November 24, 2014

Monday, November 2 4 , 2 0 14

It’s 7:30 on a Wednesday morning and Cal Poly Bass Club President John Zeolla is maneuvering his boat, Betsy, around the contours of Lopez Lake.

He guides her past the overcrowded nooks, around one bend, then around another.

He stops Betsy near a ledge and puts down her trolling motor. Without hesitation, he grabs one of his eight rods and casts his first line in the time it takes most men to open their tackle box.

The business administration senior lets it sink 20 feet so it grazes the bottom.

He waits. But just a moment.

He studies his fish finder. He reanalyzes his playing field — the water level, the wind, the temperature, the light

Established 19 16

penetration,the moon cycle, the barometric pressure, the location of his boat.

Nothing.

No bites. Within 15 minutes, he’s moved on. Patience? That’s the old song of fishing. Zeolla knows bass fishing isn’t waiting for a bite; it’s creating that moment.

He dons his lime green Cal Poly fishing jersey and wears his curls in a ponytail that’s been growing long before it became the latest fad. His beard, his attire, his assortment of rods and the ease with which he handles his boat all embody a man ready for his next catch. He slowly reels in his eight-pound line. Every few rotations he jerks back his rod, which triggers his jig lure into wiggling like a crawdad, a delicacy for bass.

w w w. m u s t a n g n e w s . n et

ON THE LINE:

The Cal Poly bass team Sara Natividad | Special to Mustang News See Page 2

An a cappella Thanksgiving: That's the Key rings in holiday season Kelly Trom @kttrom

That's the Key, one of Cal Poly’s a cappella groups, performed a delightfully cheesy holiday-themed concert Friday night. With transitions referencing favorite Thanksgiving dishes and cold weather, the performance was laced with puns and laughs. Then again, what else would you expect from a performance entitled “That’s the (Tur)Key"?

This was the group's first performance of the school year, featuring songs from the 1950s to current charttoppers such as "Flaws" by Bastille. The eclectic mix of music was chosen by the choir's arrangers and approved by the group's overall opinion, said That’s the Key President and liberal arts and engineering studies senior Jason Lu. “This was a nine-week work in progress and it paid off,” Lu said. “Our arrangers arrange what they feel like or get suggestions from the group or outside. We just try the song out and see if it fits our group, mixes well with our sound, how can we improve it.”

The show kicked off with some patriotism, with That’s the Key singing the “The Star-Spangled Banner” arrangement they performed at the Blue-Green Rivalry soccer game earlier this month. This simple rendition of the national anthem showed off the group’s natural rapport.

“We have a lot of chemistry,” Lu said. “We all can count on each other because we spend so much time together. It is one of the great things about being in an a cappella group: You have a whole new family.”

Most of the tight-knit group has been singing together for years, with only one newcomer — child development junior Skyler Pestle — who would have the chance to prove herself with a solo later in the show.

DYL AN SUN | MUSTANG NE WS THE KEY OF ROCK | That’s the Key — founded in 2009 — premiered “That’s the (Tur)Key,” its Thanksgiving concert, this past Friday in H.P. Davidson Music Center (building 45), room 218.

see KEY pg 5.

Women's basketball defeats Portland in home-opener Mustang News Staff Report @CPMustangSports

The Cal Poly women's basketball team (2-1) took to the court in Mott Athletics Center for the first time Sunday, downing Portland (0-3) 7667. After dropping the season opener at Fresno State, the Mustangs have emerged victorious in their last two outings after defeating Loyola Marymount on Friday.

Portland came out firing, hitting multiple three-pointers at the beginning of the first half. Its lead was quickly cut down by the end of the half after a 16-3 run by the Mustangs, who then outscored the Pilots by 12 in the second half.

Senior guard Ariana Elegado dropped a team-high 19 points, 17 of which came in the second half. Elegado also chipped in five assists.

