Here is Part II of my interview with Jeff Tedford:

Cohn: Criticisms I’ve heard of you: there are two. 1) He’s terrific. He used to seem more creative offensively. 2) He’s terrific. Has he reached a ceiling at Cal?

Tedford: No, I don’t wonder if we’ve reached a ceiling here. I don’t. I really believe that each year is a new year and we have an opportunity each year to accomplish what we want to get done. Are there challenges here? Absolutely — with recruiting, academics, the facilities. But the facilities are getting taken care of. We’ve done a very good job, I feel, academically to graduate our players. But as far as accomplishing our goal to get to the Rose Bowl that is still there. No way have we reached our ceiling at all. We’ve won 10 games, we’ve won nine games, we’ve won eight games, we’ve won seven games, I mean we’re in the upper echelon all the time of that. We lost our best player for 4 3/4 game last year. That’s no excuse. But no I’m not satisfied to win eight games a year, not at all. We’re going to continue to strive. You look at every team. There’s only one team, besides last year, in the last eight that’s gone to the Rose Bowl and that’s been USC. You can say all other teams in the Pac-10 have reached their ceiling, too. That’s not the case. The other part of that is the imagination or creativity. No. I think we probably have been a little bit stale and we’re going to try and do something about that. First of all you have to do what your personnel allows you do to. Sometimes you can do certain things. If you have players you can do a double pass because they can throw and things like that. Then you can utilize more things. Sometimes if you don’t, then you can’t do quite as many things. I personally have backed out of the play calling over the last two years. We had Frank Cignetti two years ago and Andy Ludwig last year. Frank left after one year to go back to Pittsburgh where he had grown up, his dad was a coach. I mean he’s Pittsburgh through and through. He would have only left here for one job and that was Pittsburgh. For me to be able to give someone else the reins I have to give them the reins and then we have to learn from things and go from there with it. After that season with Frank I would have felt like we would have done more even the next year because of having the year together. Same thing with Andy last year. I’ve always been — even when I haven’t called some of the plays – I’ve always been, ‘Hey, run this. Hey, run that. Hey, run this.’ and that’s not fair to the play caller, because they’re trying to set things up. Andy was here last year and now we have grown together where I would expect that this year is going to be a little bit different, a little bit better. We had a brand new offensive line coach last year, we had a brand new offensive coordinator last year so we had to learn to work together and I can’t jump in there every time and say something. Again, they may say I have gotten less creative but it really has to do with – again it’s not so much about me, it’s about how we have to adapt with our players and with our coaches. Now this season may be something totally new, maybe something totally different. And I’ve heard that from time to time, ‘You don’t run as many trick plays as you used to run.’ Stuff like that. Trick plays, I think people like trick plays even if they don’t work. If you run a double reverse and you gain three yards, it looks neat because there’s a whole lot of stuff going on. We want to make sure they’re effective and you have to have players to do certain things. After last season, again go to evaluating, I have 100 percent confidence in Coach Ludwig and I think we can do more this year because of the understanding of everything.

Cohn: Why did you give up the play calling?

Tedford: I gave up the play calling because I didn’t feel I had the time to do everything. When I’m a play caller I am so consumed in it. Like on Friday night I will lay in the bed and just with my eyes closed and go over it and over it, and Saturday morning do the same thing. There’s other things going on in the game with offense, defense, special teams, talking to the officials so on and so forth. So I felt like if we could get someone in here who did a great job of that, we could get on the same page and they could take that over and I could be there to give ideas. Because I still game plan with them. It’s not like I don’t game plan. I’m in there in every game plan meeting, I just don’t call every play down the list. Sometimes head-coaching duties call you away to do certain things that I can’t be in a meeting with the quarterbacks. I made a decision to do that to try and be able to do some of the other things I need to do.

 Cohn: Bill Walsh was always thinking of plays and I believe it took a toll on him.

Tedford: I even saw something with him that says as a play caller you have to be totally consumed with what you’re doing. You’ve got to block out everything else. In all my play-calling days it is a constant, just a constant. You’re laying in bed and every move you make in bed is like a block or a throw. It consumes you so much like that. I want to hire someone who can do that while I can’t do that all the time. Like yesterday I had to do a thing with the sponsors and the day before I had to do something with the students – it’s fundraising, it’s recruiting, it’s academics, it’s discipline. The discipline thing takes a lot of my time, to make sure our kids are doing everything they need to do, keeping them academically going or if they were late to a class. I’m very involved in all that stuff. There are so many other things going on I need to take part in I couldn’t do it all.

