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Cal football: What are the negatives to take from spring practice?

Based on all the reports, what are the biggest negatives you've taken from spring practice?

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(Check out our previous roundtable on the positives from spring practice!)

boomtho: The first negative I'll mention is that our overall secondary is still behind where we'd like. Part of the 'blame' has to go to our fantastic QB and WR's, but I would have been ecstatic to read that our DB's were blanking our WR's, which clearly didn't happen. A second negative for me is the continued lack of clarity around where Rubenzer will play. It's good that Forrest has looked pretty sharp, but I'm still a little disappointed we won't see Rubenzer grow into a QB2. Last, it sounds like our kickers have been shaky (at best). That's an under the radar position battle to monitor headed into the Fall.

Leland Wong: Boomtho and I are totes on the same page, because our uncertainty at DB is apparently a never-ending problem for the Bears. We're still waiting out on a couple of guys who are out on injury (like Stefan McClure, Quentin Tartabull, and Griffin Piatt), but it's rather disconcerting to have such a glaring weakness.

But, for once I'll be disagreeing with boomtho! Our inability to kick isn't a negative--it's a positive! This means we're gonna go for it on 4th down instead of kick field goals and go for two instead of the point after very time, right guys?

Avinash Kunnath: The defense is just such a question mark. It's hard to see how much they improve this year. The secondary has so many holes, it's hard to figure out who fits where. A lot of it will depend on the arrival of new faces (freshmen and JUCOs), so that's a lot of uncertain variables to deal with. It remains to be seen if Cal will find any pass rusher that can really make any quarterback feel uncomfortable in the pocket. I expect the run defense to be stable, but what good is forcing teams into 3rd and 8 if they can feel comfortable passing their way out of it? We still have a lot of holes that need to be plugged before we can feel comfortable with anything on that side.