Healthy, Relaxed Jeff Tedford Returns to Visit Cal, Where He Built a National Power

The 59-year-old former Bears head coach recalls his days in Berkeley and admits his never-rest style led to his heart problems.

While driving to Cal for the first time in nearly a decade to attend a Golden Bears practice earlier this week, Jeff Tedford had an epiphany of sorts.

“When I came out of the Caldecott Tunnel and looked over the bay, I was stunned by how beautiful it is,” he said. “I never thought about it before.”

That tells you all you need to know about the current Jeff Tedford, who is retired, and the one that was Cal’s head football coach from 2002 through 2012.

He traveled that same route to Cal hundreds of times when he was the Bears head coach, but his mind was occupied by two-deep zones and five-wideout formations and third-and-8 play calls. He was oblivious to world around him.

He never took a day off at Cal. He slept in his office most nights, got home Thursday night, Saturday afternoon following a game and Sunday. The rest of the time he was up virtually all night, trying to determine what plays would work against the next opponent.

He admits his pace was at partly responsible for the major health issues related to his heart that interrupted his coaching career at least twice.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt about it,” he said.

His most recent surgery was an ablation (a procedure for restoring normal heart rhythm) in January 2020.

Now he’s says he’s 100 percent healthy.

But he does not second guess his methods in his first head coaching job, hired by Cal athletic director Steve Gladstone just a few months after Tedford’s 40th birthday.

“I only know one way,” he said.

His way was part of the reason Cal, under Tedford, had the most football success it has had over the past 75 years, since the Pappy Waldorf days.

He had risen from a difficult childhood to coaching prominence, as noted in this feature that aired before Cal’s riveting 2004 game at USC.

He took over a Golden Bears team that was 1-10 the year before he arrived and went 7-5 his first season, then led Cal to a final top-25 ranking in 2004, 2005 and 2006, the last time Cal finished a season nationally ranked.

His 2004 team finished No. 4 in both polls, but thanks to the computers and some lost votes in the final polls, Texas supplanted Cal for the No. 4 spot in the final BCS rankings, giving the Longhorns a berth in the Rose Bowl instead of Cal.

Would it have made a difference if Cal had tried to score on its final possession in its final regular-season game against Southern Miss when it had the ball at the Golden Eagles’ 39-yard line with 3:33 left and the Bears leading 26-16? Maybe one more touchdown and a 33-16 victory would have been convincing enough to change some voters’ minds. Instead, with the victory safely in hand, Cal ran the ball seven straight times, the last one being an Aaron Rodgers kneel-down at the Southern Miss 22.

Tedford doesn’t second-guess that decision. He said it was more about integrity and not getting anyone hurt.

“I was a young naïve coach and not into politicking,” said Tedford. That was a reference to Texas’ Mack Brown, whose public politicking may have influenced a few voters and made the difference.

Tedford had just assumed that Cal’s resume -- a 10-1 record with its only defeat being a 33-27 road loss to a USC team that would go on to win the national championship -- was strong enough. He said the BCS result preventing a Rose Bowl berth was “crushing for everyone.”

***Watch the video atop this story for Tedford's recollection of two other key plays when he was Cal's head coach***

Aaron Rodgers was the star of that 2004 Cal team and was part of a run of quarterbacks Tedford turned into a first-round NFL draft choices: Kyle Boller and Rodgers at Cal, David Carr and Trent Dilfer at Fresno State when Tedford was the Bulldogs offensive coordinator, and Joey Harrington and Akili Smith when Tedford was the Ducks offensive coordinator.

Jeff Tedford leads his team out before his first game as Cal's head coach. Photo courtesy of Cal Athletics

He stayed at Cal despite being offered the head-coaching job by four teams – two in the NFL (Atlanta Falcons and Chicago Bears) and two in the then-Pac-10 (Washington and UCLA). 

Tedford’s only condition for staying in Berkeley was that Cal improve its facilities to match those of other major football programs. Most of those improvements took place, but were not completed until after Tedford was dismissed following a 3-9 season in 2012.

On Monday he returned to Cal and spoke briefly to the current Golden Bears players, as seen in this video:

Tedford had spoken with current Cal coach Justin Wilcox, who was an Oregon defensive back when Tedford was the Ducks offensive coordinator. Tedford also gave Wilcox his first fulltime coaching job when he hired Wilcox as the Bears’ linebacker coach in 2006.

But his presence at Memorial Stadium was more about wanting to return to the Cal campus.

“I never had a chance to get back there,” he said. “There are so many good people there. I wanted to reconnect.”

He splits his time between a home in Fresno and one in Carmel these days, but he plans to attend some Cal games this season.

Tedford says he has a good relationship with Cal people, which is not easy to do when that institution fired him.

“I can’t let one year dictate 11 years and the way it was,” he said.

Sandy Barbour, now the athletic director at Penn State, was Cal’s athletic director when Tedford was dismissed.

Tedford later became offensive coordinator for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers before his health got in the way. He had a coronary angioplasty in which two stents were placed in an artery near his heart.

He didn't stop coaching, though. Tedford became head coach of the BC Lions of the Canadian Football League for the 2015 season, but left after one season and contemplated retiring because of his health.

Instead he became an offensive consultant at Washington for the 2016 season and was named Fresno State’s head coach the next year. Again he took over a team that had won just one game the previous season, and led the Bulldogs to a 10-4 record in 2017 and a 12-2 record and a Mountain West championship in 2018, before slipping to 4-8 in 2019. Again Tedford stepped down for health reasons, with the ablation following a month later.

So now he is retired, and expects to stay that way, but he is still just 59 years old and did not completely rule out a return to football.

“I am retired,” he said. “Who knows what the future holds. This my first year of retirement and getting to know what retirement feels like. (But) who knows from month to month or year to year.”

His visit to Cal this week even had some wondering whether he might return to Cal in some capacity. It’s not going to happen. He was surprised the issue was even brought up.

“I haven’t even thought about that,” he said.

It’s a longshot that Tedford will coach anywhere again, but it won’t be at Cal in any case.

For now he's more excited about becoming a grandfather in a couple months.

However, he is still interested in Cal football. Tedford has not seen enough of Cal to make an educated assessment of where the program stands, but he believes Wilcox has the team heading in the right direction to become a Pac-12 title contender.

“I know Justin does a great job, Justin’s definitely on the right track,” Tedford said. “It’s something that’s attainable.”

Tedford’s Cal team tied USC for the Pac-10 title in 2006, the only time since 1975 that the Golden Bears have won or shared a conference championship.

Follow Jake Curtis of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jakecurtis53

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