With the Oregon State football team (4-4) falling to Cal 44-7 on Saturday afternoon, BeaversEdge gives five takeaways from the loss...
To say it wasn't Oregon State's day in the bay would be an understatement...
The Oregon State football team physically showed up to Memorial Stadium on Saturday afternoon for a tilt with the Cal Bears. Still, it's hard to say beyond physically being there the Beavers were.
On paper, the oddsmakers didn't see this as a blowout, and neither did we at BeaversEdge. We all predicted this matchup to be right around the 11-point spread in favor of the Bears.
As it turned out, the Beavers had their worst performance of the season, their worst loss overall since 2019 against Utah, when the Utes won 52-7, and their worst loss on the road since 2018, when Ohio State spanked the Beavers by 46 points.
Simply put, it didn't look like the Beavers showed up today.
And arguably, no play was more indicative of what type of day it would be for the Beavers than Cal's opening touchdown drive. Just as it looked like the Beavers would hold the Bears to a field goal attempt following their opening drive by stopping Cal running back Javion Thomas on a swing pass behind the line of scrimmage, only to have Thomas pitch the ball to a running Fernando Mendoza who caught it in stride and took it to the house for six.
It was only six points, but it looked to stun the Beavers, and that stun led to the other side of the ball on their first offensive drive, nearly having a safety because of penalties and poor decision-making.
After that sequence, it was only 7-0, but it felt like a big collapse on both sides of the ball, and it only got much worse from there.
We knew of the Beavers' road struggles amidst a bevy of injuries with the debacle in Reno several weeks ago, but nobody could have expected the Beavers to look and be this bad.
Save the final excuse-me touchdown from the offense; this was a failure nearly across the board from the Oregon State football team. Sure, you can nitpick a few positives, as we will throughout these takeaways, but you cannot gloss over what was just a terrible performance.
Questions will arise about Trent Bray and the Beavers' coordinators no doubt, but I think this was the case of everything going wrong all at once against a team that was foaming at the mouth to end their four-game losing streak. The Beavers were on the wrong end of a team playing with a killer instinct, and they didn't have any sort of counterpunch.
Regardless of how it happened, there must be serious conversations about this football team as even in the tough losses these past couple of weeks, the Beavers were right in those games.
One could argue the Beavers were never in this game, and that's a shocking statement considering how competitive this team has been in games outside of the second half against Oregon this season.
The way the Beavers lost this game, and the way they didn't and couldn't fight back harkened me back to the early days of the Jonathan Smith era, and perhaps even before, which is not the company Trent Bray wants to keep.
The Beavers were thoroughly beaten in every aspect of the game, and in many ways, have to go back to the drawing board because so little went right against the Bears.