Utah hosts Cal Berkeley and Leland Stanford, Jr.

It's been a huge year for Bay Area sports. The Giants won the series, Stanford won the Rose Bowl and the Niners are in the Super Bowl. And Cal and Stanford are both currently ranked in the Top-10 for women's basketball.

And then there's men's basketball. Neither Cal or Stanford has been awful by any means; we've just come to expect more out of these two teams. Cal lost a large part of its NCAA tournament team from last year; Stanford last some key pieces of last year's NIT Championship team. But both were projected at better than the CBI. Cal was picked third in the Pac-12 pre-season media poll and Stanford was picked fourth.

Incidentally, Oregon was picked seventh.

Allen Crabbe (23) and Justin Cobbs (1)

Instead of breaking these two teams down in anticipation for this week's games, I'll discuss their recent matchup against each other. Stanford was the victor at Maples Pavilion last Saturday, 69-59. The Cardinal's approach against Cal was probably the same thing we'll see Utah try: neutralize Allen Crabbe and make the rest of the team beat you. In Stanford's case, this worked like a charm. Crabbe had only two points in the first half. Meanwhile, Justin Cobbs and Ty Wallace couldn't compensate; they combined for 19 points off 6-26 shooting. As for the Cal bench, they were outscored 26-3 by the Stanford bench.

Speaking of bench play, Stanford's John Gage was a huge bright spot on Saturday. He shot 4-5 (4-4 from the 3-point line). Stanford's starting line: Chasson Randle (15 pts), Dwight Powell (17 pts 9 rebs) and Josh Huestis (9 pts 12 rebs), were all as good or better than expected.

Chasson Randle (5), Dwight Powell (33) and Josh Huestis (24)

For the first 14 minutes it looked like anybody's game, but Stanford went on a 14-6 run to end the half. The second half saw both teams shoot right around 30%; Cal cut the lead down to two or three points a few times, but could never get over the hump.

I think this is the best chance we'll get at a home sweep this year. After our win against Washington, I'd like to think we can win both. But we know we're capable of a home let down like we saw against USC. It may be one of those things where we either go 2-0 or 0-2; either we keep up the pace we established in Seattle, beat Cal and soar through Stanford -or- we get tripped up against Cal and get run over by Stanford. In either event, this week will go a long way toward determining what kind of season we'll have from here on out.