(Written by kencraw)

It’s that time of the week where I can let loose and give my prediction for the Bears upcoming game.

But first, and I’m sure you all needed reminding of this, let’s look at Cal’s last game and whether my prediction was accurate. While I’m sure you’re all willing to grant me a moment of crowing about that, I feel obligated to remind everyone that I not only picked that score in my pre-game prediction, but also in my August season predictions AND also all the way back in my post Spring practice predictions on May 10th. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! 🙂

OK, down to business…

OSU is a hard team to predict because you never know which OSU is going to show up. Is it going to be the OSU that upsets a pretty good USC last October, or the one that got crushed by both Boise St. and Cal earlier in the same year? The same trend continues this year with them laying down a woodshed beating of Utah, the same team that took UCLA to their own woodshed out back, as well as Arizona and a 61-10 beat down of Idaho State but also getting creamed by UCLA 14-40 (if one ever needed a proof of the ridiculousness of A>B>C arguments, there’s an ideal candidate OSU>Utah>UCLA>OSU, and each of the games were blowouts) and a 3-34 loss to Cincinnati that would be very troubling if Cincinnati wasn’t 6-0 with a victory over Big East darling Rutgers and ranked 15th.

I mostly stand behind what I said in my Rivals article, that all of OSU’s hopes rest on a dominating run defense and playing a mistake and turnover free game, with two additions/clarifiers (as a quick aside, writing an article is a much more difficult proposition than a blog post because it needs to be concise with only two or three themes at the most and must tell a “story”… none of these asides or anything… so I often have to leave out aspects that I would include in a blog post):

1. OSU will have to successfully defend the passing game of Cal. Last year Cal demolished OSU by going over the top and beating them through the air. They didn’t have to beat their run defense. OSU needs to not only have a dominating run defense but they can’t have a repeat of last year’s pass defense. If for some reason Longshore doesn’t start that may be just what OSU needs, or it may turn out that they get burned just as bad by Riley. In either case, Cal is too balanced to be beat by OSU’s usual strategy of loading the box like it’s a telephone booth outside a frat house and challenging the offense to beat them with all of the heat coming. OSU will have to do better than that, particularly with Longshore behind center.
2. OSU’s run defense isn’t as good as the numbers indicate. While I think they are a good run defense, perhaps the best Cal has seen so far, there’s two big pieces of misleading info in OSU’s impressive 43.3 yards per game allowed. First, the offenses they’ve faced are only rushing for 125 yards per game themselves. While that’s not horrible, it’s kind of mediocre and a good run defense should be able to shut them down. Second, OSU has gotten a ton of sack yardage which subtracts from the run total. The worst example is that Arizona had 84 yards of rushing that shows up statistically as 9 yards because of the 75 yards off of sacks. Without the sacks, OSU would be giving up 80 yards per game, which although still good, isn’t nearly as impressive considering they did it against teams rushing for 125 yards per game. Said another way, if OSU holds Cal to the same 2/3rds of their average rushing total that they held their other opponents, Cal will still get 140 yards on the ground. So, while I still think this is a key to OSU having a shot at the upset, what I’m saying is that I don’t think it is as likely as both my article and the numbers suggest.

So, yes, I’m predicting a Cal victory but I’m going to revise my pre-season prediction (21-16) and predict a 31-16 victory.