years to get. But it’s just one year and they’ve peaked at opportune times during this season.

Please, go read my column. Go back and remember what it was like back then. If you’re too recent of a fan to do that, do your best to imagine. We’ve completely lost all sense of context in the last few years. We NEED to remember where we were and just how much has been accomplished. The 100 game mark for Tedford provides an opportunity to do that.

I don’t know that the Bears are going to be able to beat Stanford on Saturday (a post on that later). I don’t know that the Bears will do better than the Poinsettia Bowl this year. But what I know, and I mean know, with an absolute confidence unmatched besides my love for my wife and children and my faith in God and the Catholic Church, is that Tedford has been a great coach for Cal and there’s no reason to doubt that he’ll continue to be a great coach for the program.

Thanks Coach Tedford! Here’s to 100 more!

Jason and I both had our thoughts about the crowd issues at the USC game and it’s nice to see that the University not only listened, but made some changes. Specifically, they liked my idea (not that I was unique in thinking it) of closing the concessions in the hallway, although they only intend to do that for the pregame, admittedly the most important time.

See their new updated Football Gameday Access Plan for all the details.

The one thing they seem intent on doing that is likely a fools errand if they don’t actually turn people away at the entrance is trying to get people to enter through the south entrance when their seats are on the south side of the stadium. If people are coming from the fun center or have parking on the north side of the stadium, they’re not going to listen to the advice and walk a considerable amount out of their way down Piedmont and around the I-House when they can enter the stadium right there and fight their way through.

It’s a noble attempt on the University’s part and I guess every person who does listen will be one less person crowding the concourse tunnel, but I don’t know if they can actually pull that part of their plan off to the degree that it’ll make a dent.

Nevertheless, it’s nice to see them listening to our feedback and implementing at least one sensible change, closing those concession stands, that I personally think would make a HUGE difference.

You know when a game as disastrous as that game yet the first thing most people on the alumni side want to talk about is the crowds, something is drastically wrong. Jason and I didn’t plan to tag-team on this one and we don’t sit together or even near each other but we both had the same thought: Something has to be done about the crowd situation. You’ve read Jason’s letter, now here’s mine:

Dear Athletic Department,

I am writing to you about a matter that could be of grave, life threatening importance in the next couple years before the stadium renovation is complete. The crowds at Memorial Stadium at the football game on October 3rd were a major problem. Even though I got to my seats 90 minutes before the game and had no problems personally, it was very clear that there was a disaster brewing in the hallways and tunnels. People were swearing and crying and distraught when they came to their seats. Other people just needed to get out of the hallways and came flowing out of the tunnel just gasping for a minuscule amount of breathing room. So many did this that the stairwells between the sections were gridlock and tempers flared even once people were out of the hallways and tunnels.

When I took my children to the bathroom late in the 2nd quarter things had calmed down just enough that it wasn’t gridlock in the hallways, but it quickly became clear what one of the major bottlenecks was. There are 2 (or perhaps 3 or 4) concession stands that are directly in the concourse hallways. I’m not referring to the concession stands below G and GG that have a large area for lines and milling around. I’m talking about the ones underneath EE and I believe either HH or I. They are directly in the hallway and any line that forms completely for those concessions blocks the walkway.

This was a problem and an inconvenience even when the service road outside the stadium (but inside the fence) was open. It allowed people a second route to make their way around the stadium. However, with the Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHPC) under construction, the ONLY place to get around the stadium between E and HH is the concourse hallway. These two concession stands are a HUGE problem this year and caused panic, gridlock and lots of hurt emotions. I literally saw women and children crying, their evening completely ruined, as they came out of the concourse.

For safety reasons, it is imperative that you close these two concession stands until construction of the SAHPC is complete.

I’ve also heard from friends that they believe it would be wise to reduce the capacity of the stadium until the SAHPC is complete and I support that idea as well. I think putting back up the Toyota blue and gold zone banners and not selling those tickets for the remainder of the year would be wise.

