okaydo said:
Larno said:
The 2004 team may not have been the best, but consider this: What if they had not whiffed at the end of the USC game and scored and won the game, and then won the rest of their games as they did? There would have been a solid chance that they would have ended up in the National Championship game. They clearly outplayed USC in that game but shot themselves in the foot. A victory over USC would have meant a great deal as USC was considered the top team in that era, and even Mack Brown wouldn't have been able to sabotage them. Yes, in 1991 they came very close to beating the eventual number one team, Washington, but they also face-planted against Stanford in the worst way. Now, would Cal have done better in the championship game in 2004 than they did in their dismal bowl game? We'll never know.
Yeah, but beating USC would've set up a very different dynamic.
Remember all the times Cal went 5-0 the past 2 decades?
Cal's last 6-0 start to the season was 1950 because going undefeated is hard. Very hard. The team might've believed its own hype. Or it might've been distracted by the even more media attention. And the 7-0 Cal might've faltered against the Ducks, which it barely beat. And if Cal did go 11-0, the shameless guy currently running for U.S. senator in Alabama might've pulled a Mack Brown and succeeded in getting his team into the championship game.
People forget Chase Lyman and one of the most significant injuries ever for Cal.
He was absolutely dynamite for that 2004 team with something like 5 TDs in his first
3 games. He was unstoppable, so good in fact, that he had supplanted Geoff MacArthur
as Cal's leading receiver after MacArthur had made some AA teams the season before.
But Chase was hurt early in the USC game, which ended his college career. Oh, what
might have been. Our receiving corp continued to fall and became somewhat depleted by the
end of the season. In the USC game (our fourth game of the year), on that final drive,
one of Rodgers' passes in the end zone was to Noah Smith, I believe, a redshirt freshman
who ended up with only 6 catches in his Cal career. The ball zoomed by Smith as he
turned the wrong way. The drop off from Lyman was huge. Injuries are a part of the game,
to be sure, but I've always wondered what might have happened that season if Chase
(a player with tremendous talent but often injured) could have stayed healthy. It's very
possible that Cal could have had a real shot at the National Championship.