The Emerald Bowl: Guaranteed* to Rain

This is the only bowl around where there's at least a chance of someone doing a full-on muddy head-slide into a dugout; for some reason the Emerald Bowl folks decided to host this in whatever they're calling Pac Bell Park these days. Apparently some people really like nuts. Speaking of nuts, nobody can figure out if they want to stick around with a bowl affiliation here; I suppose it's been the ACC's domain since 2002 back when it was the San Francisco Bowl, but in '04 it picked up a sponsor along with Navy. Because that makes all the sense in the world. Either way, the ACC's 3-2 in this game - the last two years against the Pac-10 they've been 1-1.

Miami

The Baby Canes ended up 7-5 overall and - like so many other shit teams in the ACC - 4-4 in-conference. Shockingly, their losses were actually mostly understandable; a tougher-than-expected loss to Florida coupled with losses to the other Florida team, Georgia Tech, and North Carolina + bitter stepbrother. Wait, they lost to NC State? Fuck that shit. At least they beat Virginia Tech - and they won the return game against TAMU, so they've got that going for them too.

Like so many ACC teams, Miami really doesn't do anything well other than be young and get guys suspended. Sure, their scoring offense is 2nd in the ACC (good enough for mid-40s nationally), but they only outscored their opponents by an average of 3.7 ppg - and that's including their 52-7 blowout of Charleston Southern. Good job. They don't run, pass, or stop the run very well - but they do sport a pretty decent pass D. It's left as an exercise to the reader if this is due to a good secondary or shitty ACC quarterbacking; you know which one we're siding with.

Of course, the keyword here is Baby Canes; leading rusher Graig Cooper is only a sophomore, and both QB Robert Marve and QB Jacory Harris are freshmen. (Of course, Marve's suspended for the game, but he played earlier, so he counts here.) Leading WRs Aldarius Johnson and Thearon Collier? Freshmen. At least their leading tacklers (LB Glenn Cook and DC Anthony Reddick) are seniors. Of course, their leading backfield penetrators - Alan Bailey, Marcus Robinson, and Sean Spence - are all underclassmen. Great.

Predictably, a team this young is going to have problems with turnovers (19 INT allowed vs. 4 taken away; -9 total on the season) and third down conversions (33.5%). However, they excel in the red zone and have an excellent kicking game for once. That should help them out in playing a team that lost to fucking Maryland.

What'll Miami have to do in this game? Stick to what they've done in the past; win the battle of field position and get lucky enough to come out with a victory. This is a good-not-great Cal team they're facing off against; RB Jahvid Best is the best guy on the team, so it might be worth stacking up a bit and daring Kevin Riley or whatever Weeblie is under center to beat them over the top. Really, a win here would be nice but not necessary; the bowl season experience is going to be the key here.

California

The Cal Golden Bears being a tale of two teams should come as no surprise to anyone who remotely follows the Pac 10. In 2008, the Berkley Hippies put a new twist on things by going 7-0 at home and 1-4 on the road, although the fact that USC and Oregon State were road games may have biased that outcome. If there's one thing we've learned, it's that college teams don't travel long distances well (see: home win over Michigan State, road loss to Maryland) unless they are vastly superior to their opposition… or, I dunno, if they have Vince Young on their team. Always helps when the line can forget to block, the WRs don't run routes, and the QB just says "fuck it" and takes off for 50 yards.

Oh by the way – that one road win? Washington State. So yeah, moving on… Jahvid Best leads the Cal offense, rushing for 126.7 ypg and an astounding 8.0 ypc, chipping in 22.4 ypg in receptions as well. Shane Vereen throws in another 56 ypg to make this a run-first kind of
offense. That's fortunate, because Kevin Riley and Nate Longshore have both been mediocre quarterbacks. Combined they have a 23/10 ratio, so at least there's not an excessive amount of turnovers. However, neither completes more than 60% of their passes (Riley at just 50.7%) and both average only a shade over 6 yards an attempt. To put that in perspective, Sam Bradford averages 6 yards per incompletion. Jahvid Best has more receptions than any WR on the team, so we're not really going to talk about them. In fact, Best and Vereen have the same receptions total – 52 – as the top two WRs, Nyan Boateng and Cameron Morrah.

Defensively, the Bears counter their mediocre passing offense with a mediocre passing defense. By mediocre I don't mean "bad" – I mean just that. It's a wash; technically Cal outpasses opposition by a shade under 3 ypg – practically, a wash. It's the 183-122 edge in rushing
ypg that allowed this team to win more often than not. That or the fact that they played at home more often than not, which we've already shown to be the true indicator of this team's success.

So let's discuss that home field advantage which is clearly more important to Cal's success than things like overall talent, positional advantages, schemes, etc. It's a short drive from Berkley to San Francisco, certainly shorter than the trip the Canes are making. Will that be enough to win the game for Cal? Frankly, nobody cares.

*not actually guaranteed

The Armed Forces Bowl: soldiers-in-training vs hippies

I’m kind of glad to see the Armed Forces Bowl actually …y’know, have a team from the armed forces playing in it. My theory is that’s going to be a one-time thing, a fluke spawned by Air Force having a pretty good year. It’s not like it happened before – the only team even kind of close to a service academy is …Houston? Maybe? With the head coaching change at Navy, it may be a little while before we see any team other than Air Force in a bowl, so it’ll balance out. Maybe.

Can someone explain to me why the second-place team from the Pac-10 plays on the 27th of December but the 5th-place team plays on the 31st? I don’t care about bowl prestige and/or whether or not people actually care about the bowls; it just looks really goofy to see a possible BCS contender serving as the functional opening act of bowl season. It’s like throwing a middleweight championship match on as the first bout of a card and having an amateur match at the #2 fight.