I know that the University did their best with the raised walkways to try and mitigate the construction, but unfortunately it was not enough. Please consider closing the in hallway concession stands (and if necessary reduce capacity). It is a health and safety issue of the highest order.

Ken Crawford
Season Ticket holder since 1999

After I finished up my post-game articles, I went to the local brewery, had a good beer, went back to the hotel and after checking my e-mail and the blog, went to sleep.

And a good night of sleep it was.

There was no tearing out my hair in the middle of the night, no restless tossing and turning, just good, solid, high quality sleep.

And the world is not such a bad place today.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot to worry about on this team, but it’s a lot easier to have perspective after a good nights sleep.

(More to come, including the OTRH podcast)

Tomorrow’s (Wednesday) the day: 9/16 @ 5:00 PM in Sac:

Sacramento Grid Club

Over at CGB they were obsessed enough with anniversaries to remember that today is the 1st anniversary of the extraction of the last of the tree-sitters from in front of Memorial Stadium. There seems to be a push to call this day TURD (Treesitters Untethered and Removed Day), but we’re a little more mature over here at EMFMV and I suggest an alternate name of FETS day (Final Extraction of Tree Sitters).

Let September 9th be forever remembered as FETS day!

Consider this the thread to comment “Where were you on FETS day?”

I’ll kick it off:

I was in New York City for the first time in my life. I had flown from Spokane Washington to Springfield, MA on the preceeding Sunday to pick up my brother en route to the Maryland game the following Saturday. The plan was to take a week going down the coast to see the sites. Tuesday we drove down to New York City from Mass. and saw the World Trade Center wreckage, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Peter’s Church, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Central Station, the Empire State Building and had lunch at the first place to make Pizza in the US. You can read more details here. I had NO IDEA that the trees were coming down until late in the evening when we checked into our hotel and I got an Internet connection and for the first time all day felt really disappointed to be in New York City and not back home. But even still I didn’t have time to do extensive reading until the following evening and didn’t get a post up about it until then.

Where were you?

The Cal Campus Police gets strung up left and right for their actions, often unfairly.

But I think this week, in the wake of the Jaycee Duggart abduction resolution, is a great time to re-iterate how great a job this on-campus police force is doing.

While all the local police agencies, parole agents and sex offender monitoring agencies were bumbling around and unable to detect that the girl/woman had been held hostage in their literal backyard, it was a UC Berkeley police officer who was responsible for breaking this case wide open.

Between this and the tree-sitter situation last year, it’s been a great couple years for the UC Berkeley police.

UCB Police, we solute you!

Just an FYI, if you go to the Sacramento Grid Club meeting on September 9th you’ll get the privilege of hearing Jonathan Okanes speak. He needed to change days because of a conflict that recently came up so I switched with him.

If you’re foolish enough to prefer hearing me speak, you’ve got to come on Wednesday, September 16th.

When I arrived at Memorial Stadium for the first time in the fall last week, there was a newly installed railing on the Alumni side in what used to be row 27, which was now missing. It stretched from D to HH. When I asked about it, one of the other reporters said that it had something to do with crowd control now that the SAHPC was under construction.

My initial response was that I didn’t see how things were going to be different because the tree sitters had the entire area blocked off both of the last two years. However, in retrospect, I realized that response was incorrect. The excavation for the SAHPC further eliminated the walkway around the west side of the stadium. It’ll be physically impossible to exit the stadium on the west side. One would have to walk around the concourse to either the north or south exit because of the new excavation.

Well, it turns out that the Athletic department thought this through and decided to put a smaller than the previous walkway but still a HUGE benefit, elevated (in the sense that it is over the top of the SAHPC construction site, but it’s level with the old ground level) walkway that will allow for some number of people to continue to walk outside the western rim.

