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.

If anyone needs an example of why it is so hard to come to concensus, they need only look at this week’s poll. Three answers were essentially equally popular. Unfortunately, the one that edges out the other two vote-wise is also the hardest to pull off because it requires the vast majority of the fans in the stadium be aware of “the plan”. So, I’m going to recommend that we all bring our rubber chickens (the Barry Bonds fans amongst us should already have them) and I’ll find out how to get a message to the Mic-Men encouraging the “De-Sean” chant like “Go-Bears” (student side of stadium yells “De”, alumni side yells “Sean”). Since both of those things can be done together, there is no reason not to do both.

After DeSean’s amazing punt return, we all knew he’d never see the ball again off of a punt. (As a short aside, I thought the punter did a pretty good job of keeping out of his hands without losing huge yardage with the exception of one punt.) It occured to me that we need a chant or a sign or something that we can get the crowd to do as the opponent is getting ready to punt to get inside their heads. It probably won’t have the effect of getting them to punt to DeSean but I bet it’ll get them to shank a few more because they’ll get a little rattled.

I’ll put up a poll on this later in the week after the current poll has been up for a few days, but in the mean time, here are some suggestions/ideas:

• Everyone goes silent and hold up hand with index finger (I was going to say 1 finger, but I didn’t want anything misconstrued) for #1. Thoughts: Would be impressive if the crowd could actually go silent and would have a spooky feel to it.
• Chant De-Sean. Thoughts: Simple, possibly effective… but not to clear that we’re taunting them about punting away from him
• Chant Out-of-Bounds. Thoughts: Better communicates issue, harder to chant.
• Chant Fair-Catch while waiving hands back and forth like a fair catch. Thoughts: A little odd but has a humorous perspective

Please add your thoughts and ideas in the comment box. Once we have a winner, I’ll make sure it gets to the Mic-Men and try to get it broadly distributed.

HydroTech over at The California Golden Blogs put out a reminder to treat the Tennessee fans well. As he put it: “Be Loud. Be Classy. Let’s send Tennessee home with a big L and a positive Pac-10/Cal experience (except for the losing part).” I couldn’t have said it better myself.

I’d like to add an additional bit about representing Cal well tomorrow in regards to a different group: The Tree Sitters. The last thing any of us need is an embarassing scirmish, either verbal or physical, caught on film (and as can be seen from their litany of YouTube videos, they love to video tape stuff). There’s no reason to engage these people. You may think that you’ll be advancing the cause of Cal Football, but you won’t be. These people thrive on attention and conflict. You can do nothing better than to ignore them. It’ll anger them more when you walk away and dismiss them than if you argue with them. They’ll do everything in their power to get you to engage with them including insults, taunts and other forms of verbal abuse and physical confrontation. Don’t take the bait. Take the high road. Not only will you prevent being the cause of any bad PR you’ll also strike a blow to their cause because as I said, they hate nothing more than being ignored.