Sophomore forward Hannah Gilbert and senior guard Kristen Ale both had 16 points, while Gilbert also had a team-high 11 rebounds and a block.

The Mustangs dominated the boards, pulling down 14 offensive rebounds leading to 14 second-chance points.

Cal Poly returns to the hardwood in Mott Gym on Nov. 25, when it faces Pepperdine. Tip-off is set for 7 p.m.

Nick Larson contributed to this report.

CHRISTA L AM | MUSTANG NE WS TEARIN’ IT UP | Senior forward Taryn Garza had nine points and seven rebounds in the Mustangs’ 76-67 victory over Portland on Sunday.

News... 1-3 | Arts... 4-5 | Opinion... 6 | Classifieds... 7 | Sports... 8

Monday, November 24, 2014

NEWS | 2

It’s all casting and technique. It’s very frustrating. You can sit out on a lake for multiple days and not catch shit. But it’s always worth it.

JOHN ZEOLLA

COURTESY PHOTO ALL ABOUT THAT BASS | Cal Poly bass team member John Zeolla joined the team after seeing its Faecbook page. He went to his first tournament a month later, placing fifth.

FISHING continued from pg 1.

“They’re such a game fish because even if they aren’t hungry, you can trick them if you trigger them correctly into biting a lure,” Zeolla said. “It’s a completely different animal than most fish. It’s all casting and technique. It’s very frustrating. You can sit out on a lake for multiple days and not catch shit. But it’s always worth it.”

The Cal Poly bass team consists of eight members who compete against other colleges in four teams of two. Each team needs its own boat and is only allowed to fish with artificial lures, as opposed to live bait. The teams keep their five heaviest fish. When the time runs up, the team with

the heaviest weight among 10 fish wins.

Eight members makes this the biggest bass club Zeolla has seen in his five years and is a large step up from four years ago, when he and his fishing partner Kyle Greenlaw were the only members.

“I’m surprised there aren’t more kids who fish bass at Cal Poly because it’s a total hick sport,” Zeolla said. “But I guess there’s not a lot of true hicks out here.”

Zeolla found the bass team on Facebook, contacted the club and fished his first tournament a month later. He placed fifth and came home with $5,000. After his first season, he realized he didn’t want to waste his life doing something he didn’t like and decided to pursue a professional bass

fishing career.

His partner, Greenlaw, a business administration senior, is also determined to turn his passion into his profession and understands the difficult transition between collegiate competitions and the professional fishing industry.

Their favorite tournament was when they competed in Georgia two summers ago. They spent a week driving there (fishing along the way, of course), a week fishing and a week driving back.

To have a decent shot at placing, the teams pre-fish before each tournament and use their fish finder to graft the water — studying the lake to note key structures such as rocks, ledges, submerged trees or creek channels.

“One thing that is overlooked

by a lot of fishermen is their tendency to start fishing immediately,” Greenlaw said. “You have to go and look past that and be patient and actually chart out waters.”

Having a partner helps with analyzing the playing field, especially when time is an issue, Greenlaw said.

“It’s nice having someone there to collaborate with,” Greenlaw said. “You each have your own styles that you like to fish and if you put them together, you can have a well-functioning team.”

Luckily, the Georgia tournament was during the summer when they didn’t have the stress of classes in the backs of their minds. Last year, the duo traveled from Wednesday through Sunday for a tournament in South Carolina and had to put their schoolwork on hold.

“Despite the cold, it was fun,” Greenlaw said. “We didn’t have time to fish that lake before the tournament, so it was kinda rushed. We scored 32 out of 50.

Not good.”

Greenlaw is graduating next quarter, and agricultural systems management sophomore Clayton Lauchland will be taking his place alongside Zeolla.

“It’s a lot of fun,” Lauchland said. “You get to travel around with a bunch of guys and go fishing and even the guys from the other schools are friendly.”

Unlike Zeolla and Greenlaw, who made the transition into bass fishing on their own, Lauchland knew not hing but b ass f rom the beginning.