Then, on Friday, they released a exit plan for games that showed where they hope fans from each section will exit. (You can find a PDF of the critical graphic for better resolution, here.)

As you can see if you look closely at the PDF, the hope is every one below the new railing will exit towards the field instead of into the concourse or to the new elevated walkways.

Just an FYI for better planning… I’ll take some pictures of all of this, including overall pictures of construction progress, tomorrow when I’m back at the stadium for practice.

UPDATE on 8/20: My speaking date changed to Weds. Sept. 16th. Please come on that day if you want to hear me speak.

Every once in a rare while I get invited to speak at some Cal related function. One in particular is the Sacramento Grid Club that has asked me to come speak at their meeting on September 9th. If you’re in the Sacramento area and want to up your stalker credentials, coming to hear me speak should be on the top of your priority list.

The Grid Club is a Cal football fan club. I guess there are a number around the state. They have weekly meetings to go over the previous game and have speakers come in. In the past they’ve just asked me the weekend before their weekly event, but this year they’re filling out their schedule early. I’ll be speaking about how the team is coming together, particularly how the change from Cignetti to Ludwig is going and what to expect from the offense for the rest of the season. I’ll also be talking about year two of the 3-4 switch over, which will work out well since the Defensive Coordinator Bob Gregory will be making a call in appearance just before my talk.

More details about the Sac Grid Club are available on their website, which is www.sacgridclub.com. The meeting is open to anyone, but they do hope that if you attend and you like what you see, you’ll consider joining (annual cost is something like $50-$60). They request that you join if you come to more than two events a year.

The location of the meeting is at the Sterling Hotel, which is located at the corner of 13th and H Streets in downtown Sacramento. The meeting starts at 5:00 PM with a review of the Maryland game film, Gregory is on at 6:00 PM and I’m on at 6:15 PM.

Come on out on Wednesday September 9th!

10 years ago today my wife and I were married, starting on what has been a surprise filled journey more wonderful than anything I could have planned for those years. It’s difficult to put into a few sentences what has been so wonderful about my marriage but to say she somehow manages to both make me a better person on a daily basis while simultaneously bringing great joy to me constantly. She is both the mother of my children, an awesome one at that, and a dedicated, loving, caring, funny and alluring wife.

So today I say thank you to my wife of 10 years. I love you honey!

Here’s to 50 more years…

(This post is a bit of a “brain dump” because I don’t know exactly what I want to say, but I feel oddly compelled to write it)

What’s the goal of Cal Football? Or perhaps more precisely what is each of our desire for Cal football?

Of course one could easily just resort to an answer like ‘to win the Rose Bowl’. Of course you can substitute or add your favorite level of on-the-field success whether that be as lofty as a national championship or meek as bowl appearances most years.

But why? What’s the point of all of this? What do we accomplish by seeing the team win? I mean, I don’t personally achieve anything, with the possible exception of perserverence, by watching Cal football games every year until they accomplish the above determined goal. So is it just a desire for the emotional high of witnessing something you’ve been desiring for years? And if it is, what are we willing to sacrifice to get that emotional high?

In thinking about this I started thinking about the sacrifices I’m making for this goal. For starters, every year I give a couple thousand dollars to the program so that I can sit in the stands and witness the specticle. For my family, it’s a HUGE percentage of our entertainment budget, so much so that it creates a minor strain come budget time. (Have I mentioned how much I love my wife and how supportive she is of my desires?)

But it’s not just money. There’s time, the 100’s of hours that have been poored into this blog over the last few years and in the side-job of writing for Rivals to get press passes and access to the players. Not to mention the time of actually going to the games or making time to watch them on TV when I don’t go to the games. Plus the wear and tear on my cars, which I put over 9000 miles on this year chasing the Bears around. Then there’s the emotional investment, that my heart genuinely hurts when I witness a heart-breaking game. There’s the hours I spending thinking about the games and the team.

So what is it that I desire for these sacrifices?

