Cal held its last practice of the season at Memorial Stadium last week and players carried the seniors off the field. Saturday, the Bears held their last practice of the season, period, and once again the seniors were escorted off the field, this time to the weight room at Texas Christian University for some post-practice lifting.

The Bears will hold their usual walk-through before a game Sunday, and then it will be time for the Armed Forces Bowl. This may not be one of the high-profile bowl games, but it could be very important for this program. A loss would put an exclamation point on the Bears’ collapse, and would put them on more shaky ground heading into the spring. A win, especially if they play especially well, could serve the returning players a reminder of how good they can be, and that could give them some momentum going into the offseason.

The Bears still appear to be having fun at practice, something that has been markedly different since the regular season ended. Several players have told me they felt like the bowl game gave them a new lease on life, and with it one final chance to show the world what they can do.

This game is a big deal for tailback Justin Forsett. He said he expects upwards of 300 family members at the game (Forsett is from nearby Arlington). His father, Rodney, and younger brother, Javon, attended practice Saturday. Rodney is a local minister and Justin plans on speaking at his church on Sunday morning. Javon is a free safety at Butte Community College and is getting some looks from Division II schools.

I was happy to find out when I got here that the media is indeed allowed to watch practice. Originally, the Armed Forces Bowl guidelines said the media would only be able to watch the first 15 minutes of practice, but that was scratched. It’s more of an intimate atmosphere than at Memorial Stadium, where the media sits in the stands. Here, we are able to stand between the two fields where the offense and defense break up into scout team work.

TCU, where the team practices and the game is being played, has a new indoor practice facility next to the outdoor field and stadium. Air Force practiced inside today. Both teams have pointed out that the grass on the outdoor fields aren’t in the greatest shape. Linebacker Zack Follett said today he was happy they didn’t have to practice on those fields anymore.

Just like they did before they faced Oregon, the Bears are using wide receiver Drew Glover at times as their scout team quarterback. Glover did a good job emulating Dennis Dixon and now is dressing up as Air Force quarterback Shaun Carney. The Falcons run primarily an option attack that features Mountain West Conference Offensive Player of the Year Chad Hall. Freshman Shane Vereen has been emulating Hall at practice.

When asked to describe Hall’s value to the Falcons, defensive coordinator Bob Gregory said “Unbelievable.” Hall leads Air Force in both rushing and receiving.

“It’s unbelievable how much that guy gets the ball, and rightly so,” Gregory said. “Carney is a good player, but they clearly want to get the ball to this guy.”

Gregory said the Bears haven’t faced anybody that runs what Air Force does since…well, Air Force. Cal played the Falcons to open the 2004 season and won, 56-14. Air Force also has added some pro-style elements to its offense, which Gregory says makes the Falcons even tougher to defend.

The Bears are on a bowl schedule now, meaning they will practice only intermittently for the next few weeks. They are off all this week until Friday.

Coach Jeff Tedford did address the media Monday and much of the discussion focused on quarterback Nate Longshore (seems to be a trend). Tedford revealed that not only has Longshore been bothered by a sprained ankle, but there is a chip in the back of that ankle as well. Tedford went on to reiterate what he has said all year, that although the injury may have an effect on Longshore’s mobility, it’s not enough to knock him out of the lineup because of his intangibles and grasp of the offense.

Until they get to Fort Worth on Dec. 27, Cal’s practices will be a lot like bye weeks. The younger players will get most of the reps. This is one of the major advantages of playing in a bowl game. The team gets a bunch of extra practice time that enables them not only to prepare for the game, but look ahead to next season as well.

Once the Bears get to Fort Worth, they will resume normal practices with the first team and second team taking reps together and implementing the game plan.

I didn’t go to the team’s year-end banquet on Monday, but I am kind of wondering what the vibe was like. Here, less than 24 hours after the disappointing end to the season at Stanford, they all got together to talk about all the positives from the season. Don’t get me wrong, there still are some things worth celebrating for the Bears, but I imagine it must have been hard to really put things like that in perspective after closing out the season so dreadfully.

Speaking of the banquet, no real surprises to the year-end awards. Justin Forsett was the offensive MVP and Thomas DeCoud the defensive MVP. Forsett was a slam dunk. Defensively, I thought it also may have gone to Zack Follett or Anthony Felder. But DeCoud has been steady all season and ended up leading the team in tackles (not that the Bears want their free safety having the most tackles, of course)

A glimpse into the future: Scout Team Player of the Year honors went to offensive lineman Sam DeMartinis, wide receiver Michael Calvin, safety D.J. Campbell, linebacker D.J. Holt and fullback John Tyndall.