“I like it because it’s a lot more active than fishing for other things,” he said. “I don’t like

standing there and waiting for a fish to eat a worm. You get to cast and you get to move around and it’s more competitive.”

The fishermen understand the obstacles they face entering the professional fishing industry, since most fishing tournaments are in the South and East Coast.

“The western guys don’t get a lot of love,” Zeolla said. “You have to compete in tournaments where that’s their home water and they know everything about that lake and you’re just showing up.”

“I think I have a good shot,” Zeolla said. “There’s a lot of luck involved, but there’s a lot of skill involved, too.”

Like catching a bass, Zeolla knows reaching his dreams requires more than patiently waiting for a lucky bite — it’s creating that moment.

Monday, November 24, 2014

NEWS | 3

RECON enlists citizen scientists to explore the outer reaches of space Savannah Sperry @SavannahJSperry

The Research and Education Collaborative Occultation Network (RECON) doesn’t want to keep the mysteries of space all to itself.

The network enlists citizen scientists to measure objects from the Kuiper belt to better understand the universe through their data.

The Kuiper belt The Kuiper belt is a region of space beyond Neptune that contains more than 100,000 icy and rocky objects, subsets of a larger group of space entities called trans-Neptunian objects. These Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) are 100 kilometers or larger and were formed alongside the Earth’s solar system approximately four and a half billion years ago.

Since the stretch of the Kuiper belt studied by RECON has remained primarily undisturbed since its formation, determining the characteristics of these KBOs gives the researchers a greater understanding of the processes that occurred when the solar system was first formed.

From Big Bang to RECON RECON is the brainchild of Dr. Marc Buie, a planetary scientist and observational astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado.

Buie first had the idea to assemble RECON more than 10 years ago.

At the time, Buie had been leading a project responsible for more than half of the 2,000 recently discovered Kuiper belt objects, Buie’s collaborator and Cal Poly physics professor — currently on sabbatical — John Keller said in an email to Mustang News. Buie believed having a larger group of people by his side could help measure the KBOs more efficiently.

The focus of RECON is to measure a specific subset of KBOs called cold classical KBOs, which orbit the sun.

“The way we’re measuring the sizes of KBOs is by looking at the shadow the objects cast on Earth as they pass in front of a distant star, which is an event called an occultation,” Keller said. “The length of time the star light is blocked can be

used along with the KBO’s velocity to determine its size.”

However, tracking and measuring these shadows has been difficult. One problem is the KBOs are hard to track because they are far from the sun’s light.

This is where the citizen scientists come in.

“This leads to large uncertainties in knowing exactly where their shadow paths will pass over the earth during an occultation,” Keller said. “A 2,000-km network of telescopes is needed to combat this — to guarantee that at least someone in the network will catch the object’s shadow.”

The dream team Buie and Keller set up the teams by looking for regions in the nation with reasonable densities of schools interspersed every 50 km.

The two settled on a route that took them along the Colorado River and up the back side of the Sierra Nevada mountains and Cascades in Washington.

“This path was chosen due to drier weather conditions in the rain shadow of these mountains,” Keller said. “Next, we used GoogleMaps to identify all of the high schools along this proposed transect.”

Emails were then sent out to principals and teachers at each high school.

Buie and Keller have been on four weeklong road trips this quarter, traveling to prospective schools in Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Arizona and Southern California, Keller said. Team members in these schools submit a Community Team Interest Form to help finalize which groups Buie and Keller will use for their research. These teams will be announced in a press release the week after Thanksgiving, Keller said.

The participants will be trained during two four-day workshops and provided with a telescope equipped with a recording system.

The plan is for all 50 teams of citizen scientists to focus their telescope on the same star where it is predicted a KBO will pass.

They then record the star using the telescope’s recording system and upload their video files to a server maintained by Buie in

Boulder, Colorado.

The teams located where the shadow passes over Earth will witness the occultation and will see the star go dark for an interval of seconds, then reappear after the object has passed.