One thing my mind continually drifts to is the joy of taking my family to the games. It’s something that my boys and I cherish as a common activity. Some people go hiking or take the boat out on the lake. My family goes to Bears games. I must admit that this portion of it is huge for me. It’s a family activity, one we can cherish for years.

But the reality is that it was just as much a family activity when the Bears were 3-8 or even the dreaded 1-10. As such, it’s clearly not sufficient that the team just show up on Saturday and play. I enjoy myself a great deal more these days despite the fact that I’m not as close to the 50 yard line as I was 10 years ago and I have far less room than I ever did before.

So winning is important, there is no doubt about that.

But what else is important? Just that the games are fun to watch? How about the players and the coaches? What matters about them? Just that they win? Or perhaps just that the games are fun? What about integrity? What about promoting the school? What about giving 85 kids scholarships (really it’s more than that as the football program funds a bunch of other sports programs too), many of whom would have trouble affording college otherwise? What about the academic exemption that allow kids with less than perfect grades to attend Cal, is that important?

The more I think about it, the more I think it is a huge ball of intertwined spaghetti that can not be pulled apart. It’s ALL of it. It’s about family and about the team. It’s about winning and having a good time. It’s about the school and the fans. It’s about helping the players/students and about asking for something from them. It’s about all of us being part of something that is bigger than ourselves, something collective for us to put our hopes and desires into.

I guess my overall point is that while I like a winning Cal football team, it’s just as important to me that Tedford is a class act and that the kids playing on the field are getting a real education. It’s important that it build up the University. And to repeat, it is important that the team strive to win and take the steps to evolve and improve itself so that it does win in the long term. We all want a Rose Bowl before we die…

…but let’s not forget that’s not all we want.

GO BEARS!

We’ve got 19 people signed up for the Pick’Em league, which is a good number. However, if you’ve been on the fence, the day to sign-up is today because the first game of the season, Oregon State at Stanford, is tonight.

For those already in the league, a couple of reminders:

• Please be patient after tonight’s game regarding properly posted results. The under the cover code that goes and gets the scores has yet to be fully tested for this year and I’ll have to make sure it’s doing the right stuff come game time. I promise to have it all worked out overnight though.
• Week 2 start MONDAY with the UCLA vs. Tennessee game. Since the college football week ends Sunday, it’s a week 2 game even though it “feels” like a week 1 game. Put your picks in now.

The post that was here has been moved to my personal/Catholic blog:

http://thecrawfordfamily.net/blog/?p=437

It’s not being moved because some people didn’t like it, as Doug suggested in the comments, I really don’t care. I don’t care that some didn’t like it. I don’t care that some don’t care what my thoughts are on the subject. I also don’t care that I got a fair amount of extremely bigoted hate mail by people accusing me of being intolerant (which I always find a great irony). I believe that my post was both important and reasonable and I have no regrets for having posted it in regards to those who didn’t like it or thought it was off topic. It was too important to ignore.

However, what I do care about is my co-blogger Jason Snell. I did not consult with Jason before posting, which was a mistake. I’ve apologized to him personally and I do so now publically for having not consulted him about the post. Jason is reasonably concerned about having his name attached to a blog that has any political content. He perfers to keep his political beliefs private and is worried that there will be some confusion as to whether any political posts would be assumed to speak for both of us, which is not the case. Particularly since his career is a fairly public one but not at all politically related, he would like to avoid any issues that may arise by being attached to political commentary on this blog.

So, out of respect for Jason, I have moved the post to my personal/Catholic blog even though I strongly stand behind both its content and the decision to post it on a Cal blog, had the blog been soley my own.

