For those of you who missed it, here's Part 1 of the photo essay, which covered the dining area, an aerial view of the High Performance Zone and an introduction to the football wing (North Wing, including coaches lockers, players' lockers and football lounge) of the Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHPC). Part 2 will continue the tour through the SAHPC and take you through the rest of what we saw on our tour of the facility on Monday, January 2, including the Olympic or South wing of the building. You can click on any of the images in this post to enlarge it into another window. I'll include a link to all of my photographs at the end of the post.

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So a good friend of mine that lives in Southside Berkeley sends me an email a few days ago saying that his cousin is an architect on the Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHPC) and that she offered to give him a personal tour of the facility on January 2 in the afternoon. He thought about who else might be interested in going and generously thought of me. Of course, I jumped at the opportunity. So we arranged to meet in the Optometry parking lot behind Wurster Hall around 3:30 pm on Monday, January 2.

When we arrived, my friend introduced me to his cousin, Gwojen Fung, who is actually the Project Manager for the SAHPC. She works for the university in the Capital Projects division as a project manager and her main project for the last few years has been the SAHPC, which she estimates cost about $150 million to build. She told us that this was probably the last chance for her to give us a pretty comprehensive tour since over the next few weeks there will be a massive "move-in" at which time visitors wouldn't really have access to things like the women's locker room area. We got really lucky with the timing.

I took almost 100 pictures, but I'll try to show just some of the good stuff in here and in the second installment I'll provide a link to an edited album of about 75 pictures.

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I came across this old Esquire article written by Tom Chiarella in 2003 and have shared it with some friends recently. It's a fun read. Basically the premise is this: what can the magical $20 bill buy you? Access? Preferential treatment? Better seats? Chiarella goes on a quest to find out.

There isn't much in the world that can't be had with the timely application of a simple twenty. Let loose with a roll of bills, our author confronts some of a great city's most formidable closed doors. Guess what he got from the one-hour-photo guy?

Have you ever tried to grease the wheels with a Jackson? What did it get you? Was it worth it?

The sixth-seeded California Golden Bears Men's Soccer team defeated the Brown Bears 2-0 on Sunday, November 28 at Edwards Stadium in front of about 2,000 fans to advanced to the elite eight in the NCAA Men's Soccer tournament. Unlike the previous week, when the Golden Bears scored the golden goal and defeated the UCSB Gauchos 2-1 in overtime with 1 second remaining, things didn't get ugly with the officiating or the fans. Cal played stifling defense to shut out the Bears (yes, they are the Brown Bears) and were supported by 9 saves by junior goalkeeper David Bingham, who was named to the College Soccer News Team of the Week for his efforts.

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It seems like we've been having the "scheme vs. execution" discussion here quite a bit recently, and I came across this on a BearTerritory.net interview with DuckSportsAuthority.com on the Cal Rivals page:

BT: Aside from the noted pace of Oregon’s offense, what else is so innovative about Chip Kelley’s scheme?

AJ: It’s actually pretty simple with a relatively small playbook. He preaches precision and getting the plays they do run just right.

To me, this seems to be the key to success in college football. As Avinash has already pointed out, these players are student-athletes and they aren't professionals who can spend the majority of their time watching tape, studying the playbook, conditioning, training, etc.

It seems to me like Tedford's earlier teams had simpler playbooks and focused on execution more than scheme. The talent level was probably equal to or perhaps even less than what we have today, yet the 2004 and 2006 teams were very successful. With a bunch of 19 to 22 year olds out there, it makes a lot of sense to coach players to do a few things and do them well. Run block. Pass block. Pick up the blitz. Nothing is more demoralizing for an opposing team than to know what is coming and feeling helpless at stopping it (see Cal at Oregon, 2009 or Cal at Nevada, 2010).

If you look at what the Ducks are doing and what Nevada is doing with the pistol, you see teams that use a relatively small-ish playbook, but execute very, very well through repetition, precision and an understanding of what can happen with each offensive play.

Avinash again:

But wouldn't you agree we've been trying to execute a huge playbook with mediocre players and this causes even more execution issues? Shouldn't we be focusing on a smaller playbook that allows us to focus on technique rather than scheme so that they at least play hard enough to out-execute other opponents, based on the relative weakness of our offensive line and receivers?