While Buie and Keller lead the project, they are assisted by two student assistants and an office administrator. Physics senior Andrew Parker is one of those student assistants.

“It’s the only citizen science project I know of that depends on participation from dozens of specific groups,” Parker said.

Parker also believed the project gets the community involved in real science while collecting important information about the solar system at the same time.

Keller had similar sentiments.

“As a citizen science effort, the project will be involving thousands of students, teachers and community members in pursuit of a cutting-edge research study,” Keller said.

Even with the project just starting out, they have already gotten off on the right foot. During RECON’s last occultation campaign on the morning of Nov. 15, the network successfully detected its first occultation by a KBO.

K ATHY TRUJILLO | COURTESY PHOTO PART OF THE TEAM | A group of students from Hawthorne High School in Hawthorne, Calif. — located in Los Angeles County — was one of the teams to participate in the RECON project thus far.

Monday, November 24, 2014

ARTS | 4

The Audio Files: Ghosts of records past

Finn Warfield @KCPR913

DYL AN SUN | MUSTANG NE WS OWN IT

| Warfield said his whole music collection is important — even the embarrassing stuff.

As I wrap up my fourth term here at Cal Poly and my third term as a KCPR DJ, I inch closer and closer to the inevitable doom of a life almost solely dedicated to music. It seems that with each day I continue to be a part of this organization, I find that what I want more than anything else is a life completely immersed in this medium. This doesn’t shock me. I wanted to be a part of a college radio years before I took to KCPR’s airwaves.

All of us at the station come from very different paths, and I think it’s important to look back and think about how we all fell deeply in love with this little room on the third floor of Graphic Arts (building 26).

For me, it started when I was 9 years old. This was the first time I remember digging through my parents’ record collections. I found bands like Portishead, an English trip-hop collective from the mid-1990s; Medeski, Martin and Wood, an acid jazz trio from Brooklyn; and X, a 1970s L.A. punk band. My eclectic music taste made for a pretty weird third grader who didn’t find a whole lot in common with most of his classmates. However, I didn’t stop listening; I knew there was something about these sounds that resonated with me more than anything else at the time.

A few years later, my dad gave me $100 and drove me to the best record store in my hometown of Sacramento, California. (Said store is now a BevMo, but whatever, I’m not bitter.) On this occasion, I discovered what are still some of my favorite records of all time: Sonic Youth’s Dirty and Black Flag’s The First Four Years (a compilation of the tunes they had released before Henry Rollins’ joining in 1981), among others, ended up in the stack I took to the register that day. I received some puzzled looks from the employees and after almost 10 years, I can see why.

Not too much later, I set sail on the stormy voyage that was my middle school career. I entered my new school with a fascination for metal and other forms of aggressive music. I had a couple Metallica CDs and knew how to play almost every song by the progressive metal band Tool on guitar. I was doing the long hair thing, wearing skinny jeans that really didn’t fit me the right way and being as angsty as, well, a kid in middle school. It was a dark time for all of us, I’m sure. Soon enough, I made the transition into post-hardcore like a lot of my classmates did. Bands like The Fall Of Troy, Dance Gavin Dance and Circa Survive made their way onto my iPod and filled it with wretched screams and whiny shrieks.

These tunes got me through the first half of high school until I found my next obsession, which has lasted until now. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m talking about math-rock, a distinct genre that combines the sensibilities of punk rock with the complexities of jazz. Soon, Tera Melos’ Patagonian Rats, The Speed Of Sound In Seawater’s Blue Version and Red Version and Hella’s Hold Your Horse Is fell into constant rotation on my playlists.

I owe everything to what I’ve listened to over the years. Even though many of my old records now fall into the “dorky” category, I can’t deny how influential they were to me. I think many of us are ashamed of what we used to listen to, but I’ve come to learn that what I used to listen to and who I used to be are absolutely essential to the person I am now. I would advise anyone to not feel so embarrassed by the music that made them feel good five years ago, 10 years ago, or ever.

