Perspective Piece: Cal-Tennessee

Every year, the college football season trots out a game that should be called the "Cruelty Bowl."

The Cruelty Bowl is a season-opening game featuring two teams who both have an inordinate amount of pressure on their backs, and who desperately need to win their lid-lifter to get the season pointed in the right direction. While any lessons learned in a week-one loss could potentially catapult the defeated team to a great conference season and a redeeming Autumn, the likelihood is that a setback in the Cruelty Bowl will cause negative feelings to snowball as the season progresses.

For a bit of perspective, the unofficial 2005 edition of the Cruelty Bowl--the week one game neither team could afford to lose--matched Texas A&M and Clemson. The Tigers--who prevailed on a last-second field goal, 25-24--didn't set the world on fire, but won their rivalry game and bowl game. Now, in the eyes of a number of experts, the Clemson program seems poised to climb the ladder in the ACC and college football pecking orders. Winning didn't lead to a glorious season in Clemson, but disaster was averted.

The losing Aggies, on the other hand, experienced a bona fide football catastrophe after falling short in the 2005 Cruelty Bowl. A prodigiously talented offense and a gifted quarterback--Reggie McNeal--couldn't even take A&M to a bowl game. The trajectory of the Aggies' season surely would have changed had Dennis Franchione's team defeated Clemson. But this game deserves to be called the Cruelty Bowl for a reason: when you lose this kind of game, your season--anticipated, talked about and hoped for by millions of your rabid fans over the previous eight months--becomes ensnared by fear, anxiety, desperation, negativity, backbiting, recriminations, and paranoia after one... that's right, one... football game. Four hours take eight months of hope and flush them down the drain.

So with the past as prelude, the unofficial 2006 version of the Cruelty Bowl has to be the tilt in Knoxville between California and Tennessee. The fans of the Bears and Vols will want to keep the Maalox close to the beers, burgers, corn cobs and cobbler, because a loss in this game will produce the kind of indigestion that severely dejected college football fans know all too well.

And if that isn't enough to get you psyched about this game, what makes this Pac 10-SEC showdown even more fraught with tension and drama is the fact that the home team--the one whose fans will show up in numbers exceeding 100,000--is the team that has even more pressure on its Big Orange shoulders.

California is the trendy pick to give a very stiff challenge to USC for West Coast football supremacy, and after quarterback Nate Longshore was laid up for most of last season with an injury, the signal-caller will look to take Jeff Tedford's program to the Rose Bowl that eluded Berkeley's grasp in the politicized BCS vote of 2004. A loss in this game, however, will severely dent the confidence of a team and program that couldn't recover emotionally from their most wrenching loss last season: a 47-41 shootout loss to UCLA. If a man named Longshore can't effectively pilot his offense against the Volunteer Navy's defense, Cal won't find safe harbor in the stadium near the Tennessee River. The consequences for the Cal program--in accordance with Cruelty Bowl standards--could be enormous.

But oh, as big as this game is for Cal, it's a million times bigger for the Vols and their newly uncomfortable national championship coach, Philip Fulmer.

No one could have seen this coming a year ago, but as the 2006 season commences, Fulmer--the decorated and accomplished coach who delivered a national title to Knoxville in 1998--is finding his seat to be just a bit warm. Much like another national champion coach--Lloyd Carr of Michigan--Fulmer is faced with a situation in which a bad 2006 could potentially make 2007 a do-or-die season for his coaching career at one of college football's brand-name programs.

In other words, a Cruelty Bowl loss could be particularly harsh toward Fulmer and the Volunteers if they come out on the short end in this game.

Why does this game matter so much to Tennessee, aside of the Fulmer angle? Simply consider that the Vols, much like Oklahoma, experienced a total lack of leadership on offense last season. No one stepped up to make other players accountable and light a firecracker under some fannies. And in addition to a leadership void, the markedly inconsistent play of quarterbacks Erik Ainge and Rick Clausen didn't exactly help, either. Ainge's turnover-plagued performances and Clausen's overall impotence failed to bring out the best in a number of receivers who--rumor had it--were talented, but performed nowhere near their own capabilities. If the Vols are to have a big, bounce-back season in 2006, a positive tone for the team--especially the offense--must be established right out of the gate. An ugly loss to a Pac-10 team (which would leave the whole community of SEC fans muttering in their suddenly not-so-appetizing barbecue) will put the Vols in absolute, defcon-five, must-win territory when Florida visits Neyland Stadium two weeks later. And with Florida oozing confidence and team unity, the Vols don't want that game to be even more of a pressure cooker than it already figures to be. A win over Cal will remove major heat from everyone in the Tennessee football family.

A loss? You don't want to go there. Not if you're Phil Fulmer, not if you're one of the Children of the Checkerboard.

The Cruelty Bowl... it's what makes college football--and particularly its opening weekend--so merciless and vicious. In what other sport can a season-opening loss drive a stake through the heart of a team and its millions of fans? Texas A&M felt the pain last season. Now Cal and Tennessee will fight with maniacal urgency to avoid the Aggies' fate this year.

Berkeley and Knoxville are two towns that stand worlds apart in culture, ideology and politics. But on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, the residents of both places will both be munching grilled meat... with the antacids and liquor close by to numb the pain of a defeat that, regrettably, one of those two communities will experience.

Cruel in the extreme, isn't it?

Welcome to the world of the Cruelty Bowl.