I've seen this disconnect the past three/four years on offense. Tedford made the playbook too huge and our O-line played worse and worse. Cignetti simplified things down, but our offense lost too many players for them to be good at anything but running. Ludwig seems to be too much focused on scheme and there isn't enough good technique against good opponents (lots of plays, mediocre execution on all of them). 

Simplify things a little: Is the offense too complex?

I think that's the beauty of the spread-option type offenses, because the same play can have multiple different endings (hand-off, QB keep, pass). And because these 19 to 22 year olds might have problems playing disciplined defense, these offenses can thrive in the college ranks.

Now  with a pro-style offense, you can't just use a bread and butter staple of 10 to 15 plays since defenses will easily figure them out and how to stop them. But with a spread-option offense those 10 to 15 plays all of a sudden seem to be 30 to 45 different plays and the beauty of plays like the zone read is that the outcome of the play depends on the mistake that the defense has made. And undisciplined defenses can make a lot of mistakes (see Cal at Nevada, 2010).

I'm not advocating that we move towards a spread-option type offense, but perhaps what Tedford and Ludwig need to do is find a way to simplify the offensive playbook, focus on execution rather than scheme and find an innovative way to incorporate a wrinkle or two that takes advantage of the undisciplined nature of 19 to 22 year olds playing defense. It seems that some of the recent offensive innovations in college football (spread-option, wildcat formation, pistol) are built around deception and making a defense pay for being undisciplined. The thing about the wildcat and the pistol is that every play looks almost exactly the same and the defense has to guess right and/or play very disciplined defense to stop them. Thoughts?

Based on my recent fanpost on Cal's uniform color combinations from last year, what uniform combination do you think the Golden Bears will be donning at Memorial on Saturday against the Bruins? This year, the Bruins changed their road uniforms to navy blue numbering and stripes.

In 2008 against the Bruins at Memorial the Golden Bears wore the blue jersey with gold pants. For the third home game last year against USC (30-3 loss), the Bears wore the gold jersey with blue pants. The win-loss records I've provided are based on the current incarnation of our uniforms (introduced in 2008). After tallying the win-loss records, I was surprised to find that the Bears have worn the "all blue" uniform (6 times) more often than the "classic" blue and gold (4 times) over the past couple of years. 

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Based on my recent fanpost on Cal's uniform color combinations from last year, what uniform combination do you think the Golden Bears will be donning in the Tucson desert on Saturday? The last trip to Tucson in 2008 the Bears wore the white jersey, white pants combination and lost 42-27.

Last season the Bears wore the white jersey with blue pants for the second away game (42-3 loss to Oregon). The win-loss records I've provided are based on the current incarnation of our uniforms (introduced in 2008).

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Based on what I've seen so far this year, it looks like the Bears might use the same uniform combinations in sequence as they did last year.  Here's what I could find from 2009:

Cal vs. Maryland - blue jersey, blue pants (Win)
Cal vs. Eastern Washington - blue jersey, gold pants (Win)
Cal at Minnesota - white jersey, white pants (Win)
Cal at Oregon - white jersey, blue pants (Loss)
Cal vs. USC - gold jersey, blue pants (Loss)
Cal at UCLA - white jersey, gold pants (Win)
Cal vs. Washington State - blue jersey, gold pants (Win)
Cal at Arizona State - white jersey, white pants (Win)
Cal vs. Oregon State - gold jersey, white pants (Loss)
Cal vs. Arizona - blue jersey, blue pants (Win)
Cal at Stanfurd - white jersey, white pants (Win)
Cal at Washington - white jersey, white pants (Loss)
Cal vs. Utah (Poinsettia Bowl) - blue jersey, blue pants (Loss)

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Can somebody please tell me where I can get a "real-looking" Oski plush toy for my five-year old Cal fan? Every Cal-adorned plush toy that I've seen for sale never resembles the real Oski. Is it too much for the best public university in the world to correctly license its own mascot to a company that doesn't just slap a Cal logo onto some generic-looking bear toy?

This is not Oski (although if your kid finds this particular "Oski" hidden at the Trader Joe's on University and MLK Jr., they get a little prize, like a piece of fruit leather):

via www.oski.com

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