So if you see me around campus with my headphones in, I might be listening to the newest garbage-wave, post-drone, art-funk record that no one else knows about — or it might just be one of those lame records from my past, and I’m enjoying every second of it.

ARTS | 5

Monday, November 24, 2014

DYL AN SUN | MUSTANG NE WS A-CA-AWESOME

| In its concert, the a cappella group sang original renditions of music selections spanning all genres, including 1950s oldies, alternative rock, top-40 pop and the national anthem.

Key continued from pg 1.

For those in the audience who had never experienced an a cappella performance, the show was a feast (pun intended) of different styles of music and arrangements.

“A cappella is a beautiful thing because there are no instruments except for your human voice,” Lu said. “All through middle school and high school I listened to rock, but when I heard my first a cappella song I thought it was amazing that they were doing it all with their voice.”

Though some pieces — such as a mashup of Jimmy Eat World’s “Sweetness” and Paramore’s “That’s What You Get” — seemed too complicated to enjoy, the show had its bright moments.

One of the show’s highlights was a unique beatbox solo by computer science sophomore Jeremy Chen. He displayed the amazing sounds some-

one can make with a trained voice and a knack for strange noises.

“It kind of happened back in junior high when I was the one weird kid in the back making all of the funny noises and people thought it was really weird,” Chen said. “But then after a while you meet another funny kid in the back who makes a lot of weird noises and then you realize it’s beatboxing.”

Chen started honing his beatboxing talent during his junior year of high school, when he started doing talent shows and contests. Chen joined That’s the Key his freshman year at Cal Poly and became the group’s only beatboxer.

“My favorite part is being my own section,” Chen said. “There is no other beatboxer in this group so I can dictate what goes on in the beat.

So if I want to change things, then I can, so it’s a lot of freedom.”

The show started to pick up steam in its second

half with powerful renditions of “Ain’t No Sunshine,” “In the Still of the Night,” “Royals” and a stunning performance of “Chandelier” with a solo by Pestle.

After the show, geology senior and tenor Jon Woodward acknowledged all of the hard work the group — and especially Pestle — put into the performance.

“I think we did a lot in a small amount of time,” Woodward said. “Skyler, our soloist for ‘Chandelier,’ had to learn every single song when all of us knew most of them already. She really pulled it together and was one of the driving forces of our show.”

The group is gearing up for the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella (ICCA), made famous by the movie “Pitch Perfect.” This will be the third time the group has qualified for

and competed in the contest.

Preparing for the championship is different than preparing for a typical performance in a number of ways. For starters, the group is only allowed to perform three songs.

“We have to choreograph the songs and they have to be as good as we can make them,” Woodward said. “So when we practice, we only sing those three songs. We will take it more seriously, focus on intonation, making sure everyone is getting the notes right, cutting off when they should.”

Competition has been one of the group’s best learning experiences.

“It’s the adrenaline and rush of performing in a high-pressure situation,” Lu said. “Also, to get actual results as well. To know what score you got and how to improve for next year is invaluable.”

Monday, November 24, 2014

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Barack Obama: The great divider Eric Stubben @EricStubben We’ve all had times in our lives where people just get on our nerves. Sometimes we can’t put a finger on why these people rattle us. Other times, we know exactly what bothers us.

Whether it’s the kid anxiously chewing his gum behind you, or the one sitting in front of the professor, volunteering every answer, these people have a way of throwing you off.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise for anybody; the one person who has thrown me for a loop over the past week is none other than President Barack Obama. Or, as I’ve been not so affectionately referring to him as, The Great Divider.

President Obama’s actions over the past week highlight exactly what we’ve come to expect from him. He is a president who has two undesirable courses of leadership (use the word “leadership” loosely).

His first is to establish something as “broken,” then ride in on his white horse and fix it while others hail him as a savior. Whether the thing is actually broken is typically questionable (read: the 1 percent).

