Tedford Gets Points Across to Bears

It’s all they’re talking about in the Bay Area, the streak, the streak, the streak, so we dispatched an Internet search engine task force team to investigate.

The results were startling.

The California Golden Bears have not lost a college football game since last Nov. 17, a defeat-less skein that, by months, trumps anything the Oakland Athletics have accomplished.

Mind you, Cal started last year 0-10 before a season-ending victory at Rutgers. Cal celebrated by firing nice-guy-finished-last coach Tom Holmoe, replaced him with Oregon offensive coordinator Jeff Tedford, who promptly extended the Bears’ victory streak to two games after last weekend’s season-opening 70-22 thrashing of Baylor.

The question now: When will it end?

California has not played in the Rose Bowl game since 1959, hasn’t posted a winning season since 1993 and hasn’t played anything remotely resembling football in years, yet the dance troupe once known as Buzz-by Berkeley is a double-digit favorite to win its third consecutive game when it plays host to New Mexico State on Saturday?

California hasn’t won three consecutive games since 1998, roughly the last time one of its quarterbacks tossed a straight pass.

You want pathetic? Cal finished the 2001 conference season ranked last in scoring offense and defense and first in penalties.

If that wasn’t enough, the on-field woes were packaged with an academic fraud scandal that landed the football team on probation.

The big joke on campus had to be the one-year bowl ban imposed for this season, as if Cal had a hippies’ chance of winning the six games required.

Cal appealed the bowl ban, mainly to keep lame-duck seniors from clicking the Express Program Checkout option on their computer screen menu.

Now, who knows? Are six wins out of the question?

OK, time out for this public service announcement: Until it proves otherwise, California remains the Pacific 10’s basement property.

The streak?

It started last year at Rutgers, a worse major college program you will not find, and was extended last week with a victory over the Baylor (bad news) Bears.

Yet, for the first time in a while, Cal players don’t look as if they need directions to their positions, and the point differential in the Baylor win was stunning.

Under Tedford, the 40-year-old former Oregon assistant who called plays last year for Joey Harrington, Cal appears to have undergone a major adjustment.

You might have expected 50-yard line cartwheels after last week’s 70-point outburst, which represented 34.8% of the total points Cal scored last season.

Yet, the postgame demeanor was professionally subdued.

“We didn’t respond any differently than a team like Oregon does,” Tedford said of the Pac-10’s best program since 1995.

Tedford, a product of Downey’s Warren High, already has been compared to a young Jon Gruden, a disciple of offense and sleep deprivation.

His goal this year is to make senior quarterback Kyle Boller the outstanding player he was projected to be coming out of Newhall’s Hart High. Tedford pored over old game tapes and quickly concluded he inherited a guy who had grossly underachieved.

Tedford reworked Boller’s throwing motion and mental approach--going so far as to create a board game in which Boller and the coach go over strategies by moving offense and defense checker pieces.

Why should Boller be all ear holes?

In tutorial stints at Fresno State and Oregon, Tedford coached Trent Dilfer, recruited David Carr, and put finishing touches on Akili Smith and Harrington. All became first-round NFL draft picks.

In his first game paired with Tedford’s play calling, Boller completed a career-high 62.2% of his passes against Baylor, with three touchdowns.

Tedford’s breakdown?

“He missed some passes he should have made,” he said.

Wow, maybe this is a whole new ball game at Cal.

Pac Bits

It was quite a week for Washington Coach Rick Neuheisel, who signed a six-year contract extension in the aftermath of his questionable decision-making in the heartbreaking loss to Michigan. In fact, the Neuheisel extension had been worked out over the summer. The school planned to announce the news at a news conference this week but held off after disturbing developments in Ann Arbor.

“There may have been rioting in the streets,” Neuheisel joked to the Seattle Times.

When news of the extension was reported in the papers, Washington issued a release to confirm the details.

Neuheisel is still taking heat over losing a last-second decision to Michigan on a field goal set up after Washington was flagged for having 12 men on the field.

“On one hand, we’re absolutely mortified with the way things turned out,” Neuheisel said, “but on the other hand there are 11 games to play.”

That’s right, 11, same as the number of men you’re supposed to play on defense.

“We have a mechanism in place for how we substitute, it just broke down so we’re fixing it,” Neuheisel said.

Buddy Teevens makes his coaching debut at Stanford this weekend when the Cardinal opens at Boston College. “It’s exciting, but you try to separate the personal from the professional,” Teevens said.

The coach’s debut didn’t get easier when starting quarterback Chris Lewis was suspended last week for the opener for breaking a minor and undisclosed NCAA rule. Kyle Matter, a redshirt freshman from Hart High, the same school that produced Boller, makes his first collegiate start.

Stanford, citing academic concerns, is the lone Pac-10 school playing only 11 games this year, which could become a factor in the Rose Bowl title tiebreaker scenario if the Cardinal has only two nonconference victories.