(Written by kencraw)

There’s a lot of different ways to look at the WSU game.

The first is our recent history with them. There’s no team in the Pac-12 that the Bears have more dominated than WSU. Tedford lost to them in his first year (when WSU was just coming off a Rose Bowl appearance), but after a two year hiatus in 2003 and 2004 (remember when we only played 8 conference games and 11 games over all, and had to skip one team every year?), the Bears haven’t lost since.

And the reason is simple… Tedford’s run-first, expose our personnel advantages strategy always worked against a less talented WSU team. There’s been no one team except WSU that Cal has held a significant talent advantage each of the last 7 years. Add to that, that WSU wasn’t doing anything truly creative or unique to overcome that talent gap, and the Bears were perfectly positioned for their current run.

As proof of this, when one looks back at the scores, there are a lot that are closer looking than they felt at the time. 2008 at home: 20-17. 2010 on the road: 20-13. 2005 at home: 42-38. The reason? Tedford played it conservative and got just what he needed against an inferior team.

A very different way to look at this game is to look at the last time we faced their new head coach, Mike Leach… the 2004 Holiday bowl. Texas Tech’s air-raid offense gave the #5 ranked Bears fits and they won 45-31.

There are of course a number of mitigating factors as to why that game is not alone the best indicator of what is going to happen this evening. For one, our defense is an entirely different style. Gone is Bob Gregory’s ‘Bend But Don’t Break’ and in is Pendergast’s much more aggressive scheme. Another is that Leach’s 2004 team was one of his best, with players perfectly tuned to his offensive strategy. It will be years before Leach can recruit and develop the players needed to get his scheme back to the level it was in 2004.

Yet another way to look at this game is team trajectories and the motivation factor. Cal finally rebounded from a soul-crushing 3 game losing streak by laying the wood to UCLA. WSU started 2-1 but has themselves just had a soul-crushing 3 game losing streak, complete with a couple of close-but-no-cigar loses.

So, does Cal make it a 4-loss streak for the Wougs? Or said a different way, does Cal make it a 8-season winning streak? On the other side, does WSU seize the opportunity to do what Cal did to UCLA and right the ship? Does Cal have a let-up game after the strong effort against UCLA? Or was the UCLA game a season-turning game and the Bears play with the sort of precision and intensity that marked the UCLA game?

My gut says that it is somewhere in between all of that. The Bears won’t have everything go quite as well as it did against UCLA, but it will be a much stronger effort than ASU. WSU will play with heart, seeing this as a winnable game, to get them back on track. Their new offense will deliver a couple blows that past WSU teams wouldn’t have, but Tedford will work the talent advantage like he always does and the Bears will come out on top with a score a bit closer than the game would have had you think.

Bears win: 31-24