Cal Golden Bears, Pac-10 champs

This weekend, the California Golden Bears Men’s basketball team accomplished something that had not been done at Cal in FIFTY(!) years.  They became the first team to win at least a share of the conference title since 1960 (The great Pete Newell’s last year as Cal’s head coach).  The Golden Bears dominated the second half of the game vs. Arizona State, who came in essentially tied with Cal for the conference lead.  ASU still has a chance to tie for the regular-season title, if Cal can’t beat hated rival Stanfurd next week, but Cal swept ASU so they will have the top-seed in the upcoming conference tournament.  The Pac-10 doesn’t use tie-breakers to determine the regular season champion; if teams tie, they are co-champions, so Cal and ASU could be co-champions next week.  However, in terms of historical significance, that is iirrelevant.  Even if you count sharing the title, it’s been FIFTY years, and a great burden has been removed from the program with this accomplishment.

Congratulations to the team, the coaches, and everyone associated with the program on this outstanding achievement!

As a footnote, I was at the game, and took the above picture with my iPhone… Go Bears!

Joe Posnanski on Tony Gonzalez

Joe Posnanski, one of the great sportswriters of this generation, writes an article about Cal alum Tony Gonzalez, who was traded from the Kansas City Chiefs to the Atlanta Falcons yesterday.

A great read.

Thirteen+ months later…

So it’s been a long time… and I need to get back in the swing of blogging. Since I’ve last blogged, I’ve seen (among other things):

• The birth of my second child
• a 13-3 record for my Dallas Cowboys, only to get nipped by the juggernaut that was the eventual Super Bowl Champ Giants in the playoffs
• My Cal Bears being about 90 minutes away from the #1 ranking in the land, only to see that slip away in the final seconds of a loss to Oregon State, followed by one of the all-time implosions (impressive even by Cal standards)
• Those same bears firing the men’s basketball coach and replacing him with a fantastic coach whose most recent college job was the head coach at Cal’s arch-rival, Stanfurd… and strangely enough, the firing came the day immediately after I sent a long, passionate letter to the athletic director indicating my displeasure with the direction of the basketball team (not that there was any cause-and-effect, but it was still a strange coincidence)
• My Angels losing twice in the postseason, both times to the Red Sox, and “blessed” with management that doesn’t seem to understand much about how to identify quality offensive players (outside of the trade for Mark Teixeira, who many people think will spurn the Angels for greener pastures)
• A very intense Democratic primary, with 3 high-quality candidates, in which my first choice dropped out the day after I decided to donate money to him, and then later was found to have been hiding an affair which would have crushed his presidential hopes had he won the nomination (and has effectively scuttled a future in politics for him… John Edwards, I think that you showed an unforgivable level of arrogance in hiding that affair)
• A mixed-race candidate win the presidential nomination of a major party
• A supposedly democratic congress caving to a president with record-high levels of unpopularity and granting him powers (and granting telecoms retroactive immunity) that a republican congress was unable to give him
• The banking deregulation chickens coming home to roost in the recent economic crisis, in which the current administration’s initial response was to give away, with no strings attached, $700 billion of taxpayer money to the very people who created the mess(!)

I’ve left out many things, of course, but those were some of the first things I thought when i thought about what I would have blogged about. My impetus for blogging again today was a quote I saw from David Sedaris in the New Yorker (h/t Balloon Juice):

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I don’t know if anyone could have put it better (although I will admit that after reading the full article, I don’t know if it was intended with the same implications that I read into it)… However, I’ll just leave it at that and let you decide .

