by Morris Phillips

BERKELEY–There is a lot of good stuff going on in the Cal Bears program but we didn’t see it in the last two ball games which Cal dropped to Utah and on Saturday at Stanford. The Bears Tyrone Wallace had a tough afternoon scoring 11 points and Wallace didn’t play in the final minutes of the game when they looked they could make a run and they were swept by Stanford for the second time in the last three years 72-61.

The Bears have not had much success in Maples Pavilion at all dating back to the time when Cal head coach Mike Montgomery was coaching the team. They did clinch the Pac 12 regular season title that year that they won it under Montgomery at Stanford which was a big milestone win. Other than that it’s a tough place for Cal to win and Stanford just continues to get better and better. It incumbent on Cal to try and match that if they want to keep up with their rival the Cardinal.

The Cardinal Chason Randle 19 points with a career high of eight assists, has quietly become a great player in the Cardinal history and he continues to do great things. They even outlined a scenario where he would eclipse former Stanford stars Todd Lichti and Adam Keefe as the leading scorer in the history of the Cardinal program. On Saturday Randle came right at the Bears.

Chason was double teamed in the game with a second defender a move to cut him off and it worked for about 20 minutes in terms of his scoring. Chason is a great player and he just looked for his teammates and in the second half he hit a couple buckets to start off and he was off to the races in terms of his scoring. Chason is just a real heavy player.

In my article on Saturday night I wrote about the one play that the ball was inbounded for the baseline over the top and he had the ball with only two seconds left on the shot clock and he immediately shoveled it over for a huge assist and that assist helped Stanford get a big basket to finish the clock off and that put Stanford up by 13 points late in the game.

This is a good lesson for any ball player if the defense is set up to take you out of the game then your goal is to get the ball to your teammates and Chason did that. Chason had a great game. For Cal they were behind the eight ball all night long, they just struggled with Stanford’s size, the Bears Jordan Matthews is hobbled he’s a tough guy and nobody is explaining what’s wrong with him but he was favoring his ankle, Matthews didn’t get any scoring done and finished the night with seven points.

Morris Phillips is the Cal Bears beat writer and is filling in for Michelle Richardson for NCAA commentary for this week on http://www.sportsradioservice.com listen to Morris’ podcast below