A few days ago, on Saturday September 10, I attended the collegiate American football match between the University of California Golden Bears and the University of Colorado Buffaloes. Although we've lived in Boulder for over a year, and I work in the football stadium, this was the first Buffs game I have attended.

The game was an exciting one. The Bears led for most of the game, but the Buffs tied the game in the last minute of regulation, sending the game into overtime. Quite surprisingly, the Bears managed to win in overtime, something that as a True Blue, I am not used to seeing from my Bears.

This is the first season where the Buffs are a member of the Pac-12. I think they are not quite up to the standards of the Pac-12. Here are some of my observations from the game.

• The security getting into the game was a perfect example of security theater. They patted people down in a very cursory way searching for who-knows-what. Once inside the stadium, I didn't see security officers in the stadium at all until the end of the game. In the closing moments they were positioned in front of the student section in a weak attempt to prevent the students from rushing the field. How are 20 people in yellow jackets going to stop 4,000 drunk undergraduates? In the end, because the Buffs lost, the students stayed put.
• Note to self: For the next game I attend, I'm putting all kinds of goodies in my office the day before the game. No one seemed to notice when I went inside to get my water bottle this time (to avoid paying $3.75 (!) at the concessions for water), so I figure I can store even more stuff.
• The stadium feels a bit dated, kind of like Memorial was before reconstruction. The isles are tight and the access gates are narrow. The loudspeakers are located at one end of the stadium, meaning that they have to be extra loud to reach the other end. The head referee's microphone didn't work, so we had to guess what penalties were or catch the hand signals (which was difficult because he faced the other way during announcements). However, the views of the front range and flatirons are supreme.
• I noticed several times during the game that the PA people are, frankly, rude. I always thought that music is required to be turned off during plays, but the PA people would let it continue into the beginning of plays. Also, at least once when the Cal Band started to play after a Cal score, the PA played music over them. It's one thing to play over the 183rd playing of "Tribute to Troy" when playing U$C, but it's unacceptable to play over the Cal Band.

The only cool thing about CU is the running of the buffalo, Ralphie. I think there should be the running of the bear. How about a 800-lb grizzly bear running across the pitch at Memorial Stadium?

Today we went to the Cal-Washington football game. This was the last game held at Memorial Stadium before it is torn down and rebuilt. It's about time - the bleachers are falling apart, the concrete is deteriorated, and it's seismically unsafe. The outcome of the game was not a good one: Cal lost 16-13 on the last play of the game, where Washington scored a touchdown. It rained (and even hailed) for much of the game, which I suppose is kind of poetic.

We ran into Paul (pictured above), an old Cal Cycling friend of mine. Unlike me, he's been to Cal games all season. I've only witnessed their futility on the TV until now. Washington had the ball on 4th down, with half a yard to the end zone, with one second on the clock. If Washington had been stopped, Cal would have won the game and gone to a bowl game. As turned out, Cal could not stop Washington, and finished the season with a losing record, and no bowl game.

Cal: 13 Stanfurd: 20

Like me, Oski tries to keep a strong face (and two thumbs up!) but can only keep so much disappointment inside.

Most of my faithful readers are not college sports fans. Therefore, you are probably not aware that the men's basketball national championship in two days will be between Ohio State and Florida. These are the same two teams that met in the football championship in January of this year.

As a Cal fan, I've learned that the Berkeley football team and men's basketball team cannot both be competitive at the same time. More likely, neither will be all that successful. When I was in school, the football team was awful. I believe they lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 16 in a row over two seasons. They also never beat Stanfurd in the "Big Game" while I was an undergraduate. The basketball team was somewhat more capable. While they would usually lose against top opponents, they at least won more games than they lost by a comfortable margin.

Lately, the rule has stayed true. The football team has been excellent for the last few years, while the basketball team has been less than mediocre. All as is it should be in the Cal athletics world.

The best explanation of this phenomenon is that Cal is a legitimate academic powerhouse. Any school that's worth attending will, and should, stink at high-level popular sports. Sure, Cal is dominant at rugby. The Cal women's basketball team made it to the NCAA tournament this year, unlike the men. Cal is good at water sports like swimming and crew, too. Actually, Cal is all-around good, as their current third place in the Sears Directors Cup shows. All of that doesn't matter to me. Let me know when NCAA lacrosse makes it to prime time and I'll update my rules (a.k.a. chauvinism).

All of this is leading to my main point: Ohio State and Florida graduates should be on high suspicion of their worth for the next few years. They should be looked at with the same eye as Devry or University of Phoenix graduates. It is no secret that athletes are not academic superstars. There's a reason why these schools have attracted the best performers. If you're looking to attract the best athletes, you've got to show them that they can keep their grade point average high enough for NCAA eligibility. Bluntly, they ain't gonna get it done at a place like Cal.

Perhaps, someday in the future, Cal will be proficient at both men's basketball and football at the same time. And I will be forced to eat my words. If you are a true blue like me, you're not too worried about this.

Now that the full bowl schedule is out, I've done some rough analysis, ranking the bowls by their computer ranking. Since the human rankings don't go as deep as all the various bowl-bound teams, I've used the Sagarin computer rankings to do my mathematics. Simply, I added the Sagarin number for both teams, and also took the difference between the two teams. The first is supposed to roughly gauge the quality of the bowl, and the second the competitiveness of the two teams.

I've lowered the totals (in true USA Today front page style), so the worst bowl, the R&L Carriers New Orleans Bowl between Rice and Troy, has a value of zero. The bowls are arranged in order, with the national championship on Jan 7 on the far right.

In my opinion, the bowls should get better towards and beyond January 1. New Years Day has always been the day for the best bowls -- the Rose Bowl, for example. This graph makes it clear that bowls don't get better in any kind of pattern. In particular, the Pioneer PureVision Las Vegas bowl between BYU and Oregon is way too early for its quality. And the two bowls right before the National Championship (a grand canyon of stink in the graph above), the International and GMAC bowls, are in fact two of the worst bowls of the season.

My team, California, plays in the Holiday bowl on December 28 against Texas A&M. There are 11 bowls after that until there's a bowl of better quality (the Outback bowl between Tennessee and Penn State on the first). By far the best bowl of the season will be the Rose Bowl (between USC and Michigan), which has quality only second to the National Championship, but has a much smaller difference between the teams.

There are all kinds of people out there complaining about the BCS, arguing for a playoff system. I'm on my soapbox asking for the schedule to be changed. Awful bowls don't belong in January, and good bowls don't belong in Mid-December. Especially when my Bears play way too early!