BERKELEY — In this world of short attention spans and a million distractions, a first impression has never been more important.
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And for those tuning into the opening moments of Tosh Lupoi’s first game at the helm of the Cal Bears, the initial takeaway was nothing but positive. A full house, a beautiful cotton-candy sky, and a 10-play, 75-yard touchdown drive led by star quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele told a story — one of hope, optimism, and brighter days to come for a moribund program.
The much-anticipated trailer looked great.
The full movie?
It didn’t live up to the hype.
Yes, there are countless good things happening with Cal football, but Saturday’s season-opening loss left no room for interpretation: This might be a program on an a perceived upswing, but Lupoi and the Bears still have a long way to go if they want to be a contender in this new, strange world of college football.
Because while the Bears have talent — good receivers, an excellent running back, and a quarterback with one of the best arms I’ve ever seen — they are nowhere near good enough where college football games are still won: in the trenches, between the hashmarks, and between the ears.
You don’t win championships in this sport by producing viral clips. You can’t win much of anything if you’re consistently getting your teeth kicked in at the line of scrimmage.
You can have the most gifted passer in America, but it doesn’t mean a thing if he’s scraping stadium turf out of his facemask down after down.
And it means even less when he, in concert, treats ball security like an afterthought.
Four JKS turnovers — two fumbles and two back-breaking interceptions — flipped Saturday’s altogether winnable game into a 45-24 loss.
UCLA coach Bob Chesney — who, lest we forget, was in the playoff last season with James Madison — didn’t need a complex manifesto to beat Cal. No, he smelled blood on the left side of the Bears’ offensive line and kept sending heat until everything broke; until JKS decided to take matters into his own hands, to both spectacular and disastrous results.
And that, paired with a seasoned counter-puncher’s temperament, won UCLA the game going away, 45-24.
Every time the Bears stumbled, the Bruins delivered a cold-blooded return. UCLA scored on one-play drives of 31 and 53 yards following Cal turnovers, exploiting a Cal defense that didn’t set the edge and missed critical open-field tackles again and again.
But the most telling play of the game came at the end of the first half. Cal had just made a game UCLA controlled interesting, with JKS authoring a brilliant five-play, 87-yard touchdown drive to pull the home team to within four with 13 seconds to play.
One UCLA snap later, the Bruins were in field goal range. Cal failed to cover the seam, and one 43-yard pass-and-catch later, UCLA had three free points and a 24-17 lead. Inconsequential, it turns out, in the final scoreline, but indicative of the contest.
Because even when Cal dominated the third quarter, pinned UCLA deep, and had all the momentum in the world, they couldn’t take advantage.
That’s when JKS ignored a wide-open checkdown, tried to rip a 35-yard sideline laser into double coverage, and watched it ricochet into Bruin hands. One play later: UCLA touchdown.
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The next drive ended with another Sagapolutele pick — this one unforgivable — and that was followed by an eight-play, four-minute UCLA clinic to ice the game.
The temptation will be to scapegoat the kid under center, and, sure, he should wear plenty of blame, but that’s also letting everyone else off the hook.
One quarterback can’t block five rushers — or, apparently, the three that UCLA was able to get home, repeatedly, late in the game — and he can’t fix a defensive front that was halfway to El Cerrito on every UCLA run. He can’t tackle for a secondary that looked like it was playing flag football, either.
While the Bears could run the ball on Saturday night — Washington transfer running back Adam Mohammed is the real deal — they were never able to properly sequence the run and the pass game. The offensive line didn’t let them and first-time playcaller Jordan Somerville could never find a groove.
And pair that with a quarterback who an make any throw he wants, but wants it all, all the time, and you don’t have a team ready to fight for the top of the ACC, but rather a highlight factory that will replicate Saturday’s weather: perfectly hot and then ice cold.
There’s an irony to all of this.
Cal’s power donors (justifiably) wanted out of the Justin Wilcox era because steady mediocrity and 20-13 slugfests were boring everyone to tears.
Then, through the magic of college football’s current chaos machine, JKS showed up and presented the Bears something exciting and worth exploring last season.
The program went all-in on chasing that feeling.
Now they’ve built a program that, at least on Saturday, had the exact opposite problem of the Wilcox era: the Bears were a highlight machine that didn’t show it could do the unglamorous chores required to win a football game.
Lupoi was hired to bring juice and recruiting dominance. He was hired to bring relevance and soon.
Soon as in “now.”
After all, the schedule looks soft, the war chest is fuller than it’s ever been, and the ACC, after Miami at the top, is wide open.
Cal, with their Heisman-buzz quarterback and a transfer class that would have made any program west of Texas envious, entered this campaign with a mandate and a clear window.
They came in with intrigue, at the very least. You could even call it hype.
But none of that matters if you’re constantly getting blown up at the point of attack.
Saturday was a reality check delivered straight to the jaw by another team with a first-time head coach and a roster full of recent enrollees.
If Lupoi can’t fix the line of scrimmage, this season will go like Saturday’s game: sideways.
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And all this momentum? Well that will go right out the window in the process.
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