Bulldogs know that come bowl time, mindset matters

Fresno State coach Jeff Tedford led Cal to eight bowl games and won five, which is a school record at a place without much history of postseason success outside of the 11 seasons that he spent in Berkeley.

Tedford knows come bowl time there are teams that are just happy to be there, that still feel they have something to prove, that are beat up or worn down and don’t want to be there or would rather be somewhere else. Take, for instance, 2004, when his Cal team that was 10-1 and ranked No. 4 in the nation got lobbied/politicked/snubbed out of a Rose Bowl berth and ended up in the Holiday Bowl. The prep did not go well, and the game was worse: Texas Tech 45, Cal 31.

“After that announcement was made we had kids scattered through the stadium screaming and hollering,” Tedford said.

“They were so frustrated because we felt that we deserved to be in the Rose Bowl and we got beat out by fractions of a point and it flipped at the last second for no reason.”

Mindset is not a concern this season for the Bulldogs, who have a chance to win a 10th game in the Dec. 24 Hawaii Bowl against Houston and set the program up for a solid offseason and another run at a Mountain West Conference championship.

“That 10th win means a lot, just to show people that you can bring someone in and bring back a culture of a school,” cornerback Tank Kelly said.

“It doesn’t take one person to bring it back, but when you do bring the right person in and they show they care for you and it’s a family bond it can make something special happen, so we want to make something special happen for this program.”

Tedford has set up the practice schedule to keep the Bulldogs on task.

They opened bowl practices on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, working mostly on fundamentals and giving the younger players in the program a chance to get in some work in the offense and defense rather than on scout teams.

There is a three-day break for final exams, and beginning Thursday they’ll get into game prep for Houston, which has won three of its past four games including a 28-24 win at No. 23 South Florida, and which has the Outland Trophy winner in defensive tackle Ed Oliver.

“Our approach has been about one game at a time the whole time,” Tedford said. “It hasn’t been about the number of wins. Not everybody has an opportunity to get double-digit wins. We have the opportunity to do that.

“It’s still about one game. Now, because it could be No. 10, will that be nice as far as how history records this 2017 year? Yes. But it’s still about one win. It’s about one more opportunity for us to play together. It’s about a chance to send the seniors out successfully. We’re looking at it that way, mainly.”

That approach hasn’t changed since Week One and Incarnate Word, a 66-0 victory.

A 17-14 loss at Boise State in the Mountain West Conference championship game and a chance to rack up a 10th victory after going 1-11 last season only adds to it.

“That loss in the Mountain West championship, it hurt this team. You could tell it did,” said center Aaron Mitchell, one of the Bulldogs’ captains. “We felt like we let the Valley down. But not every team gets to go to a bowl game and I read some stat where only one team in the history of college football has gone from double-digit losses to double-digit wins. It’s not even about that. It’s about leaving this program on a high note.

“A late bowl game, with a win, will really propel your team into the offseason. It will send you into training on a good note. That’s really the goal.”

Fresno State has not won a bowl game since 2007 when it beat Georgia Tech 40-28 in the Humanitarian Bowl in Boise, Idaho. Its most recent bowl game did not go well – a 30-6 loss to Rice in Hawaii.

“If we go out there and flop around, they have the potential to put 50 on us,” Mitchell said. “You’ve seen it in bowl games here. I’m not afraid to say it. We went and lost in the Hawaii Bowl (in 2014) to a team that we had the potential to beat and you see it all around the country. Each bowl season, you could tell which teams came in ready to play a game and which teams didn’t.

“You don’t want to be that group that had a hell of a season and then have people say, ‘They were really nothing because they got beaten up in a bowl game.’ You don’t want to put that mark on our legacy – ‘Oh, yeah, they had a good season, but they lost their last two games.’ We don’t want that on our résumé.”

This story was originally published December 9, 2017 at 3:08 PM with the headline "Bulldogs know that come bowl time, mindset matters."