Cal-Fresno State a game to watch

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BERKELEY -- Going into next Saturday's season opener against alma mater Fresno State, California head coach Jeff Tedford knows that his Bulldogs - and former boss Pat Hill won't be a push-over.

"Fresno State, they're a typical Fresno State team," Tedford said on Friday. "They play hard, they're very competitive, they're athletic. You know that that's what you're going to get. They always have good athletes and they always have good team speed, so that hasn't changed."

While Tedford said he doesn't pay much attention to the ins and outs of his old program, he does take a peek at scores from time to time. There are three players that he should be familiar with on the Fresno State roster, though, in receivers Davon Dunn and Josh Harper and first-year signal-caller Derek Carr, the younger brother of former Bulldogs quarterback David Carr.

Harper and Dunn were both committed to the Bears during the 2010 recruiting cycle, but flipped to Fresno State late in the process. He said that having scouted those two gives him no advantage during game planning.

"That was high school," Tedford said. "I don't know what they've done there. They haven't been in the stats much. Fall practice is one thing. Games are a whole different thing. They were good players coming out of high school."

Derek Carr, starting as a redshirt sophomore, has no game film, but, Tedford said, won't be too difficult to game plan for.

"They typically do what they do, what they have done over the years, but you always have to prepare for something new in the first game of the year," said Tedford, who also remarked that season openers are "always" more difficult, "because you don't know. You've got to be ready for everything because you don't know what different spins they're going to put on. Typically, people do things in the offseason, they'll study football, go get a different concept and do something like that, so you just always have to be prepared for it."