Reality check for Bears, Cardinal

Reality arrived on the Bay Area’s collegefootball landscape Saturday, with all the subtlety of a lightning bolt. For Cal and Stanford, this week’s practices will be about reflection and regret.

Nobody expected either team to go undefeated, and each had some inspirational moments in the early going. The Bears were building their case for a significant upset before the explosive Oregon Ducks left Strawberry Canyon with a 42-24 win. At Notre Dame, where history and tradition cast a palpable spell, Stanford stood helpless against a second-half onslaught that gave the Irish a 38-17 rout.

Sifting through the rubble: At 3-1, Cal can resurrect its bowl-bid passion with winnable upcoming games against Arizona, UCLA and Oregon State. But a porous defense, something that haunted the Bears throughout the Sonny Dykes era, factored heavily in Satur-

day night’s loss.

For Stanford (4-1), coach David Shaw must come to grips with an alarming trend: Over the past two weeks, against Oregon and Notre Dame, his team has been beaten on both sides of the scrimmage line.

Where it all leads: fun times in the Pac-12’s North Division, where Stanford, Washington, Cal, Oregon and Washington State (4-1 overall) all feel they have a legitimate shot.

The bigger picture, having to do with the four-team playoff for the national championship, doesn’t look so good for the conference. Washington’s credentials took a severe hit with its loss to Auburn. USC had too much early-season disaster to overcome. Oregon’s loss to Stanford last week was selfinflicted. And now the Cardinal have come up well short against a national powerhouse, the type of non-conference loss that carries a great deal of meaning when votes are cast.

It seems just about impossible for either Bay Area school to get a rollicking, boisterous, jam-packed crowd for any game at any time, but the Bears came reasonably close, by their standards, with 43,448 on hand for the conference opener (it looked to be at least that many). Chase Garbers and Brandon McIlwain are now firmly established as a twoquarterback tandem, and things looked promising in the first half when Garbers’ 19yard run sparked a touchdown drive and McIlwain burst up the middle on a quarterback draw for a 28-yard touchdown and a 10-7 lead.

What you’ll notice there is a lack of air. The Bears completed just four passes in the half, good for 43 yards, and if you cared to make a comparison against Oregon’s Justin Herbert, you could barely do so with a straight face.

Cal suffers badly with its lack of a deep threat among its wide receivers, an issue significantly amplified when the fleet Demetris Robertson transferred to Georgia after last season. Oregon not only

has eye-catching speed throughout the skill positions, but perhaps the nation’s most NFL-ready quarterback in Herbert.

Herbert threw a number of deep balls Saturday night that were simply ridiculous, a combination of velocity and catchit-in-stride accuracy that called to mind Jared Goff ’s fivetouchdown masterpiece for the Rams against Minnesota on Thursday night (and many of Goff ’s best moments at Cal).

“The good Lord doesn’t make people like that so often,” said Willie Taggart, who left Oregon for Florida State after coaching Herbert last year. “I think he’s the No. 1 pick. He reminds me of Andrew Luck, a guy who can make every throw, and he’s a freak of an athlete.” Added the Ducks’ current coach, Mario Cristobal: “He’s this big ol’ 6-foot-6 stud, and he’s got his hair flowing like Fabio, man, back in the day. I’m thinking some modeling agency is going to come out here and snag this guy.”

The most crushing development for the Bears wasn’t a Herbert pass, but a hit on McIlwain by Oregon defensive end Drayton Carlberg with 18 seconds left in the first half. McIlwain fumbled, and when linebacker La’Mar Winston picked it up, he was gone — 61

yards for a touchdown and a 28-10 lead, making for a rather subdued mood in the stadium during intermission. The Ducks’ lead grew to 35-10 before long, and by the midway point of the fourth quarter, the place was looking rather desolate.

Watching Stanford in the Shaw era, we come to expect tremendous performances by the defensive line and a ruthless, old-school rushing attack behind massive offensive linemen. That was the key to Bryce Love’s epic 2017 season, but things aren’t the same this year. Love isn’t finding much space between the tackles, and the toll was evident when he limped off the field in Saturday’s fourth quarter.

Defensively, the Cardinal has been torched in consecutive weeks — first by Herbert, who was 25-for-27 leading up to last week’s overtime, and now by a Notre Dame offense that rolled up a 550-229 edge in net offensive yards and scored 24 points in red-zone territory. Shaw usually finds a way to fix things, and when problems lie in the trenches, there are no easy solutions.

Bruce Jenkins is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: bjenkins@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Bruce_Jenkins1