Golden Nuggets: Post-Game Video and Quotes from Saturday

Post-Game Video

Full transcripts (or at least more quotes than I’m providing here) for Wilcox and Laird can be found here.

The defensive effort was awfully good for you guys, didn't you think?

"We didn't win the game. We had opportunities to get stops in the first half and some critical third downs. We need third down to be big. I don't know what the total possessions were on each side of the ball, but it wasn't a high-possession game. So we knew each and every possession would be so critical. And we had some opportunities to get some stops in the first half and, obviously, the fourth quarter got to be able to get off the field there and get the offense the ball back. Don't get me wrong, I love our guys and the way they compete. They played hard, played their butts off, and we just needed another play here or there, and we didn't quite have it."

Do you think you might have concentrated to stopping Love so much that it hurt, because they hurt you with a lot of passes there. Do you think that one had something to do with the other?

"Well, yeah. It's not every call can you stack the box and double the wide outs, right? So you're going to have to pick and choose. There's times, when you're playing Stanford, which, you know, and I could be wrong, but you got to commit to stopping the run, and we did that and he still hit us on a run. He's an excellent back, they had a great scheme. We knew we would have to win on the outside at times. And on some critical downs, and they completed some, our guys competed and we didn't quite just make enough plays. So we were trying to mix and match in coverages to take some pressure off the cover guys at times, but I can sit around and play cover two against Stanford, we got to mix it up and play the run."

What's the mood in there in the locker room?

"I think most people are disappointed. We were in the game the whole time and I think we stopped ourselves offensively. And I think the defense, they knew they could have made a couple more plays. Right now it's, the idea is we're just going to bounce back this next week and get our sixth win."

What happened on that 47-yard touchdown run you had to sideline there early.

"I think it was inside zone and big hole opened up back side and I think I came off of Gibson's block. And, yeah, the O line was handling the stuff up front, gave me a lot of opportunities to get to the secondary, and I just almost got away."

You haven't played much in this game at all in the past, but you've been around. Did this feel like a huge step forward for your program, even though you lost?

"I mean, I don't know if I buy into moral victories very much."

Aside from the moral victory part, do you think you represented yourself in a different way as a team than have you in the past?

"I think our team comes out and competes every single game, but at the end of the day we judge our performance off of whether you get a win or a loss."

From Ryan Gorcey

Ross Bowers on the similarities of his interception on Saturday to the one his junior year of high school: "Losing is losing, especially when that play is definitely on you, so very unfortunate. Wish I could have it back. Got to learn from it."

Was it underthrown? "I haven't seen it on film yet, but probably, that's what it felt like."

How difficult is to to get over this in a day or so: "We have one more game. That's what we're focused on. We're focused on UCLA. That's all we're focused on. Got to get bowl eligible. Got to get this win. Got to get this feeling off. That's it."

Post-Game Articles

• Post-Game notes from Cal. I’ll quote some of my favorites.

Patrick Laird eclipsed the 100-yard rushing mark. It was his fourth career (and fourth this season) 100-yard rushing performance. He ended the day with 20 carries for 153 yards and a touchdown. The last time a Cal player rushed for 100 yards in the Big Game was Daniel Lasco (103) in 2014. His rushing yards are the most in the Big Game since Shane Vereen's 193 in 2009. This was the fourth game this season that Laird has carried the ball at least 20 times. The touchdown was the ninth of his career and his eighth this season.

Vic Wharton III has caught at least five passes in eight games in 2017. Tonight, he hauled in seven catches for 58 yards.

Camryn Bynum notched a career-high three pass breakups.

Darius Allensworth caught his third career INT on the last play of the first half. It was his first interception this season.

Cal was 2-for-2 on fourth downs today, and now on the season are 16-for-23.

One of the fourth-down conversions Cal executed was a fake punt, Cal's first fake punt this season, which was also Dylan Klumph's first career rush.

• Trace Travers has his takeaways from yesterday.
• UCLA also had a hardbreaking “road” loss to their rival in USC... now both the Bears and Bruins will play for a bowl game on Friday.
• Cal, who was #11 last week, moved up to #9 in ESPN’s Power Rankings.

Pre-Game Articles

• Most of the ones I found are almost completely 100% outdated and hard to read after the fact so I won’t post them...
• However, this one from The Daily Cal has a lot of cool information on Kyle Wells who played in his final Big Game... of course its hard not to tear up after reading that last part. (Not the excerpt below)

All the kids in the Sacramento area knew about Cal, but for Wells and his family, the team’s games were a weekly tradition. For most of his childhood, there was a lot to talk about.

“They had Aaron Rodgers, Marshawn Lynch, DeSean Jackson. Everyone was a huge Cal fan in Sacramento; everyone was watching Cal games and keeping up with the Bears,” he says.

When the recruiting season finally came around, the Bears were still on his mind. After visiting a few Ivy League schools during his senior year of high school, Wells realized that when it came to his next step, football was just as important to him as academics. He needed more than a challenge in the classroom — he wanted it at a Division-1 school in a Power Five conference.

Eventually, the choice to come to Cal became the obvious one. Being just a couple hours from home doesn’t hurt either. So while he had to walk on to make the Cal football team, everyone in the organization welcomed him with open arms.

Well, almost everyone.

“I’ve always played tight end, and during the (Sonny) Dykes era, we didn’t really have that, so I didn’t really have a spot,” he says. “My first three years here, I just played scout team — I didn’t really play at all. I was just a forgotten soul.”

• A recap of Week 10’s NFL action. Some great play from Jared Goff, as usual, but unfortunately last week also saw a season ending (and scary) injury to Daniel Lasco.

Misc.

• Congrats to Antzela Dempi who made the Academic All-District Team (one of only 3 Pac-12 Women’s VB players to do so), which covers the west coast and mountain states, and Alaska/Hawaii. With a cumulative 3.84 GPA in her senior year, she has led the Volleyball team in GPA the previous two years.
• Aravind Sivakumar was named the Pac-12 Scholar Athlete of the Year in Men’s Soccer. Sivakumar, who scored his first goal of the season and last of his career during his final game (Cal’s postseason loss to USF), currently has a 3.9 GPA.
• Check Ryan Gorcey’s recap of Cal Baseball’s fall ball training, their first with new coach Mike Neu, which also includes video.
• The Cal Women’s Basketball team took a beating at UConn, but there was a lot to learn in the loss.

“This will help us in so many different ways,” Gottlieb said. “We talked about it that it exposes what our weaknesses are and shows a lot of good things about us. Right now, there’s UConn and then everybody else. If we can get close to the top of the pack of everyone else, that’s what we want.”

Go Bears. Congrats to WBB on defeating Brown this morning. Hopefully I’ll make it to Cal/UCLA WVB in a few hours.