Tedford’s Mixed Cal Football Record Is No Shame

by Irvin Muchnick, 2008-12-15

Intelligent local college football fanatics who are disappointed that Cal, under coach Jeff Tedford, has once again fallen far short of Rose Bowl glory should get a little perspective.

You want to take cheap shots against someone who represents the worst in a sleazy entertainment industry masquerading as a mission of higher education? Try George O’Leary at the University of Central Florida. Earlier this month a UCF player, Brandon Davis, collapsed and nearly died in an “offseason” workout – this in the same year that teammate Ereck Plancher collapsed and did die under identical circumstances. Coach O’Leary is the worthy who, in 2001, served all of five days of a six-year contract as the head coach at Notre Dame, before the discovery that he had lied about both his athletic and his academic credentials.

The fair truth about Tedford’s tenure with the Golden Bears – as well as the socially responsible judgment – is that it is a seven-year period of improvement, on the field and in the classroom. If Cal hasn’t achieved Bowl Championship Series dominance, that may be because the program has bumped up against its limits, despite deployment of every tactic up to and including expensive new-stadium blackmail.

Such a result properly defines the Berkeley environment in which the Bears coexist, and that is not, overall, a bad thing. Cal is our state’s flagship public university. Rival Stanford, whose football team is currently inferior but enjoys more historic success, is a heavily endowed private institution.

On November 30 the Chronicle analyzed the academic performance of Cal football players under Tedford. The article by Tom FitzGerald distinguished itself from past propaganda on the graduation rates of Berkeley student-athletes, in that it didn’t simply lump together statistics for the “revenue” sports of football and men’s basketball with those for all the other sports. FitzGerald showed that Tedford’s graduation rates have clearly improved on past dismal records, which included that of his predecessor Tom Holmoe (whose teams also had flopped on Saturdays). Credit went to the campus Athletic Study Center, under the direction of Derek van Rheenen, and to a Tedford system of follow-through and accountability called the “Academic GamePlan.”

It is appropriate to view such data skeptically and to process whether the trends are meaningful. (In a nutshell, the Chronicle said current athlete academic retention rates were tracking very well, though a longer-term yardstick, the way the NCAA calculates graduation rate, still places Cal below even almost all the other public universities in the Pac 10.) But there you have the gist of the other part of the Tedford story – a part not conceded by those obsessed with X’s and O’s, and especially with W’s and L’s.

Reading about this progress in the classroom, and knowing of my interest in these issues, a Berkeley alum, Jon Polland, wrote me: “Maybe college football bowl revenues should be divided among Division I schools based on the academic achievement and improvement of each school’s football team over the prior 12-month period. That might make academics more of a priority and also help more Pac 10 teams get a bigger share of bowl revenues. In any event, it appears that you and Tedford think alike.”

I don’t know about that last part: Tedford seems a rather conventional football careerist. But Polland’s point is taken. To the extent that Tedford has improved the academic culture, as well as the winning percentage, at Memorial Stadium, I think he deserves applause, not ridicule. I am a believer in kicking targets when they’re up, which is why I took my strongest shots at Cal football when it was in apparent ascendance (see my Beyond Chron pieces from November 8 and November 15, 2004).

The idea that Cal can have its BCS cake and eat educational values, too, is usually postulated by either stand-and-deliver dreamers or conflicted fans (there shouldn’t be any other kind). But getting past the beer buzz, the fundamentals of the debate have it about right; once you’re committed to playing the game at that level, the real choice is some semblance of balance. While it’s easy to mock the Golden Bears for “only” making the Emerald Bowl in San Francisco, I find that stance entirely too easy, ceding way too much ground to the yahoos in our midst.

From this corner, two and a half strangled cheers for Coach Jeff.

Irvin Muchnick’s blogs are http://freelancerights.blogspot.com and http://muchnick.net/babylon