It's a chilly Tuesday in the Strawberry Canyon, a slight breeze dips in and out of Memorial Stadium as the sun slowly slips below the horizon.
Cal offensive coordinator Tony Franklin is standing in the north end zone, a permanently sweat-stained Cal hat corralling a head of hair that rarely gets cut, his seemingly permanent five o'clock shadow offset by a sort of squint-crunched visage only a Kentucky mother could love.
Someone from the press corps asks Tony if he wants one of the "Keep Calm And #Drop50" t-shirts that popped up online this week -- an homage to Cal's high-scoring offense, now second in the country in points per game.
"What now?" Franklin says, a southern twang slipped into every syllable. "No, I just want to win. If you've got a 'Winning' t-shirt, I'll wear that."
Franklin says he has no idea where Cal's offense ranks -- didn't know the Bear had the third-ranked passing offense in the nation at 398.2 yards per game, didn't care that their 50 points per game average puts them only behind fifth-ranked Baylor (5-0).
"I read nothing," he says. "I have no idea what people say. I don't want to know, I could care less. I have a job where I get 50,000 critics every week and several million from other walks of life. If I listened to the noise I would be miserable. I don't hear anything -- I just go to work early and stay late and try to get better at my profession."
So far, so good.
Cal has DOUBLED its scoring output from a year ago -- the redzone-inept 2013 Bears averaged just 23 points per game, good for 98th in the country.
Now at 50 per game, the "BearRaid" is finally living up to the hype. Just like head coach Sonny Dykes knew it eventually would under Franklin.
"When I became a head coach, I didn't really want to run the offense, it was really important to me to do other things than try to run the offense," Dykes says. "I was interested in going fast and Tony was playing fast. At that time, not that many people were going fast."
Dykes talks about 2010, the year he and Franklin re-joined forces (both overlapped for a year on Kentucky's staff in the late 90s). Two years later they would together trot out the highest scoring offense in the country for the surprise 9-3 Bulldogs.
"The thing that always impressed me with Tony was one, I always liked the way he interacted with his players -- he's very demanding, but also really good at having a personal relationship with the guys. I always admired the way he worked with the players. And two, he was really creative. The principles we were running in the offense, he created drills, ways to improve and they were all very common sense in their approach -- I was always really impressed with that, he was a very good coach at Kentucky when I was starting to cut my teeth as a coach."
Dykes says since arriving at Cal, he's taken a step back from Franklin and the Bears' offense. After collaborating much more closely for three years at Louisiana Tech, his comfort with his offensive coordinator and his offense has elicited a more hands off approach.
"Tony was still figuring things out after spring in terms of what direction we were going in, and to his credit, he figured it out," Dykes says.
And no one is happier than Franklin, who has grown more attached to Berkeley than probably any member of the staff.
"I love this place, I love this community, I love the people, every day I walk to work and walk home. I have probably more friends outside of football than I've ever had in my life," he says. "I feel like this is a place that changes the world, and I'm just glad to be here to absorb it. Every day, in the middle of the day, I walk through campus, there's a protest, there are kids expressing their opinions, there are adults expressing their opinions. It makes me feel like I'm not weird, that I'm normal. Honest to god I knew history of Berkeley, but I didn't understand culture of Berkeley. I didn't get it 'til I moved here. The moment I was here for 30 days I said wow, I found home. I love this place."
Back on the football field though, Franklin is quick to admit he still doesn't "love" the offense. And he probably never will.
He says he always expects to score on every drive, he did in 2013, and he does in 2014, but this year there's a marked difference: he's not the only one expecting that, the players are now, too.
"That's the good thing, it used to be that it was only me. They get it, they know it's disappointing when they don't. That's the attitude they have," Franklin says. "That's where we wanted to get, we've been preaching this since the day we got here. It's not something that happens overnight. It's not easy to flip and score 50 points a game. Credit to these guys."
"These guys" though, deflect most of the credit back to Franklin.
"He brings the best out of you," says wideout Trevor Davis, fresh off amassing 229 total yards and three TDs in a 60-59 barnburner in Pullman. "He'll get on you, but normally when he does, it's when it's needed, and you know that. You can't really say anything back because you know that he's getting on you for a good reason, you know you did something wrong. He might get on you hard for something that was the tiniest thing ever, but those tiny things matter. That's what I think is making our whole entire team realize every tiny little detail matters. That comes from him jumping down our throat every time we do something wrong, that's why we're so sound on offense right now with every little detail."
The 57-year-old Kentucky native is about as honest as they come. Anyone who's ever attended a Cal practice knows that, largely because you can hear his "honesty" 40 rows up.
"One of the most honest coaches I've ever seen in my life," Davis says. "He's gonna say how he feels, you'll know how he feels. He's gonna tell you up front. And it doesn't really matter how you feel about his answer."
Franklin says his not-so-quiet confidence comes from 34 years of coaching.
"I feel like I'm good at what I do, my job," he says. "As far as the confidence and the belief of the philosophy we have -- that has never wavered. I never doubt what we're doing, I never doubt the assistant coaches that work with me, I never doubt myself, I never doubt our head coach, I've never wavered."
Not even in the midst of 1-11.
"Last year we were young, we had a lot of guys that weren't bought in and we had addition by subtraction, a lot of times you lose guys and it makes you a lot better -- that's what happened here. Everyone playing offense for us now, they're all in, 100%. Everyone has had a year with Damon (Harrington), we're stronger, more physical, just better."
A lot better in fact. Franklin says the offense has expanded considerably in 2014 -- he's now able to put his same basic concepts against more complicated sets, to tweak formations in ways he couldn't in 2013.
Because of it, Franklin can favorably compare this Cal team's offense to the record-breaking one he coached in 2012 in Ruston.
"Hell, I've been coaching 34 years, we had that amazing, spectacular deal at Louisiana Tech that was mind blowing, that I couldn't believe, that just blew me away in my brain, and right now we're playing at that level. It's week to week, you don't know, it's still just five games into the season..."