A commenter noted that during the time I went dark here UCLA beat Texas and nicely dominated Washington State -- then looked like stumblebums against Cal. One consequence of going dark is that I can't point to any thing at the time to document that I had a pretty good feeling about the Texas game by Thursday of game week, Ah, well. Subsequent events seem to validate what I was afraid of: Texas didn't deserve to be ranked #7 and probably didn't belong in the Top 25; its early-season ranking was based more on last year's accomplishments than this year's team. So maybe beating them wasn't as big a deal as it seemed at the time, and maybe, just maybe, the Bruins aren't as good as we had hoped. The Cal game would seem to validate that.
I remain still something of a hopeless homer optimist. I'm hoping that the Cal and Stanford games were the anomalies this year -- maybe something about the psychological impact of Northern California this year or maybe climate change? OK, so that's perhaps a stretch. The loyalist in me wants to hope UCLA will show up Saturday with the kind of motivated team that beat Texas. Unfortunately there's something of a realist in there who thinks Oregon has so far shown itself to be the class of the Pac 10 and is likely to beat the Bruins pretty handily.
Ah, who wants to be a realist during football season?
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