(Written by kencraw)

In all of us, there are two football fans. There’s the heavily biased guy who’s got all sorts of preconceptions and scoffs at data that appears to contradict what in his heart he knows to be true. This guy, for example, doesn’t care that Iowa is undefeated and has beaten Penn State and only has Ohio State, who is struggling with teams like Purdue, left on the schedule. He knows Iowa is Iowa and there’s just no way they belong in the national title game if Texas loses.

The other fan in all of us is the rational one. He knows that football teams change and that he has to do a very careful analysis of every game and every injury and every schedule to even come close to understanding who’s good and who’s not. This guy is a lot more unsure than his biased counterpart.

So you can imagine these two fans sitting on each of your shoulders like the angel and devil in the stories/movies/books of old, albeit without the explicit goodness and badness of each. And just like that old imagery, in some of us the biased fan is very strong and it appears the rational guy doesn’t exist. In some of us the rational guy is so strong it appears that there is no bias. Personally, I like to believe that in me I lean towards the rational guy most of the time.

The reason I bring this up now is because my biased guy scoffs and scoffs LOUDLY at ASU. He doesn’t care that ASU beat Cal in 2007. He knows that ASU team was the luckiest team in modern football, squeaking by against a crippled Cal team in a game they in no way deserved to win, as well as many others that year, and perhaps was the worst 10-2, Holiday bowl losing team in history. His suspicions were confirmed when ASU fell of a cliff in 2008, not even reaching bowl eligibility. And he knows that this year’s ASU team with their “dominant” run defense is a joke for the ages.

He knows Cal can destroy that team if they put up even a modest effort, perhaps not even as good as their performance in the Rose Bowl and definitely not as good as their performance in Minnesota.

I mean, COME ON! It’s the over-the-hill, Carpenter lacking, Erickson show. Those guys don’t know defense in Tempe, right?

And I’ll be honest, my biased guy is WAY over-powering my rational guy.

Sure, my rational guy tries to get in a couple of points arguing that giving up 82 yards a game on the ground is impressive no matter who you’ve faced (Phsh, did you SEE what Stanford did to them on the ground?) and they played a noble effort at Georgia despite losing, something that is always difficult to do (Chsh, yeah and those wins over Idaho State, not even Idaho proper, and Louisiana-Monroe really bolster the resume, who have the actually BEAT!?!) and that win over Washington, who lets not forget beat the USC team that creamed us, shows they’re dangerous (Fttt! Did you SEE the non-defense that UW put on the field in the winning play at the end of that game?), and yeah, my statistical preview over at BearTerritory.net shows a fairly even game but in the end, the biased guy is winning the battle of hearts and minds in my head.

Maybe it’s because my rational guy just doesn’t have many arguments to work with or maybe it’s because my biased guy is so strongly biased. However, my rational guy and my biased guy were on the same page about WSU and they don’t feel on the same page about ASU. Nevertheless, I just can’t believe that Cal is going to lose this game. The biased guy is winning the argument with ease.

It’s exactly the way I felt in 2007 and my biased guy just doesn’t care:

Bears 38, Sun Dopes 17