One final link…. A great post by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Catching Up…

A few links I thought were worth sharing:

• Why is it that foreign news outlets do an infinitely better job of reporting on items that are actually newsworthy than US news outlets? Case in point: this article in the Toronto Star which reports on the first “Terrorism Index” put out by the journal Foriegn Policy. Key quotes from the Star article:
  • Some 86 per cent of them said the world has grown more, not less, dangerous, despite President George W. Bush’s claims that the U.S. is winning the war on terror.
    The main reasons for the decline in security, they said, were the war in Iraq, the detention of terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay, U.S. policy towards Iran and U.S. energy policy.
  • “When you strip away the politics, the experts, almost to a person, are very worried about the administration,” says Joe Cirincione, vice-president of the Center for American Progress, the Washington think-tank which co-sponsored the survey.
    “They think none of our front-line institutions is doing a good job and that Iraq has made the terror situation much worse.”

• So the Republicans want a debate on Iraq (well, not really). But if they do, georgia10 at DailyKos is ready for it.

• Were voting machines that were decertified by California used in the highly contested CA-50 election to replace jailed Republican Congressman Duke Cunningham? It appears so, and the Registrar for San Diego County and the (Republican) Secretary of State don’t seem to care. Did any hanky-panky go on which might have swung a close election in one direction? Wouldn’t anyone who cares about democracy want to know. Apparently not the Registrar of a Republican County and the Republican Secretary of State.

• Republican Senators prevent an up-or-down vote on an increase to the minimum wage, which
  • has been $5.15 an hour for almost 10 years, and is worth less now that at almost anytime in the last 50 years. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage in 1968 would be worth $9.09 today, 75% more than the current wage.

• At the same time, Republican House of Representative members remove a Democratic amendment increasing the minimum wage from the Labor-HHS bill, while reviving the effort to repeal the estate tax. Classic Republican focus: ignore those who are slaving to make ends meet at minimum-wage jobs while protecting that tiny fraction of the population (0.3%) lucky enough to inherit more wealth than they know what to do with. Quite a set of values, huh?

• For those out there who fail to see the real world impact of Republican pro-business and anti-consumer policies, you may want to watch the latest edition of HBO’s Real Sports (the basic gist is diaried here in this diary at DailyKos). It is somewhat sad, though, that it takes a program on sports to really convey news.

• Finally, The University of California gave men’s basketball coach Ben Braun a two-year extension. I certainly don’t agree with the extension, but if it was given primarily to ensure that recruiting wasn’t affected, it might be ok. The key thing to know about the extension is if/how much the university is on the hook for if they decide to let Braun go (say, after next season if the Bears don’t make the tournament).

Cal v. UCLA; battle for First place?

Cal's men's basketball team hosts the UCLA Bruins tomorrow night, with both teams at or near the top of the Pac-10 standings. Cal trails the 1st place bruins by a game, but has beaten UCLA in their only meeting, at UCLA, this season. A win tomorrow would tie the bears and Bruins atop the Pac-10 (along with Washingtion if they beat ASU), but the Bears would hold the tie-breaker (for Pac-10 tourney seeding) over UCLA due to having swept them (again, if the bears win tomorrow night).

The bears really tanked their game against ASU after having beaten Arizona, which leaves Cal with little room for error if they want to get an at-large bid to the NCAA tournament. My best guess is that Cal needs 3 more wins to be in the tourney safely, whether that comes with 2 this week and one in the tourney, or 1 this week and 2 in the tourney. We shall see.

Cal wins 6th in a row, 75-66 over Arizona; moves into a tie for first in Pac-10

The California Golden Bears continued on their recent run last night, defeating another one of their nemeses, the Arizona Wildcats, 75-66 in Berkeley last night. Arizona has recently had Cal's number, and while this Arizona team is not as strong as in past years, Arizona is still a team that seemed to have their way with Cal. As such, it was an important win both from the standpoint of the Pac-10 standings (they are now tied with UCLA in first place), as well as from a mental standpoint. The Bears played well, and while a team more of a killer instinct might have stretched it out to a 15 to 20 point win, the Bears were mentally strong enough to respond to every Arizona run with one of their own. Cal now, in a sense, controls their own destiny; if they win out (unlikely, I know, but fun to dream about ), they will win the regular season Pac-10 title.

Cal defeats Stanfurd, 65-62!

