09.17.07 5:00 AM CDT
• Letters
• Chip Rowe
Our sports editor, Gary Cole, has a superb record of selecting in the fall where the top college football teams will finish at the end of the season. The Village Voice once did a study of the accuracy of preseason college football predictions in seven major newspapers and magazines over a 10-year period, and guess who topped the list, beating out the Associated Press, Newsday, The New York Times, The Sporting News, Sports Illustrated and USA Today? In the 20 years he has been compiling the poll, Gary have chosen the national champion correctly six times and his No. 1 pick finished second four times. You can see his picks this time around in our September issue. Yet despite this established brilliance, every season we hear from disgruntled fans who feel their team has been unjustly ignored. Here are a few of this year’s entrants:“How can you leave the University of California at Berkeley out of the top 25?” writes Joe Monroe of Sacramento. “With the offensive genius of Jeff Tedford, junoir quarterback Nate Longshore, a receiving corp that rivals any school in the top 10, and a defense returning five starters, it’s difficult to understand this slight. And that’s not to mention Justin Forsett, who will run all over the Pac 10 defenses. When Cal gets its bid for a BCS bowl, I expect tickets to a Mansion party.”
“No Georgia, which finished the 2006 season by beating Auburn, Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech?” asks Paul Turner of Adel, Georgia. “Gary Cole must have been distracted by the ladies at the Mansion. I would be too.” Michael Curtis of Alpharetta, Georgia, has the same thought: “Georgia is the No. 1 no-respect team in the nation. Since 2001 our Top 5 coach, Mark Richt, has a record of 62-17, including 41 games played against your preseason Top 25, with 25 of those being victories, including six in a row against your No. 23 team (Georgia Tech).”
In the second week of the season, the Bulldogs lost to unranked South Carolina. That hurts. But there’s still a long way to go.
RSS 2.0
Comments on this entry:
CAL fans live their own fur coat/pennant old school glories universe which I'm proudly part of;)