It was also good to see the Pac-10 coaches recognize the efforts of freshman Jahvid Best on special teams. Best may be the best special teams player I have ever seen, which is saying something considering he never had to do such things in high school. His speed obviously is an asset as a gunner on kicks, but he also is such a sure-handed tackler, again something he wasn’t required to do on the prep level. Best was voted All-Pac-10 first team as a special teams player. I would hazard to guess not too many true freshman earn that honor.

On the one hand, I am surprised Cal has wound up in the Armed Forces Bowl. It seemed like everyone I talked to was pretty convinced Arizona State was going to go to the Fiesta Bowl if it beat Arizona on Saturday. The Sun Devils were BCS-eligible and why wouldn’t the Fiesta Bowl want the local team?

On the other hand, the Fiesta Bowl made the right choice. Arizona State simply isn’t worthy of a BCS game. Yes, the Sun Devils are 10-2 and shared the Pac-10 title with USC. But they played eight of their 12 games at home and lost to both USC and Oregon.

Had ASU been picked by the Fiesta Bowl, Cal would have wound up in the Emerald Bowl in San Francisco. Since the Sun Devils weren’t, they were slotted No. 6 among the Pac-10’s six bowl-eligible teams and therefore in line for the Armed Forces Bowl bid.

Sometimes, bowls make deals with each other within the conference so it wasn’t set in stone Cal was going to Fort Worth. In fact, Armed Forces Bowl executive director Tom Starr said Sunday night that he was talking to the Las Vegas Bowl about swapping with UCLA. But both bowls stayed put.

Cal will be playing Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl. The Bears beat the Falcons in 2004 but lost to them in 2002. In fact, the loss in ‘02 was Jeff Tedford’s first as Cal’s coach (after starting his first season 3-0). Air Force is 9-3 and finished second in the Mountain West Conference.

It should be a nice trip for running back Justin Forsett, who is from nearby Arlington, Texas. I talked to Justin’s father last week for a story and he was really hoping the Bears would wind up there. Freshman quarterback Brock Mansion is the only other player on Cal’s roster from Texas (Dallas).

The Armed Forces Bowl is on New Year’s Eve at 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time, and on ESPN.

You have to wonder what the next month is going to be like for the Bears. How motivated will they be to play in this lower-tier bowl game after their sights were set so high two months ago? They certainly haven’t given a very inspired effort the past couple of games. If the Bears felt like they had something to prove, why didn’t we see it against Stanford? If the Big Game can’t get them to play closer to a higher level, will the Armed Forces Bowl? It may be a big game for the underclassmen, to set things up for the spring and next season.

Reflecting on the Big Game, obviously Cal was disappointed with its offensive performance. The Bears went to a lot of two-receiver sets because of the absence of DeSean Jackson. I’m not sure how much that affected the Bears. When Robert Jordan sat out the UCLA game, Cal stuck with more three-receiever sets.  For the record, Tedford said it didn’t affect the game plan that dramatically.

The defense is what it is. Giving more reps to Greg Van Hoesen and Justin Moye at linebacker didn’t make much of an impact, good or bad.

Some leftover comments Saturday’s postgame interviews:

Linebacker Worrell Williams: “They’re not a better team than us. No way, no how. You guys know that. Everybody knows that. But you couldn’t tell from today’s game. Take nothing away from them. Coach Harbaugh has those guys playing hard. They’re a good team. But we killed ourselves today. That’s what we’ve been doing.”

Moye: “That was the best Stanford team I’ve ever played against. They came out hitting hard. We just couldn’t answer it, I guess.”

Linebacker Zack Follett: “We were riding so high on what we had going. Once we faced a little adversity, everything kind of tumbled down from there. Once again, I don’t think we had the leadership to bring it up. Me being a senior next year, I’m going to have to fill those shoes. That’s going to be my biggest thing in the offseason to work on so it doesn’t happen again.” 

Some thoughts the night before kickoff:

 –I’m interested to see how Rulon Davis performs. He has been a big loss this season that hasn’t been talked about too much. You could see how he changes the game when he returned from that sprained foot against Arizona State. He had sacks on the Sun Devils’ first two possessions and was playing hard. He looked hungry at practice this week. He’s one guy who definitely should be motivated to play the rest of this season, to set things up for spring and his senior year. Davis hasn’t been healthy enough in each of the past two years to really demonstrate how good he can be. He has one more season to do so.