In probably their most important game of the season to date, the Cal men's basketball team defeated arch-rival Stanfurd last night, 65-62. It was a tight, hard-fought game, in which both teams were at less than full strength (the 'furd's Matt Haryasz was suffering from lingering vision problems resulting from a poke in the eye last weekend @ OSU, while Cal was missing 3 of it's top 8 players in Rod Benson, Martin Smith, and starter Omar Wilkes). Coming into the game, both teams were tied for second in the Pac-10, one game behind UCLA. However, the game was critical for both teams, since neither has a particularly strong out-of-conference resume (although Cal at 6-3 OOC is much better than 'furd's 4-4 OOC). Cal now sits in sole possession of second place, with 4 of its last 6 regular season games at home. Their chances for an at-large berth into the NCAA tournament are getting better, although a strong finish is still needed. The Bears were led by Leon Powe's career-high 32 points and Ayinde Ubaka's 18.

Cal BB and FB notes…

So the men's basketball team played probably their best game of the season in defeating Oregon State, 69-52. The Bears stormed out to 21-2 lead midway through the first half and were never really threatened the rest of the way. If Cal can come out with this kind of intensity and effort every game, they should be competitive in every game the rest of the season and win most of them. A key point to remember, though, is what happened after their last 3-game winning streak. Cal had swept USC and UCLA (ranked highly) on the road and defeated Oregon at home. In came an Oregon State team that was struggling in the conference, and they pretty much had their with the Golden Bears. In this case, Cal swept UW (ranked highly) and WSU at home, and demolished Oregon State. They go into Eugene to play a struggling and disheartened Oregon team on Saturday… a classic "trap" game, i.e. a game in which Cal may play with low intensity, assuming they can just show up and win, and may let Oregon steal the game. The Bears need to remember the OSU loss (and Coach Braun must ensure as best he can that the players are up for the game) and come out strong.

In other Cal news, Jeff Tedford has hired Mike Dunbar, who was serving as the offensive coordinator at Northwestern University, as offensive coordinator. Dunbar replaces George Cortez, Cal's OC since Tedford arrived in 2002, who lef to pursue other interests. Dunbar has much experience with the spread offense, and while Cal won't go to a spread offense exclusively, look for Cal's offense next year to incorporate the spread and the shotgun with the Tedford's existing offense.

Cal Men’s Hoops Next Challenge: On the road vs. the Oregon Schools

The California Golden Bears Men's Basketball Team faces it's next challenge of the season, going on the road vs. OSU (a team they lost to earlier in the year in probably one of their worst efforts of the season) and then vs. Oregon, a team they beat in a somewhat tight game earlier in the year. As was the case last weekend, the Bears need a sweep against two teams they should beat if they are at the top of their game. Anything but a sweep would be a damaging blow to their NCAA tournament hopes. If they hope to garner an at-large berth, a sweep, while not absolutely necessary, is almost necessary. A loss this weekend might mean the Bears might need to win on the road at UW, which would be a very difficult task. So Go Bears!

Surprise, surprise… Cal Over #9 UW, 71-69!

After the post earlier in the week taking Cal head coach Ben Braun to task for the team's poor play against Arizona last Saturday, I have to give him credit for having the team prepared to play against No. 9 ranked Washington. The Golden Bears played extremely well the first 35 minutes of the game, and somehow survived some extremely dubious coaching decisions the last 5 minutes. The game wasn't perfect, but the Bears outplayed the Huskies for most of the game, and came away with the win. The win keeps alive the Bears faint hopes of an at-large berth into the NCAA tournament, but in order for this week of basketball to be a successful one, the Bears have to come into Saturday's game against Washington State focussed and emerge with a win. A loss on Saturday really hurts the Bears, and Coach Braun must have his team as up for Saturday's game as he did for today's game.

A game like today's shows how good the Bears can be if they put their minds to it. It's up to Coach Braun to get that kind of focus from the team game in and game out.