Welcome to Thursday's...
...Cocky Condom Comment

from the www.wearesc.com football forum:

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The bad thing about playing Cal...................

.....after the game, all the USC players will have to be de-loused.

I BELIEVE the Trojans will win…I hope they win BIG!

This will be the largest crowd I have ever been part of to watch any USC vs CAL game.I cannot stomach even thinking about dealing with the CAL fans…if they should win…The CAL fans are the absolute worst fans (win or lose) I’ve ever experienced, any place anytime.

Fight On Trojans…!
Beat the Bears…!
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De-loused. Get it! We're dirty...dirty hippies....yeah...

...this is all getting very predictable huh?

AND NOW, a brief interlude from this week's series of condom comments:

Cal-USC benefits Pac-10, Bay Area
Wednesday, October 06, 2004 BERKELEY --

This is the way it used to be, before NFL arrived by the Bay and transformed college football from an attraction into a curiosity.

This is the way it is in places such as Knoxville and Ann Arbor, where the bandwagon rolls and not infrequently so does some coach's head.

Welcome to 1950. Welcome to packed houses and thundering herds. Welcome to a game that for the University of California, for the Pac-10 Conference, for the Left Coast, given conditions and situations, couldn't have arrived at a more opportune moment.

Cal against Southern Cal, at the Coliseum, the one without any phony commercial labels, the one in Los Angeles, the one with 92,000 seats.

"I can't tell you what it's going to be like," said Jeff Tedford, the Golden Bears' coach. "Ninety-two thousand is bigger than I've ever seen. I've never been in front of that many people before."

Cal has, in the days of Pappy Waldorf and Johnny Olzewski, the days when college football around here was banner headline stuff, the way it is at this very moment in Lincoln and Baton Rouge.

Who imagined it could be that way again in Northern California, then again who imagined the A's and Giants wouldn't make the playoffs, and the Raiders would be average and the 49ers would be atrocious?

Who imagined Cal would be No.7 in the nation?

What we never had to imagine was USC again could be No.1. We simply dreaded it.

"They have blue chip players every single place on their team," said Tedford. The monster has returned.

The media, an agile group of front-runners, was packed in Tuesday for Tedford's weekly press conference, and the coach was hardly unaware.

"Important?" Tedford said rhetorically, referring to the game. "I think this room is evident of that. The first week I sat in here, I think we had maybe five or six people.

"I think the magnitude of this game probably has a lot to do with (the change)."

The magnitude of the game, unbeaten Cal against unbeaten USC, and the decline of everything and everybody else north of Monterey, a most propitious bit of timing.

It was the long-held belief of the late Leonard Koppett, an astute observer, that in virtually every city where the NFL played it squashed college football. There were and are exceptions, Miami, Seattle, Los Angeles -- where the NFL fled town, leaving it to USC and UCLA -- but the Bay Area was the rule.

Evidence? Last weekend, Stanford, now 3-1, drew only 27,000.

But Cal-USC matters, in Los Angeles, in Northern California, maybe in the rest of the country.

"I know since I've been here," said Pete Carroll, the Marin County guy who coaches USC, "the talk is the Pac-10 is underrated and overlooked because of the time frames when the games are shown on TV (in the East). But this is prime time."

He means daytime. He means a 12:30 p.m. PDT start Saturday, or 3:30 p.m. in New York and Atlanta, 2:30 p.m. in Norman and Austin. He means an hour when people are watching, not sleeping.

"I love it," said Carroll. "The state of California. So much excitement about the game. People who don't think Californians love their football better stay away from this college game."

Carroll is a Californian. Tedford is a Californian. But we're talking reality, not provincialism, here as if there's anything wrong with a bit of bias.

"This is a great moment for the Pac-10," said Carroll, "and for our programs. Two top 10 teams. A lot of people are going to know what we can do."

What Cal already has done is create a buzz, an "are these guys really that good?" sort of response. This is a big game, as opposed to the Big Game, and that became so irrelevant the last couple of years it didn't even sell out down at Stanford. But the L.A. Coliseum already is sold out.

"Our guys have been in enough big games," Tedford insisted, "the bowl game last year, Kansas State last year, that they understand what the big stage is all about. But I think there's a little extra this week ... playing against the defending national champs and the No. 1 team in the country.

"We'll be fine. We just have to continue doing what we've been doing."

What they've been doing is making us pay attention, and that is no small accomplishment.

-Art Spander

Link: http://www.timesstar.com/Stories/0,1413,125~1511~2449515,00.html#

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WOOHOO! Viva los osos!

....make the Bay Area, NorCal, heck, the whole state proud. This is going to be an epic game, regardless of the outcome.