In Reply to: Just Finished Watching the Game. A Few Thoughts posted by UCLA78 on September 06, 2026 at 17:25:53
Call me a worrywart. You can also call me a Bruin football fan going on 60 years. I loved how the Cal game turned out. I saw a lot of things to get optimistic about in yesterday's (yesternight's?) game. There's just one thing....
The line going into the game was Bruins -1.5. That's gambler talk for a tossup. With 9 minutes to go in the 4th quarter, that line was absolutely correct. Tie game, and no one had scored since Cal's tying score in the third quarter.
Then, the gates opened and Cal made three crucial errors. The first was James' interception off the pass deflected by the Cal receiver. That pass was thrown a little high, but a receiver needs to catch those or make sure no one else does.
The second was the miscommunication between Cal's QB and their receiver. The throw went low and short, the receiver went long, and James had an unbelievable night with his second interception.
The third was Woods' long run with a bit less than two minutes to go. I really think that the Cal defense was on its back foot at that point, knowing that the game was lost. They were a step slow as a result, and Woods took advantage of that.
UCLADal made the point that Cal looked gassed in the fourth quarter. I can't argue that observation with respect to Woods' run. The two Knight scores in the 4th quarter came at the end of runs long enough to make it tough to argue UCLADal's point on either of those scores, too.
But the first two fourth quarter scores came as a result of turnovers that were Cal mistakes. Our scores following those interceptions may have been over a gassed Cal D, but we would not have had the ball had not Cal made some huge mistakes that we were in a position to take advantage of.
I would feel better this evening had we pulled away from Cal in the 4th quarter the way we did with our two scores in the second quarter. We were the stronger team in the second quarter. We were the team that executed without awful mistakes in the 4th quarter.
Would we have won had both teams executed well, but Cal was more gassed than we were? I'd like to think so. I just wish I could have seen our O and D perform in the 4th quarter and win without being aided by Cal mistakes.