Today, Stanford

The Big Game will be a showcase of Cal’s great talent this season, but also an opportunity to appreciate many of the seniors on the squad. If the game follows the blowout trend of the past 4 years, we will likely be able to see many seniors on the depth chart come out to play by the second half of the game.

In addition, this may very well be Marshawn Lynch‘s last home game as a Bear. We would love to see him return and possibly capture the Rose Bowl next year, but with first-round NFL draft projections and a limited shelf life of physical running backs, it may make sense for Lynch to go out and provide for his family.

Stanford football has been so pitiful that I have almost come to feel bad for them. However, one must remember the 7 straight years of defeat before the arrival of Coach Jeff Tedford, their student section chants of “Cal’s Our B****”, and other nasty memories of this bitter rivalry.

To close up, here is a recent article from the Stanford Review, thanks to RBBID:

Berkeley coach Jeff Tedford is consistently producing top-25 football teams with Heisman candidates. We find ourselves in ESPN’s Bottom 10 rankings. These two facts mean that we won’t be beating Cal in football for the foreseeable future, which begs the question: should we continue to care about Cal? They have a much larger student body and lower academic standards for athletes. One Cal newspaper even declared that we were unfit to be rivals.

We’re happy to take our rivalry elsewhere. Cal clearly lucked-out having us a rival; if they would prefer UC Davis, well, they can have them. We always knew that we could do better than Cal.

The task now is to find a new rival, one much more like our fine school (meaning a private school), a school that we can fairly compete against, and beat on occasion, and sometimes badly. There are a few options. We could adopt Duke as a rival; their football team is as hapless as ours. Northwestern’s is almost as bad.

Pathetic. Mind-bogglingly pompous. No mercy today, Tedford.