To the promised land.

Byline: BOB RODMAN The Register-Guard

FOR NEARLY A DECADE, Strawberry Canyon was little more than a valley with a river of football defeat flowing through it.

They couldn't give away the freebie viewpoints where fans have long planted their fannies on Tightwad Hill, which overlooks California's often half-empty, 73,347-seat Memorial Stadium.

Without a winning season in the past eight years, Cal tossed the scrap heap from a 1-10 disaster in 2001 at Jeff Tedford and asked the former Oregon offensive coordinator to coach the Bears, get Berkeley back into a football frame of mind and shake a dream or two out of what seemed to be an unending nightmare.

With a little help from his friends, some Cal athletes thirsting to drink from the well of football victory, a daring offensive scheme and the wheels of Tedford's quarterback mind continuously turning, he is doing it in this, his first season as a head coach.

The Bears are golden again - only one win away from becoming bowl eligible (though currently Cal is under a one-year bowl ban for NCAA academic violations during former coach Tom Holmoe's regime) and just two wins away from clinching their first winning season in nearly a decade.

"We gave them something to believe in, something they wanted to buy into," said Tedford, a quiet man who far prefers to walk the walk than talk the talk.

"All we did was give the players a fresh start. Now they expect to win, know they can win in any given week. They also know it takes great preparation and playing their best to do so."

The 40-year-old Tedford, who leads the Bears into Corvallis for a Pac-10 Conference game with Oregon State on Saturday, said from his get-go at Cal that "our goal is to achieve a winning season this year."

Why not? In his 11-year collegiate coaching career at Fresno State (his alma mater), Oregon and now Cal, Tedford has tutored high-powered quarterbacks and equally impressive offenses, amassing yards, touchdowns, wins and star power by the truckload.

Four of his quarterbacks, Fresno's Trent Dilfer and David Carr and Oregon's Akili Smith and Joey Harrington, followed the light from their starshine to the first round of the NFL draft.

Tedford's stay as offensive coordinator at Oregon lasted four years. During that stretch, the Ducks fashioned wins in three of four bowl appearances and a 38-10 record, moving from 8-4 in 1998, when the Ducks set school records in yards passing (3,856), total offense (5,795) and points scored (473), to 11-1 in 2001.

Last season was an Oregon milestone, one in which Oregon won the Pac-10, beat Colorado in the Fiesta Bowl and finished as the No. 2-ranked team in the country.

Today, eight games into Tedford's Cal debut, the Bears are marching to the same kind of drumbeat.

Cal leads the nation - with Virginia Tech - in turnover ratio at plus-2.0 a game. The plus 16 in takeaways is the best for the Bears since 1951. Cal has lost just four fumbles in eight games. Its three losses to top-25 teams Air Force, Washington State and USC were by a total of 14 points.

Cal quarterback Kyle Boller, a senior, leads the Pac-10 with 19 touchdown passes, more than half of the 36 he had in his first three seasons combined, and just five interceptions out of 259 attempts.

A year ago, the Bears were yielding nearly 40 points (and scoring just 18) and 450 yards a game. They were minus-17 in turnover ratio and allowed 32 quarterback sacks.

"They just don't make mistakes now," said Dennis Erickson, the OSU coach who linked himself to Tedford through Jim Sweeney, the former Fresno State coach who hired Erickson as an assistant in 1976 and coached Tedford in 1981-82.

"That plus-16 turnover margin is a huge statistic. They don't beat themselves. What they've done is unbelievable."

Cal's resurgence may have caught some onlookers off guard but not Oregon coach Mike Bellotti.

"While it may be a surprise to some," said Bellotti, whose Ducks do not play Cal this season, "it's not a surprise to me."

Nor has it been to Tedford, who has successfully mixed the Xs and Os, techniques and fundamentals of the game with the less-tangible elements - potential, leadership, commitment, confidence, belief, communication, dedication, focus, direction, unity, environment ... the whole nine yards.

"I looked for it (winning) to begin immediately," said Tedford, whose predictions and penchant for saving time by sleeping in his Memorial Stadium office several nights a week have gained national attention.

