Playing Out The Season
With the loss to USC behind us, reasons to keep paying attention to Cal Football this season are dwindling. Honestly, there’s not much of any significance left to play for — except the Axe. There’s ALWAYS the Axe. Oh, if you’ve only been a Cal fan for the last few years, you may not know why the Axe is special, but trust me, it is. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Cal will finish the 2007 season in no better than 3rd place. The Bears will not go to a prestigious bowl game (though they almost certainly will got to *a* bowl game). They will not win 10 games this year (although they’ll have 3 tries left to secure their 6th consecutive winning season). Though they may yet retain the Axe, there’s very little to recommend paying attention to this weekend’s matchup against Washington in Seattle — except your die-hard enthusiasm for our beloved Golden Bears.
Saturday’s loss to USC was cold, dreary, damp and depressing, and I’m damn proud of how many Cal fans stayed until the bitter, disappointing end. If you were looking for the proper time to jump off the Cal bandwagon, that time was a few weeks ago. Bandwagon fans should have been scurrying away like rats from a sinking ship, and by now, they should’ve all gone and bought themselves a nice green Oregon hat. There’s no bandwagon anymore, folks. If you’re still with us now, chances are, you’re a true blue Bear for life.
Anyway, here’s how the Pac-10 currently stands:
Pac-10 Standings
| Team | Wins | Losses |
| Arizona State | 6 | 1 |
| Oregon | 5 | 1 |
| USC | 5 | 2 |
| Oregon State | 4 | 3 |
| UCLA | 4 | 3 |
| Arizona | 3 | 4 |
| California | 3 | 4 |
| Washington State | 2 | 5 |
| Stanford | 2 | 6 |
| Washington | 1 | 6 |
Yup, Cal sits firmly in the ’sucky’ half of the standings. Perhaps games against Washington and Stanford (the 9th and 10th place teams) will buoy us towards respectability.
And our bowl destination? Glad you asked. Increasingly, it’s looking like the Emerald Bowl is where Cal is headed, but don’t discount the Sun Bowl just yet. I updated the odds from last week, and added a new assumption, which I’ll discuss below.
Emerald - 58.71% - Now that I’m resigned to a lower-tier bowl game this year, I’m pretty much rooting for this one to happen. Get your Emerald Nuts signs ready.
Sun - 19.71% - Not terribly likely, but it gets a boost from a new assumption of mine. Now, I haven’t heard anything regarding such a situation, but I tend to think the Sun Bowl would be reluctant to host the same team two years in a row, and Oregon State was the Pac-10 representative last year. How many Pac-10 teams have played in the Sun Bowl back-to-back years? Try none. In fact, only two teams (Purdue and Texas) have appeared in consecutive Sun Bowls since 1960.
So, my guess is that if Cal and Oregon State tied for 4th place (w/ two Pac-10 teams in the BCS), Cal would be the pick. How likely is such a scenario? Actually, that’s exactly what would happen in the ever-popular ‘favorites win out’ scenario. Oregon would end up in the National Championship Bowl, the winner of USC @ ASU goes to the Rose, the loser to the Holiday, and Cal and Oregon State would be tied for 4th at 5-4. However, any number of upsets could ensure that Cal falls to the Emerald Bowl, and if you were hoping to stay in the Bay Area for your Bowl experience, you’d better hope one of them happens.
No Bowl - 10.98% - Don’t lose out, Bears! This isn’t terribly likely to happen. In fact, there’s only a 31.87% chance that the Pac-10 even fills all its bowl slots.
Armed Forces - 10.60% - Also not terribly likely. In fact, I doubt the Pac-10 fills this slot, thus ending the conference’s brief and inauspicious association with this bowl.
Las Vegas - 0.0% - I’m still assuming that the Emerald Bowl will snag Cal away from Vegas, so unless I hear otherwise, I’m not considering this bowl a possibility.
Holiday - 0.0% - Technically, Cal isn’t mathematically eliminated from San Diego yet, but the best the Bears could do would be a tie for 3rd with two teams in the BCS, and I’d have to think that if the Holiday Bowl had the choice between ‘Cal’ and ’some other team’, ’some other team’ would be visiting Sea World over Christmas break.
A few other interesting percentages:
UCLA gets bowl eligible - 51.37%
Washington State gets bowl eligible - 17.67%
Arizona gets bowl eligible - 3.30%
The Pac-10 gets two teams in BCS games - 66.27%
You could at least put the list in the correct order, by head-to-head wins/losses…
Cal is ABOVE Arizona…and, really, at this point, Oregon should be at the top since it beat AssU (and despite the fact that they have played one fewer conference game…they may only be 5-1, but they are ahead of the 6-1 team anyway).
It’s the little things like that that make a difference in perception.
Go Bears…wherever you end up!!
Comment by TrumanHugh — November 13, 2007 @ 8:24 pm
Who Could Our Bowl Opponents Be (Emerald)?
Well, guess what. After bashing the conference for weeks, it looks like I’ll be watching ACC football these next two weeks. What goes around comes around I guess.
Here are the likelihood of bowls, in order: Emerald Bowl (most likely), Sun Bowl (p…
Trackback by Bears Necessity — November 14, 2007 @ 12:12 am
TrumanHigh, can I direct you to this link:
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/confstandings?confID=9
It is the Pac10 standings at ESPN. It lists ASU above Oregon for some reason. It does have Arizona below Cal, tho. Perhaps Ragnarok is so bummed out he couldnt bear put us higher
Comment by TwistNHook — November 14, 2007 @ 9:56 am
TrumanHugh,
Yeah, it looks odd having Arizona State above Oregon, but they do have a better winning percentage (for now), and that’s the commonly accepted way to order standings, even though Oregon will win the Pac-10 if they win out because of the head-to-head tiebreaker.
As for the other ties in the standings (OSU-UCLA, Arizona-Cal), I put them in alphabetical order precisely because the head-to-head result doesn’t matter. Both teams will be credited as having finished in the same place in the standings, and bowls will get their choice of either team, regardless of who beat whom in the regular season. With the exception of determining the Pac-10’s automatic BCS bid, ‘tie-breakers’ are irrelevant (and even teams tied for 1st are considered to be co-champions).
TwistNHook, ESPN has Cal above Arizona because they use overall winning percentage as a secondary ordering determinant. If those are equal, they’ll go with alphabetical order, just as I did. (I ignored overall winning percentage because I don’t list the overall record.)
Comment by ragnarok — November 14, 2007 @ 12:14 pm