"Hope you enjoyed the view." 

First, Cal won one of the biggest games of Tedford’s career.  And now, a judge has ordered the tree sitters be-gone.  Tree sitters.  Be Gone!

I don’t think this really affects the overall lawsuit much, but it is great news.   GO BEARS!

Our top 25 this week doesn’t much resemble top 25s of previous weeks, but I think that’s OK.  Huge upsets all weekend completely shook up the top 10, and I gotta say, filling out a ballot this week was difficult.  I can’t speak for my fellow Golden Bloggers (yes, even TwistNHook graced us with his input this week), but I started this week basically from scratch.  Here’s what we came up with:

The California Golden Blogs Top-25

RankTeamDelta

1	LSU	1
2	Southern Cal	1
3	California	3
4	Ohio State	3
5	South Florida	10
6	Florida	3
7	Kentucky	4
8	Oregon	2
9	Wisconsin	4
10	Oklahoma	6
11	Boston College	1
12	West Virginia	7
13	Georgia	4
14	South Carolina	2
15	Missouri	7
16	Texas	8
17	Hawaii	2
18	Arizona State	5
19	Cincinnati	2
20	Virginia Tech	—
21	Rutgers	12
22	Clemson	8
23	Kansas State	3
24	Purdue	2
25	Auburn	1

LSU and USC appear to be 1 and 1A at this point.  Both looked vulnerable this weekend, and while they’re the odds-on favorites to make the BCS championship game, I wouldn’t bet on either going undefeated.

Cal was the biggest winner this weekend, outlasting Oregon on the road, then sliding into the third spot as Florida, Oklahoma and West Virginia all lost.  Most significant was the Oklahoma and Texas losses.  Before this weekend, it looked like even if Cal ran the table, they might be stuck behind the SEC champ and the winner of the Red River Shootout in the BCS derby if both teams went undefeated.  Now, Cal controls its own BCS destiny, something very few teams can say.  As long as they keep winning, Cal will be on track for the national title game.  How weird is that?

Speaking of Oregon, they move up two spots after a loss at home.  That’s pretty much as well as you can play and not come away with a win, especially against what is now a top-3 team.  I know both the AP and Coaches polls dropped them a few spots, but I don’t agree.  Neither does Stewart Mandel.

Is South Florida really the fifth-best team in the country?  On a neutral field, would they really take down Florida, or Oklahoma, or even Oregon?  I couldn’t say.  Still, they looked pretty darn good in taking out West Virginia, and that win at Auburn looks even better after Auburn took out Florida Saturday night.  Possibly one of the best-looking résumés out there.

In the same vein, is Kentucky really the seventh-best team in the country?  We’ll find out soon, as they visit South Carolina this weekend, followed by games against LSU and Florida.  Ouch.  It’s schedules like that that cause people to continue touting the SEC as the toughest conference.

Rutgers was the biggest loser this weekend, falling from the top 10 all the way to number 21.  After feasting on terrible competition, the Scarlet Knights were pretty much exposed as pretenders in falling to a middling Maryland squad (whom West Virginia had just thrashed).  And it wasn’t even that close.

Florida and Oklahoma remain in the top 10 after losing, in part because they both lost on last-second field goals, and in part because, unlike Rutgers, their previous wins have been quite impressive.  Meanwhile, Texas gets pounded by unheralded Kansas State and drops to number 16.  That may even be generous.  We’ll see after the Red River Shootout this weekend.

New to the top 25 this week are previously mentioned Kansas State and Auburn, as well as Purdue.  I’m rather skeptical of Purdue myself.  Yes, they’re 5-0, but they’ve beaten Toledo, Eastern Illinois, Central Michigan, Minnesota, and what may turn out to be the worst Notre Dame squad of all time.  Beat Ohio State this weekend, and then we’ll talk.

There are times in life when it feels like someone owns you.  Whether it be your boss owning your life, your girlfriend who has got you whipped (or boyfriend who has got you trained), or an obsession that takes over your life. 

Oregon cornerback Mr. Jairus Byrd is having one of those moments in life. 

 

His life currently consists of being pwned (owned) by Desean "THA1" Jackson. 

Last year he got pwned by THA1 on a hitch and go route for a touchdown.  That can be seen here at the 0:15 mark.  THA1 is so sick that he didn’t even do the hitch!  He just stutter-stepped, slightly turned his body to the outside, and made a fool of Jairus. 

This year he got pwned by THA1 on a little hitch route for a touchdown.  THA1 threw him a little dead-leg, false-step action and blew right by Mr. Jairus Byrd for a touchdown.  That can be seen here at the 3:36 remaining time mark. 

At least this is a learning experience for Mr. Jairus Byrd.  He can learn from these experiences and get better - everything has a bright side, right?  And it happened against a future 1st round NFL draft pick.  So I guess it isn’t so bad.  But then again, he got embarrassed two years in a row on national television.  Okay, maybe it is pretty bad.   

 

Thanks to our readers J.C. & B.L. for sending this in our direction.  Good lookin’, playas.

Congratulations to PaperMike and BiggerBetterBears for picking 14/22 last week.  PaperMike is in the lead but not by a lot.  Around 15 of us are still only 10 points behind and could make up the difference with 9 weeks of Yahoo Pick’Em left.  But to PaperMike’s credit, he’s only 6 picks behind the national leader. 

Ragnarok and I are tied at 9th.  And TwistNHook and YellowFever come in at 11th and 12th.  Rags, Twist, and I picked a piss poor 9/22 last week.  I think it’s safe to say none of us will be throwing down bets on college football games any time soon. 

Speaking of point spreads and stuff, congrats to Ken Crawford over at Excuse Me For My Voice.  Mr. Crawford not only correctly picked the winner of the Cal/Oregon game, but the exact spread, and the exact scores.  

I used to be pretty good at just "feeling" when Cal was gonna win/lose and by how much.  Sort of like that dumb chick in the movie Mean Girls or whatever who can tell when it’s going to rain via her breasts.  Except my chest didn’t tingle or whatever when I thought Cal was going to win.  Nowadays I suck at predicting whether we’ll win or what the point spread will be.

Last year when I was working with the team I thought I’d get real good at predicting when we’d win or lose.  I thought since I was there watching them every day that I’d know what we were capable of better than everyone else aside from the coaches, and players.  Boy was I wrong.  We looked sharp the week prior to Tennessee and I predicted a 2-3 touchdown win.  Well, needless to say that didn’t happen.  I had the same kind of thoughts the weeks prior to Arizona and U$C too…

All this talk about predicting how your favorite team will perform reminds of this quote by Tedford who said something like how you never know how the team will perform based on the week’s practice.  Sometimes the team doesn’t practice well that week but comes out on Saturday as sharp as ever and pounds the competition to dust.  Other times the team practices great the week before but then come Saturday they get annihilated.  It really is a fickle thing.  And honestly I think the best people for predicting the outcomes of games are studious, serious, non-homer fans but not people who are intimately connected with the program or people who have insider information.  People who are connected to the program are often unreasonably biased and people with insider info let that info influence their predictions too much.

#3!