"Cal is an extraordinary story," USC coach Pete Carroll recently told the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times. "Where they have come from last year at 1-10 to where they are now is remarkable."

Tedford believed, but ...

"I really didn't know if we could win or if we couldn't," admitted Tedford, once a record-setting quarterback at Fresno State (an honorable mention All-American with a nation-high 24 touchdown passes in 1982) who spent six seasons in the Canadian Football League.

"But I knew if we prepared hard, created an environment where the kids could gain some confidence and take care of the little things, then the big things would take care of themselves."

Those "big things" have been the wins. Five of them, so far, which is one more than the Bears had in the two previous seasons.

"That good start (three straight impressive wins over Baylor, New Mexico State and then No. 15 Michigan State) validated what coach Tedford had been saying all summer and when he first arrived on campus," said Ron Gould, a former Oregon player who coaches the Bears' running backs and is the only holdover from the previous Cal staff.

"There's a belief in what Jeff says. The players had a sense of `Wow, we have a chance.' '

Tedford assembled his coaching staff in just 10 days, in part because most of those men - including former UO assistants Bob Gregory (now Cal's defensive coordinator) and Bob Foster (now Cal's linebackers coach) - were in tow as Tedford considered taking the San Diego State football coaching job before Cal called.

There are other Oregon connections. Cal wide receivers coach Eric Kiesau worked for the Ducks in 1999 as teamwork coordinator, Cal strength coach John Krasinski was an assistant strength coach at Oregon from 1996-2000, Cal assistant strength coach Erick Young was a graduate assistant strength coach at Oregon in 1996-97, and Cal recruiting assistant Kevin Parker played running back for the Ducks in 1995-96.

But where did this karma of Tedford's come from?

"Mainly from coach Bellotti," Tedford said. "The two great coaches I've been around are Mike Bellotti and Jim Sweeney. Sweeney was the fiery type, Bellotti a little more poised.

"I think I'm somewhere in the middle," said Tedford, married and the father of two teen-age sons. "Coach Bellotti taught me to not panic ... and that rubs off on the players."

Boller is at the top of that list.

"Coach Tedford has made believers of us," said Boller, who was recruited by Tedford, then at Oregon, as a star quarterback at Hart High in Newhall, Calif.

"I feel like it's fun to play the sport again," said Boller, who began his final season with more career interceptions (38) than touchdown passes (36). "I'm not surprised we've won five games and turned things around so quickly.

"The players bought into what he was saying. He gave us confidence, made us believe we were good players who could compete and win. He is an awesome leader. When he tells you something, you know it's powerful and it works."

Tedford's coaching bell was first rung when he was a freshman at Warren High School in his hometown of Downey, Calif., a suburb smack dab in the middle of Los Angeles.

"The guy was like a little gym rat," remembered Frank Mazzotta, then the Warren football coach and now holding a similar position at Cerritos College in nearby Norwalk, Calif. "He was always around.

"I had to tell him story after story after story. I couldn't get away from Jeff. But he was a quarterback-type of kid. You could just tell. He makes me feel proud as hell. Jeff is like a son to me."

Mazzotta moved to Cerritos when Tedford became a prep sophomore, but the two were reunited when Tedford quarterbacked the junior college team for two years before transferring to Fresno State.

"He conducts himself today just as he did when he was a quarterback in the huddle. He talks a lot about the presence of quarterback ... that's Jeff. He's an awesome leader," Mazzotta said.

"I was from a single-parent home," Tedford said. "Coach Mazzotta would talk to me. He cared about me as a person, I admired that. That's when I knew I wanted to be a coach."

Tedford's coaching career has been one of total involvement, including a kind of one-on-one mentoring approach. Which might be why his wife Donna, who runs the Tedford household in Danville, Calif., said, "We don't see him much."

Tedford is, as he so often has put it, a "hands-on" guy. He's not about to let go now.

CAPTION(S):

Jeff Tedford has taken a Cal football program that was hopelessly overmatched with a 1-10 record last season and brought them to 5-3 so far this season heading into Saturday's game against Oregon State in Corvallis.