Cohn: You said you’d lie in bed – would you actually move like if you were thinking of a particular play you’d actually act it out?

Tedford: You can never turn it off. When you’re laying there you can never turn it off. Any little thing is always football. Your dreams are football. Your movements are football. It’s a weird deal. You’re so consumed by it you find you can never turn it off.

Cohn: Does your wife ever say, ‘Jeff, turn it off.’

Tedford: Oh, yeah (laughs). I’ll wake up and tell her and I’ll talk to her about it and it would irritate me when she would try to not listen to me. I’d be in my sleep – when I was young I was a sleepwalker and things are real to me in my sleep, right – so you get so consumed in that, I’d wake up and I’d say something to her, ‘We’ve got to do this.’ Or, ‘we’ve got to do that.’ And she wouldn’t pay attention to me. And I’d say, ‘No, this is real. We’ve got to do that.’ Then she started kind of interacting with me . . .’

Cohn: You were sleeping and talking?

Tedford: Yeah. And then she answers something to me and I’d sit there and kind of think for a minute and I didn’t know the answer, so I’d just lay down. The point is, without getting all in depth about my sleeping patterns, the point is it’s all consuming, that you can never turn it off. That’s what happens during the season. There’s been times like two seasons ago when I was very unhealthy because I’d watch tape here until 1:30 in the morning. I’d lay down I couldn’t turn it off, I couldn’t go to sleep and then I’d be awake all night long. If you get on that pattern it is so bad because the game is going to go on on Saturday. You can’t say, ‘Hey, memo, we’re going to postpone this meeting till Sunday.’ The progression of the week has to happen. In order for me to stay with a semblance of health, I can’t do everything. I have to delegate and I have to hire the people.

Cohn: Do you still spend nights here?

Tedford: This season I’ll probably spend two nights a week here.

Cohn: Did you used to do more?

Tedford: Yeah, I used to stay Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I used to stay four nights a week. Go home on Thursday. Thursday was date night. Now I’ll probably stay Sunday and Monday. We’ve changed our schedule, which is another thing about evaluating what’s going on for the stress level of the players and the coaches to be able to be more efficient in what we do.

Cohn: I understand you didn’t want to convey stress to the players. They want to see a coach who’s calm and in control as opposed to frazzled.

Tedford: And has energy. The thing is going to be to stay fresh as a team and as a staff through the duration. I’m usually a grinder all the time. I’ve tried to make it a point for this year to let the players have a little escape at some point and be intense when it’s time to play. They eat dinner six to seven. Now they have some discretionary time where they cannot be totally pressed by everything – stress on the field, stress off the field. That was the whole thing about changing the schedule. I think it’s going to help the coaches, the players, everyone. That was part of the evaluation: how can we sustain for the duration our energy levels, our focus and so forth?

Cohn: What do you do that’s not football?

Tedford: During the season? Nothing.

Cohn: What about in the not-season?

Tedford: During the summer my wife likes to travel so she usually takes us somewhere. This last year we went to Greece on a cruise.

Cohn: Was it fun?

Tedford: It was all right, yeah. It was interesting. It was too long, though. We were gone for like 10 days. It’s hard for me to stay gone for 10 days.

Cohn: Stay gone from here?

Tedford: Yeah.

Cohn: It calls to you?

Tedford: Yeah. Because the kids are going to summer school. There’s things going on. I found this with vacation. Instead of turning my phone off and then, OK, in five days I’ll be back, I find it much easier if I call in every morning to find out what’s going on. Because then I can at least relax. If I go for five days without knowing anything that’s going on, I’m totally stressed out and the vacation’s not a vacation any more. If I call every morning, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’ then I can relax and the rest of the day I can do whatever I need to do. I’m a big family guy, my two boys and my wife in the summertime we pretty much do everything together. I play golf with my kids. But that’s really the only thing – play golf or we have a place at Lake Almanor where we were at for two days this year and that was it in the summer.

The end.