His second form of leadership is via executive orders while blaming others as being the reason he had to step around Congress. I almost feel guilty describing both of these courses as ones of leadership.

I realize that criticizing the president’s leadership in this way is a bold claim. Before I continue, I should explain myself.

My charges of criticism against President Obama are largely stimulated from last week’s immigration speech and executive order

announcement. However, I’m not upset with the immigration message he sent. Many of President Obama’s suggestions and points regarding immigration align right alongside conservative tenets. In fact, I noticed, and it was later noted

by USA Today, that his immigration speech largely mirrored George W. Bush’s immigration speech of 2006. Even the idea of an executive order in itself wasn’t too bothersome for me.

While I think the order is far too large to be sidestepping Congress, every president issues executive orders. In fact, the latter Bush implemented more executive orders per year than President Obama has to this point.

What’s gotten on my nerves and frustrated me the most about President Obama this past week, as well as during his entire presidency, is his hypocrisy and willingness to divide factions of Americans against each other. Whether he decides to pit Democrats against Republicans, rich against poor or whites against minorities, President Obama is always deviously working to skew things in his favor.

Take, for example, the past week’s executive order. On the campaign trail in 2008, the younger and less gray Senator Obama claimed: “The biggest problems that we’re facing right now have to do with George Bush trying to bring more and more power into the executive branch and not go through Congress at all.

And that’s what I tend to reverse when I’m President of the United States.”

That’s quite the bold claim for a man who earlier this year stated, “We are not just going to

the right angle be waiting for legislation … I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone, and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and I can take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward …”

President Obama also made sure to take verbal jabs at Republicans in his immigration speech. He criticized House Republicans for failing to vote on this summer’s Senatepassed immigration legislation. While I tend to agree that the House should hold a vote, the president needs to understand that failed leadership progress doesn’t lie solely on others. Even after swinging at current Republican Congressmen, President Obama eluded to the middle

class “getting a raw deal for over a decade.” There’s a nice, snide jab at President Bush.

I was pretty sure those jabs expired in 2010. After all, I don’t continue to blame my kindergarten teacher for the fact that I still can’t draw a straight line.

Yet throughout President Obama’s entire incumbency, we’ve seen acts of division and hypocrisy. While Democrats stood around painting Republicans as the party of the rich, President Obama and his sidekicks ran with it.

Naturally, Democrats casually neglected that in 2011, seven of the 10 wealthiest members of Congress were Democrats.

While I sometimes feel obligated to be impressed by

President Obama’s crafty tactics, I’m morally disgusted.

Our country and Constitution were founded on basic principles of compromise. I’m quick to point out that House Republicans aren’t exactly model compromisers themselves, but President Obama uses his position to continually spurn any chance of compromise while painting House Republicans as the creators of gridlock.

Great leaders are able to bring diverse groups of people together and construct great success. Poor leaders divide and demolish with the intent of achieving their goals no matter the cost. Unfortunately for us, President Obama, The Great Divider, is a prime example of a poor leader.

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Monday, November 24, 2014

SPORTS | 8

Football finishes with statement win over San Diego Stephan Teodosescu @steodosescu

One team was using the game as playoff tune-up. The other was playing for pride.

In a season of ups and downs, the Cal Poly football team made a statement on Saturday night in San Diego. And the Mustangs did so against a squad that had already clinched its postseason berth via an automatic qualifier spot.

The Mustangs (7-5) used a trio of touchdowns from junior backup quarterback Dano Graves and suffocating defense to beat non-scholarship San Diego 34-3 in their final regular season game.

“From where we were to where we are, I think we played a lot of really good football,” head coach Tim Walsh said. “To me, we’re one of the best teams in the country.”

The Toreros (9-2) entered the matchup riding an emotional high.

The Mustangs entered riding the emotional opposite.

San Diego qualified for the school’s first trip to the NCAA Division I Football Playoffs after winning the Pioneer Football League (PFL) title last weekend.

