Longtime Cal and Fresno State football coach Jeff Tedford retires

Jeff Tedford forged a great career as a college football head coach. The architect of the Cal football team that kept Pete Carroll’s 2003 USC Trojans out of the BCS Championship Game stepped down as Fresno State’s head coach, citing health concerns. Tedford led Fresno State to multiple Mountain West Conference championships. Over a decade earlier, he guided Cal to a place of considerable prominence in the college football world. Many people thought then, and still think now, that Cal deserved to be in the 2005 Rose Bowl against Michigan, but Texas was allowed into the game instead of the Golden Bears. Had Cal been invited to the game, the Golden Bears would have snapped a very long Rose Bowl drought dating back to the 1950s. Tedford was that good. He took a largely irrelevant program which has struggled for most of the past 50 years and brought it to the top tier of the Pac-10 and made it a relevant program in the West. Rodgers is the man who developed Aaron Rodgers as a quarterback in College. The 2004 Cal-USC game at the Coliseum — won 23-17 by the Trojans thanks to a late red-zone defensive stand — is one of the great games in USC and Coliseum history. Tedford’s Bears pushed the Trojans to the limit.

We congratulate Jeff Tedford on an amazing career at The Voice of College Football and wish him full health.

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