Cal beat SDSU 35-7 past year and holds a 4-3 head-to-head edge in games since 1982.
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“Huge”, Nathan Chapman called it, and it’s huge to him, a former Australian rules football player who played for the Green Bay Packers in the 2004 preseason. Since the mid 1990s, American football has steadily grown in popularity in Australia.
The rest of the college football slate kicks off Thursday with Vanderbilt and SC squaring off in the first big ESPN game of the week.
Behind starting quarterback Davis Webb, the Bears took advantage of the Rainbow Warriors’ weak defense, which spent most of the inaugural game of the college football season struggling to keep Cal in check. Flawless for college football. Former Quarterback Nick Rolovich takes over and brings in an interesting worldwide talent to the program. May all gridiron junkies in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres rejoice in its long awaited return. Two previous college football games have been played in Melbourne, Australia – Wyoming versus UTEP in 1985 and BYU versus Colorado State in 1987… Though it feels a bit obscene to call the 5,000 mile trip from Honolulu to Sydney “close”.
The fans mostly supported Hawaii, the underdogs, and other than reports of beer running out in parts of the stadium, most of the fans appeared to enjoy what was likely their first taste of American football. So what’s a few thousand more miles? “Rolovich will be slowly adding elements of the old “Red Gun” attack under (former coach) June Jones”.
Hawaii went 3-10 a year ago and Rolovich has a lot of work to do, as the Warriors averaged just 17.6 points a game and surrendered 35.6.
We’re entering the third season of the annual South Point-lined Play of the Day competition, effective July 1. The Warriors haven’t been bowling since 2010. Rolovich is in his first season as a head coach, after being the offensive coordinator at Nevada since 2012. That, in fact, was a theme, as Webb played the entire game and Enwere carried the ball to the Hawaii goal line on the game’s final play. The Warriors have little time to iron out the wrinkles in whatever that offense will look like, because next weekend they’ve got another almost 5,000 mile trip to take on Jim Harbaugh’s 7th ranked Michigan Wolverines in the Big House in Ann Arbor.
Sonny Dykes, an architect of high-powered passing offenses, opens his fourth season as Bears coach. The result was a terrible 1-11 debut season in 2013, the worst in the program’s history.
Following a bowl win and the departure of now-Rams quarterback Jared Goff, the Cal football team will look to prove that it can survive without the talents of the number one overall pick.
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Now Dykes has to replace all those yards and experience under center. If the Bears can run the rock effectively, it will take a load off Davis Webb and his young receiving corp. “My first one, and it’s special, of course”. In 2015, Goff passed for 4,714 yards, 43 touchdowns and 13 interceptions, completing 65 percent of his passes as the Golden Bears delivered their first winning season in five years.