(The previously posted comments have been moved to my personal site and the comment section has been closed for the post on this site although remain open on my personal blog)

There are a million fun “take this survey” sites that do some analysis or another in a very unscientific fashion. You can add to that list a new one, the “Blog and Website Cuss-O-Meter”:

As a point of comparision, here are the other Cal blogs I visit on occasion:

• California Golden Blogs: 6.2%
• Bear Necessity: 5.1%
• Cal Football Fan: 0.7%
• Oski Talk: 6.4%
• Rose Bowl Before I Die: 6.9%
• California Golden Bear Football: 1.0%
• BearTalk (with Jonathan Okanes): 6.3%
• College Hotline with Jon Wilner: 4.5%
• Sturdy Golden Bear: 8.2%
• Cal Bear Wire: n/a
• Bears With Fangs: n/a
• My Bear Territory: n/a

If you put in a bogus or very slow URI, it’ll give a 0% answer. So the n/a’s are ones I couldn’t get an answer back from as the sites were clearly responding slowly both to my own browser and to the Cuss-O-Meter. Noteworty however is Cal Football Fan, the one site that creates it’s own content that scored lower than me. Surprising was the high pecentage for Sturdy Golden Bear, who generally seemed to run a clean site at their now-defunct page (or at least it seems that way).

For what it is worth, as I said, the above list is all of the sites I frequent on occasion. That means it’s the sites from which I pick who goes on the blogroll. This summer I’ll be re-doing the blogroll and will be including new sites that have proven themselves to be worthy of being on my blogroll. For those who don’t know, I take which blogs I link to very seriously. There are those sites out there that’ll post a link to just about any blog they know of, and while that is a fine way to go about it, it has the downside of the list getting so long it is meaningless and hard to find the good needles in the haystack.

Here are the criteria I use:

1. Moral content: The #1 thing to prevent your blog from inclusion on the list is any content that is morally offensive. The most common example of this is frequent swearing. Does it really add anything to a post to say a player is f-ing pathetic? Find better words to describe yourself. Other examples include any suggestions of violence against anyone, this is college football not a war, or personal attacks against players or coaches beyond just their capabilities on the football field. It’s OK to say that Joe “Booya” Ayoob is the worst player to ever grace the Cal sideline and Tedford is a complete coaching moron to have let him stay behind center for as long as he did (even though I’d disagree), but to say you want to rip out his bowels and force-feed it to Tedford crosses the line. Finally, I expect the comment sections being in line with my moral standards and that the comments of the blog’s author on other blogs meet the standards as well (one blogger in particular suffers from this problem). For the comment sections, I don’t expect one to moderate to the degree that all comments meet my moral standards, but that truly, wildly objectional comments are deleted and somewhat to moderately objectionable content is somehow rebutted/chastized.
2. Frequency of posting: I’m only going to link to blogs with somewhat regular posting. Generally that means at least a couple posts a week during the season. I’m not too concerned with off-season posting but someone who is consistent all the time gets extra props.
3. Quality of posts: What this means depends on what your blog is trying to accomplish. If you’re just trying to report news, I’m not going to hold it against you that you don’t have detailed analysis. At the same time, if your goal is news and you’re always a week behind everyone else, well, that’s not very good news. On the other hand, if you’re a game-analyst type guy, I’m not going to hold slower posting against you, but I do expect that your analysis is meaningful. Generally what this means is if when I go to your blog, do I find something worth reading?
4. Longevity: I generally like to see that a blog has been around for atleast a year before it gets the nod. This is partially to give me time to judge based on the above criteria and also because lots of bloggers drop off within a month or two of blogging.

If you don’t care if you get a link on this blog, that’s fine. But if you do, those are the criteria I judge by. If your blog is not in the above list, consider this post a good place to comment and put your blog’s URL so that I can see if it is one I want to include in the fall.

There’s been a bit of a swirling controversy regarding California Golden Blogs posting pictures from the open to the public spring practice on Cal Day, April 12th. See the message board post by GrayBear and this post at CGB for background. I’ve thought a great deal about this matter (I was reluctant to comment at first). The more I think about it, the more I believe this issue was mishandled by both BearInsider and the Athletic department.