California (by Coach Pendley)

If I was going to preview this team properly, I’d write about 3,000 words on their season history and their players and about 25 on actual strategy. It’s impressive to see a team basically self-destruct on itself without really any impetus; they held an excellent win over Oregon (which seemed bigger at the time than what it turned out to be), but that was about it once the second half of the season rolled around. Lose to USC, lose to Arizona State, lose to Stanford – heck, by the Transitive Property of Football, they’re worse than Notre Dame! That’s got to sting a bit.

Still, it’s not like they’re not talented on both sides of the ball. QB Nate Longshore is an excellent talent; he’s a drop-back pocket passer who theoretically has a good grasp on head coach Jeff Tedford’s offense. He ended up throwing for over 2,500 yards and 16 TDs, but the 13 picks were a killer – including 10 in the losses. In addition to that, his ratios bit it over the last three months of the year; from September on, he threw 9 TDs to 11 INTs.

RB Justin Forsett probably does miss his old backfield mate Marshawn Lynch a bit, but Forsett excelled in limited duties last year and he’s done an excellent job stepping up to the plate this year as well. He finished 2nd in the Pac-10 with 1,406 yards rushing and 13 TDs, and unlike Longshore, didn’t totally tank once September rolled around; he averaged 5.14 ypc in October.

WR Desean Jackson looked like a Heisman contender early in the season (helped on by his punt return TD against the Vols in the season opener for both teams), but nagging injuries derailed his productivity. Heck, WR Lavelle Hawkins finished with more yards (841 to 681), more yards per catch (12.19 to 11.35), and more receptions per game (5.8 to 5.5) than Jackson.

As for the Cal rush D, it was like the rest of the team – good in September (3.62 ypc), horrid in November (4.98 ypc). The passing game was a little more respectable; it actually showed an improvement as the year went on, but while the yards per attempt stayed virtually constant (hovering around 6.4 yards per attempt), the number of attempts went way down – probably because teams were gouging them on the ground.

Hell, even their turnovers followed the same path - +11 in September, -5 in October, -6 in November, -1 in December. Red zone opportunities were way down (24 in September was more than the other three months combined) as was TD conversion percentage (70% in September to around 55% at all other times). So yeah, the gameplan should be pretty obvious – play like it’s September, not November.

Keys to Victory:
1: Shake off the second half. There’s a reason this team opened at 5-1, and it will do the Golden Bears a world of good to remember why they were that good to open the season. Yeah, I suspect that the losing probably snowballed a bit as the season wore on, but that’s one of the many reasons why the bowl games are so far after the end of the year. Cal is unquestionably a more talented team than Air Force; if they play like it they’ll win handily.

2: Play against either the new offense or the old offense, but not both. Air Force’s new head coach Troy Calhoun is trying to install more of a spread-based offense, but he has old HC Fisher Deberry’s personnel in starting roles. As a result, Air Force’s offense is kind of a mix of the two schemes – dangerous when working, but likely to be only firing half the time. (Only a handful of offenses can do both at once, West Virginia’s chief among them.) Cal can’t defend both the spread and the option at the same time, so if they focus against one and only one at a time, they’ll limit Air Force’s effectiveness. It’ll likely be easier for them to defend against the option and leave the corners on an island. Playing, say, a modified Cover-3 and sending a corner across to challenge the option is only going to result in headaches for the defense.

That’s about it, really. If Cal plays like they should they’ll win the game, but their defense has to play smart too – easier said than done.

Air Force (by Coach Lawrence)

After bring bowl eligible every season from 1994 through 2003, Air Force had suffered three straight losing seasons coming into 2007. Following a weird win over TCU and consecutive losses to BYU and Navy, that academy’s season looked like it could go either way. The Falcons rose to the occasion, winning 6 of their final 7 including being the last team who was able to defeat the Notre Dame Fighting Irish. At 9-3, this is their best regular season finish since 1998, when the Falcons won the Oahu Classic bowl to finish 12-1.

As we’d expect from a service academy, Air Force relies on a complex triple option offense. Three players, including QB Shaun Carney, average 9+ carries and 44+ yards per game. The leading rusher is wingback Chad Hall, at 17.5 carries and 118 yards a game. Overall, AFA runs the ball an average of 55 times per game, with just over 16 pass attempts to compliment that. As we’d also expect, the Falcons are a little undersized on the defensive line (avg wt 260) and get high productivity from the linebackers and secondary – 4 LBs and 3 DBs combine to be the leading seven tacklers. But the defensive performance is adequate, giving up 131 ypg rushing and 226 ypg passing.

As far as meaningful statistics, look no further than the offensive rushing totals. In nine wins, 333 yards/game and 5.7 ypc... in three losses, 194 ypg and 4.4 ypc.

Keys to Victory
1) Open up the offense. Without much of a passing game, it’s difficult to move the ball down the field 5 yards at a time. The triple option needs big plays, and Chad Hall is the man to provide those IF he can find space. Forcing the defense to play everything honestly will give him more opportunities to bust a big one, as they will be keying on him.

2) Don’t give up the deep ball. It’ll be tempting to send 8 to try to stop Forsett, but quick TD passes to Jackson and Hawkins are exactly what the AFA doesn’t need. When you’re a running team, you don’t want to give up quick scores which can really put pressure on your offense to respond.

3) Proper fundamentals and decision-making on the toss. Running option is of course a big risk of turnovers... and the AFA has fumbled 6 times in 3 losses compared to just 7 times in 9 wins. Frankly, that’s damn impressive to run the ball 55 times at all and average less than one fumble per game (in their victories), but to do that while running that many option plays is just amazing. Even their overall total – 13 fumbles in 12 games – is impressive considering the offense. Keep it up.