–Cornerback Brandon Hampton is a confident player who has a lot of pride. So the nosedive Cal has experienced in the second half has really taken its toll on him. He had a funny analogy for the season when I talked to him earlier this week:

“You know how, in a scary movie, it starts off with maybe 10 people stuck in a house, then one guy branches off and wants to do his own thing, and then he dies? And then someone else gets caught behind, and they die? Then next thing you know, there’s only three people left. That’s how I feel. It just keeps getting worse.”

Hampton also said: “Sometimes I get sick when I think about it, how things just turned around after that one loss. It hurts, but that’s all over. There’s nothing we can do about it. Hopefully I won’t be scarred by this for the rest of my life.”

One piece of good news for Hampton: He regained his starting job back from Chris Conte tomorrow.

–Left tackle Mike Gibson said coach Jeff Tedford’s scolding after the loss to Washington may have been overdue.

“It’s something that maybe should have happened earlier, maybe from some of the players, myself included. We probably should have stepped up and started getting after players.”

–Earlier this week, offensive coordinator Jim Michalczik praised wide receiver Lavelle Hawkins for his work ethic. He said sometimes Hawkins’ work and competitiveness could go overlooked because he is such a happy-go-lucky guy.

“The thing about Lavelle, he comes out here in the summertime and they’ll be nobody out here except Lavelle,” Michalczik said. “He’s always had talent, but he’s truly worked his butt off. There’s a serious side to him and I think people don’t see that. It pays off.”

Hawkins is projected as an NFL first-round draft pick in ESPN’s Mel Kiper’s latest projections.

Hawkins joked this week that perhaps cornerback is his best position. He said he shuts down DeSean Jackson when they go one-on-one.

“DeSean gets nothing,” Hawkins said.

–It will be interesting to see how Cal’s defense responds to once again being without Matt Malele, who is still out with a bad knee. The Bears didn’t have their top interior lineman against Washington, and the Huskies rushed for 334 yards. It probably wouldn’t have made too much of a difference, but the Bears need others like Mika Kane, Cody Jones and Derrick Hill to fill the void.

–Linebacker Worrell Williams says he doesn’t expect the Bears to quit just because the stakes aren’t as high as they once were.

“It would be so much easier to just lay down, have Christmas off, have a long break,” Williams said. “This program hasn’t been built on quitters.”

Williams, one of the more introspective players on the team, said earlier in the season that he is mentally equipped to handle losses pretty well. But he’s had trouble getting over the setback to Washington.

“I’m crushed,” he said. “I’ve never been on a team like this before. I’ve never been on a team that is as talented as this, and I’ve never been on a team with this record. It’s frustrating.”

I’ve got a few e-mails regarding the 7-5 vs. 6-6 rule in terms of bowl berths. I checked again with Cal and the Pac-10 office, and they reiterated: Yes, a 7-5 team gets the nod over a 6-6 team to qualify for a bowl berth. But once all the berths within a conference have been awarded — in other words, if there are enough bids to go around for all teams eligible — then bowl bids are still handed out in the order of the conference standings. So UCLA still is ahead of Cal even if the Bears win tomorrow to finish 7-5.

Now, if Arizona beats Arizona State and Cal beats Stanford, either the Wildcats or the Bruins will be left out of a Pac-10 bowl game because by rule the Bears will get a bid over one of the teams. Cal would be the fifth team in from the conference, with one spot left between Arizona and UCLA. The bowl would get to pick between the two schools. And once that team is picked, they would automatically be ahead of Cal in the conference standings. Thus, in that scenario, the Bears would be headed to the Armed Forces Bowl.

Got all that? Yeah, I’m thinking the same thing. Let’s just wait until after the games are played tomorrow and have somebody tell us what’s going on!

The Bears were reunited after three days off tonight for a full practice at Memorial Stadium. Usually, Sunday nights are reserved for a short conditioning practice, but Cal got a head start on the Big Game because of the bye week.

Coach Jeff Tedford has been generally pleased with his team’s attitude and morale since its disappointing loss at Washington. He said the team practiced very well before parting ways before Thanksgiving and it carried into today.

Of course, the big question is how the Bears will respond now, seeing as the stakes are no longer high. It might be a good thing that Cal is playing Stanford this week, because both teams usually are motivated to play the Big Game no matter how each team’s season is going.

Cal’s bowl possibilities became clearer over the weekend. The Armed Forces Bowl on New Year’s Even in Forth Worth, Texas is looking like the most likely scenario. There is no way the Bears can finish in the top five in the Pac-10, so the Emerald Bowl or Las Vegas Bowl are almost certainly out. The only exception is if two conference teams make it to a BCS game — for instance, USC goes to the Rose Bowl and Arizona State gets a bid to the Fiesta Bowl — that would move everyone else in the Pac-10 pecking order up a slot. In that case, it’s probably almost a certainty Cal would go to the Emerald Bowl (that’s if the Bears beat Stanford). But ASU is ranked 13th in the lastest BCS standings and a lot would have to likely happen for the Sun Devils to slip into a BCS game.