As has come to light, these pictures were taken at the open to the public, Cal Day practice. For those who went to the Cal Day practice, since it was open to the public and the fans would have no other guidance to go on, there was no instruction regarding taking pictures or anything like that. While I think it is a fools-errand to try and stop pictures from the open practice from being taken or being posted publicly, I know that California Golden Blogs (CGB), myself and most other bloggers would respect whatever rules they wanted, had they been stated/posted. But nowhere was it stated to anyone (I can’t emphasize this enough). I mean all they had to do was post a sign, give out a handout, say something over the loudspeaker, say something in the e-mail invitation to the event that went to all season ticket holders, anything like that. But they didn’t.

It’s unfair to CGB to force them into a situation which such negative publicity (look at all the misinformed comments on the BearInsider message board that think/thought they posted pictures from a closed practice) and compromise the hard work they’ve done to promote Cal football (the post in question, even though it has nothing to do with spring ball, is useless until they can find alternate photos, which they surely would have done initially if they knew those pictures were off limits) when they were given no reasonable guidance on the subject.

Even if they had attended the Bancroft Hotel event, which I didn’t so I can’t speak to, unless it was explicitly stated at that event that these rules apply to the Cal Day practice, it was a reasonable assumption that the rules were different for this open to the public event. As someone who gets access to the closed spring practices, although I didn’t post pictures from the Cal Day event, I made that exact assumption.

Hopefully this can be avoided in the future through better communication to the fans by the athletic department.

I would also have hoped that BearInsider handled the matter with both more clarity and more charity. While GrayBear admits the pictures were “probably as a result of Cal Day” he launches into a discussion of the Bancroft Hotel event which is wholly irrelevant if the pictures were “a result of Cal Day”. He then bases the rest of his post on the foundation and premise of the Bancroft Hotel event. There are no gray areas here as his message indicates. The pictures were taken at the Cal Day event. There was no information presented about photography at that event. CGB made the reasonable assumption that open to the public meant they could post pictures of it. The fault lays with the athletic department communications.

A more appropriate post would have said something along the lines of “I’m sure they were acting in good faith thinking the Cal Day event was unrestricted, but the athletic department has communicated to me that all pictures from the Cal Day should come down even though that wasn’t well communicated at Cal Day itself. We apologize for the confusion.”

What bothers me most about this is that just about everyone involved has the same goal: the promotion of Cal football. But because of poor communication and a lack of clarity and charity, this issue has erupted into something far bigger than it would have been. It could have been easily avoided.

(note that this same post, minus a few edits, was made on the BearInsider message board)

Before I launch into my post-game posts… let’s remember that player health is the #1 thing all college football fans should be rooting for. Along those lines, it looks like Washington QB Jake Locker could use our prayers/cheers.

Let’s hope he can come back onto the field in full health next week against our Bears.

I have two long running jokes with my wife to help lighten the mood after a crushing Cal loss:

• The good news is that I guess we can remove the “Rose Bowl tickets” budget line-item
• Looks like we’ll be able to improve our season ticket location next year

The second joke is more true than anyone wants to admit, although we’re not really at that point yet this year. There’s no doubt that during the bad seasons both the number of season tickets goes through the floor and the number of people using their tickets go down. All of a sudden there are a lot less complaints about how much space is allocated for each rear-end on the bench with the empty seats to spread out into.

So it’s gut check time.

Yeah, none of us have to worry about the Old Blues… they’ll be around as long as they’re alive. But there are A LOT of young blues out there who are buying season tickets. I’ve got a question for you: do you see yourself as an Old Blue some day? If so, this program wants you! This University was built by Old Blues, not by flash in the pan Young Blues. You want to become an Old Blue? It’s easy enough. You can complain. You can be disgusted. You can be cynical. But whatever you do, your rear-end better be in the seat for the next home game, and every game after that no matter how bad it gets.

That’s how you become an Old Blue.