I don't really understand the fixation on blowout losses I've seen in this thread. When people have looked at the relationship between points and winning, they've found, pretty much universally across sports (at least the major ones like basketball, baseball, football), that point differential is a much better measure of how a team performed than actual win-loss record; it's a strong predictor of future success. To simplify it a little bit, essentially you have to think of games in 3 ways: games you get blown out, close games, and games you blow the other team out. The first and third are ones where the outcome is not by chance, but the middle one....well, chance plays a huge role in those games. Drunkoski is right - you can not expect a team to continually win all its close games. Too much random chance involved. Good teams put the other team down enough that even good luck won't help them. So, to relate that back to my original point...there's a lot of focus on the blowout losses (for good reason)...yet there's no mention of the blowout wins? Those are important indicators of the teams ability, too, and you know what Cal did last year? Stomped UCLA, stomped ASU, and completely embarrassed Colorado. They took luck out of the equation in those games, and it says pretty positive things about the team.
I can see how Tedford's comment about being a few points away from 8-4 sounds ridiculous. Of course any time you take out the bad things that happen you look better. It doesn't make for valid analysis. In this particular case, I don't think it's that far off, though. The losses to Nevada, USC, Oregon State, and Stanford were not luck, Cal got crushed, and those games should be chalked up to losses. Similarly, the wins over Davis, Colorado, UCLA and ASU were all real wins. The other four were the games where random chance played a big role. WSU, Arizona, Washington, Oregon. Cal actually had a positive point differential in those games, and with neutral luck, probably should have ended up with 6 wins and a bowl appearance on the season. So yeah, 8-4 is pushing it, but Cal was very likely on the bad end of random chance, so to some degree, Tedford does have a point.
Now, this isn't stuff I'm just coming up with because it supports my argument. A decent amount of research has been done on these statistics. If you check out the Sagarin ratings, they support the notion that Cal was unlucky last year - Sagarin's point predictor rating had Cal as the 27th best team in the country last year. It's entirely based on point differential (because of point differential's track record in predicting future performance, or in other words, measuring a teams "true talent level"), so being blown out is heavily frowned upon by those ratings, yet it still thought Cal had a pretty good team last year. Combination of bad luck and 6th toughest schedule in CFB did them in. More than that, though, is that I'm trying to make the case for giving equal weight to blowout wins. As blowout losses should be frowned upon, blowout wins should be celebrated.
This year I'm expecting Cal to be a 7-5 team. A little bad luck means 6-6, a little good luck means 8-4. A lot more luck and things could go farther in one of those directions. I think it will be exciting to watch the new guys play, and what I'm really looking for is to see if there's a lot of young talent out there that looks poised to take a step forward next season. That would be encouraging, especially if another highly touted recruiting class comes in with it.