Cal currently is in seventh, but if it beats Stanford and Arizona loses to Arizona State, it will move into a tie for sixth and likely get the Armed Forces Bowl berth. If the Bears were to lose to Stanford, they would finish 6-6 and tied with Washington State for seventh in the Pac-10. That might make their chances to get an at-large berth to an out-of-conference bowl game a little more dicey.

A couple of notes from today’s practice:

–Wide receiver DeSean Jackson, who suffered a thigh contusion against Washington and was held out of most action last week, practiced more Sunday. Tedford said Jackson should play Saturday.
–Defensive end Rulon Davis, who has missed the past three games with a sprained knee, has returned to practice and looks like he will play as well.
–Some of Cal’s seniors that don’t usually start are getting first reps in practice, meaning they will probably start against Stanford in their final regular season game.

Cal linebacker Anthony Felder’s return home to Seattle obviously is a big deal. For the plane flight Friday and during walkthrough, he was decked out in a pinstripe lilac suit with matching purple shoes. The guess is that he simply likes purple, not Huskies colors.

Well, a new month is upon us, and with it will probably come a Cal victory. The Bears went 0-for-October and watched their season change dramatically in the process. It seems like a long time ago that Cal pulled off the win up in Eugene and ascended to No. 3 in the country (then to No. 2 the following week when the Bears had a bye). That Oregon game came on Sept. 29 and the Bears haven’t won since.

Conventional wisdom says Cal will win tomorrow. The Bears are undeniably better than Washington State. The Cougars don’t have the type of talent as Cal, and they will be without starting running back Dwight Tardy.

Still, for some reason tomorrow’s game doesn’t seem like a slam dunk. Maybe it’s because of the uncertainty at quarterback. Maybe it’s because of the defense’s struggles. Maybe it’s because, no matter how much the players say the motivation is still there, it’s hard to believe it’s as strong when the goal now is the Sun Bowl or Emerald Bowl.

Even though there seems to be a lot of support for Kevin Riley at quarterback, I think Cal needs Nate Longshore to get back on track. Yes, Longshore has been hurting and has thrown a couple of bad interceptions lately, but Riley is no sure thing. Even though he looked good leading Cal back against Oregon State, he’s still played in only one college game. Longshore still has made some plays even with the ankle problem and the Bears need his experience and savvy to stop their losing skid.

It will be interesting to see what the Cougars try to do on offense now that their top two running backs are out. There’s no doubt WSU can throw the ball, and it might do it a lot against the Bears. Cal defensive coordinator Bob Gregory hypothesized as much on Thursday. The Cougars certainly have the weapons in the passing game. Alex Brink, a four-year starter, is one of the most accomplished quarterbacks in Pac-10 history and WSU has a strong group of receivers. We will see how Cal’s defense responds.

Arizona State quarterback Rudy Carpenter said he’s been waiting to get another shot at Cal for awhile. He had an abymsal performance last year against the Bears, throwing four interceptions and losing a fumble.

“It will be a little bit of motivation for me, I will not lie about that,” Carpenter said. “Obviously, for every player there are some games they circle on their schedule every year. For me, I didn’t play too well at Cal last year and they beat us pretty good. This is a game I’ve been looking forward to, a little over a year now, waiting to get a second chance at them.”

Carpenter went on to have a tough season last year but is second in the Pac-10 in passing effiency this season. He’s tied for second in the conference with 16 touchdown passes and has seven interceptions.

“His decision-making is better,” Cal defensive coordinator Bob Gregory said. “The guy just makes plays.”

I’m really interested to see what kind of mental state the Bears are in when they take the field tomorrow. Of course, they have said all the right things and believe they still are in the conference race. And they are, although there obviously are other teams in better position of power.

Still, it has to take something out of you to be served a dose of reality. The Bears were on top of the college football world and took a long, hard and fast fall. It’s not easy to recover from that.

There’s also the view that since some of the pressure is off now, the Bears will just let loose and play even better. I actually buy that theory. But the opposing viewpoint is that if they still think they are in the conference race, then they can’t afford another loss. Knowing that you HAVE to win is the ultimate kind of pressure.

My hunch is that Cal will play well. I think they will relax and get back to having fun. And coach Jeff Tedford stressed getting back to basics this week, something that may have escaped the Bears during their two losses.