he San Jose Mercury News is reporting on yet another Pac-10 bowl letdown.

Cal was ranked 12th in the country to begin the season and was picked to finish second in the preseason Pac-10 media poll. But the Bears tied for fifth in the conference standings and probably won’t garner a single vote in the final national rankings. It will mark the third straight year Cal has failed to finish in The Associated Press Top 25.

 

Let’s have a look at those Pac-10 preseason poll numbers, shall we?

If we remove WSU, which undertrained algae could have picked last, that’s a whopping correlation of 0.15, for an R-squared of .023. Let’s just hope these reporters don’t moonlight as stock brokers.

And what would be a Pac-10 beat down without confusion over who is really the better team?

“There’s no way we should be 8-5,” said quarterback Kevin Riley, who was 20-of-36 for 214 yards and threw two interceptions [on back-to-back offensive plays] in the fourth quarter. “It’s hard to say what we should have been, but we definitely should have been better than we were.”

 

But, never fear all those Cal fans with whom I went to high school. We all know the Bears are still an elite program. Said sixth-year senior Mike Tepper:

“We all believe that we can win a national championship. We just have to do it. This team has enough talent to beat Florida or Alabama.

 

…despite the fact that you just lost handily to the third-place team from the Mountain West Conference? Well, I guess Journey put it best:

Don’t stop belieeeeeeeeeevin’
Hold on to that feeeeeeeeee-leeeeeeeee-eeeeeeeeen.