Sophomore quarterback Keith Williams threw a 44-yard Hail Mary to win the game over Valparaiso and clinch the Toreros’ inaugural playoff berth. Jacksonville finished with an identical record as San Diego in conference play but withdrew from championship contention due to players receiving improper financial aid, which gave the Toreros the playoff nod.

Interestingly enough, the Toreros suffered the same fate last season when they had to vacate their PFL championship because of scholarship inconsistencies, but they bounced back in a big way this year.

Meanwhile, Cal Poly suffered a deflating loss to the Big Sky Conference’s worst team and rival UC Davis at home last weekend. Before that, the Mustangs had a five-game

win streak snapped in a battle of a couple of the Big Sky’s top teams at Idaho State.

Those last two weeks essentially knocked Cal Poly out of playoff contention. Following those letdowns, the message from Walsh to his team was clear entering Saturday’s game.

“I think the challenge was, ‘do you want to be thought of as 6-6 team, or a 7-5 team that was probably 18 points away from being undefeated in the Big Sky?’” Walsh said.

Cal Poly had its share of problems outside of the stunner against the Aggies and the loss against the Bengals. What started as a bleak outlook to the season after five of the team’s players were arrested and charged with an alleged attempted armed robbery turned into a poor start, then a five-game win streak that spurred talk of playoff hopes and ended with tough luck in the season’s two penultimate games.

On Saturday, the Mustangs jumped out early with senior fullback Brandon Howe’s 2-yard touchdown run set up by junior quarterback Chris Brown’s scamper to the red zone.

Brown threw a 13-yard touchdown strike to junior wide receiver Jordan Hines in the second quarter before being taken out at halftime because of a leg injury.

Graves picked up right where Brown left off. He scored three touchdowns, one through the air and two on the ground in the second half.

“It feels real nice, I mean I’m running around practice going full speed because I’m 100 percent healthy and I just kind of all season felt up like a riled up dog just ready to go,” Graves said. “And finally I got my opportunity.”

San Diego scored its lone points on a 32-yard field goal late in the first quarter by David Last.

Cal Poly’s defense didn’t give up much more, as it played a more physical game than it did against

UC Davis, according to senior linebacker Nick Dzubnar. San Diego was forced to punt six times in the game.

“If you look at the way we played UC Davis, we weren’t physical, we weren’t ready and we didn’t finish,” Dzubnar said. “Obviously, coming into your last game we knew we weren’t going to the playoffs, but we knew we could leave the season off with a bang.”

Dzubnar recorded seven tackles, an interception and a forced fumble on Saturday. He also added to his school record-breaking singleseason tackle total with seven in the game.

Cal Poly accumulated 482 yards in total offense and held San Diego to 234 yards. The Mustangs now own a 4-0 record all time against the Toreros.

“We wanted to show the Pioneer League that we should have been a qualifier in our league,” Graves said.

“We’re definitely playoff quality and I think we showed that tonight.”

With an at-large playoff berth highly unlikely — the 24-team field will be announced Sunday morning — the Mustangs can take several positives away from the 2014 campaign. Cal Poly broke the school and Big Sky records for rushing yards and rushing touchdowns in a single season, an impressive feat considering its top returning slotback was involved in the robbery incident and didn’t play this season.

The Mustangs also became the only Football Championship Subdivision school to produce two 1,000-yard rushers this season, as both Brown and sophomore slotback Kori Garcia achieved the milestone. Brown is Cal Poly’s only quarterback to ever run for more than 1,000 yards.

Eastern Washington, a team Cal Poly did not play this season, earned the Big Sky Conference’s automatic playoff berth with a win over Portland State on Saturday.

IAN BILLINGS | MUSTANG NEWS FINISHING STRONG | The Cal Poly football team finished its season on a high note, taking down San Diego 34-3. The Mustangs finished the regular season with a 5-3 record in the Big Sky Conference.