concordtom said:
BearlyCareAnymore said:
concordtom said:
It's so funny to me.
To all those who want to fire Wilcox, what makes you think that the next coach is going to produce more wins?
And, just how many wins do you need each season in order to stop calling for (whatever coach) to be fired?
Just come out and say it:
"I must win X games in order to be satisfied with Cal football.
Otherwise, I'm going to kick the cat, spit at the garbageman, and log in to BearInsider and complain."
It's so funny to me.
To all one of you who want to keep Wilcox, what makes you think that keeping him is going to produce more wins?
And, just how many losses do you need each season in order to stop supporting a coach? How years without a winning record in conference?
Just come out and say it:
"He must lose X games in order to be un satisfied with Cal football. He must go X years without a winning record.
Otherwise, I'm going to sit here counting pink fluffy unicorns and be perfectly blissful spending 8 figures every year on this program and keep chastising others for not being zen about total failure.
You asked the other side. Now you answer. How bad does it have to get before we fire him? How low are your standards. We all know you wanted to get people to commit to unreasonable standards here. What are your unreasonably low standards. Because if you haven't got there yet, they are unreasonably low.
I miss the tailgates, throwing the football around with family in the parking lot.
That's been replaced by untold THOUSANDS (untold zero placeholders) of dollars my family pays to sit in the most primo of seats, which include endless free food and liquor upstairs - for games that nobody attends because they all start at 7:30pm.
The older family members can't go because it's too late and cold.
The youngest family members can't go because it's also past their bedtimes.
But for me, yeah, I'd be equally happy to start an Ivy West conference. Are the stands full for Yale vs Harvard? Are they having fun????
Do you think Cal could find a cure for cancer with all the money spent on Entertainment?
Here, with the help of my "assistant" I've crafted the following for folks to think about:
In "Amusing Ourselves to Death", Neil Postman warns that when entertainment dominates the medium of public discourse, serious matters lose depth and are transformed into spectacle.
Politics, once grounded in reasoned debate, has increasingly become a stage for theatrics and soundbitesa chase for attention, ratings, and fundraising.
College football has undergone a similar evolution: what began as an extracurricular activity aimed at building character and camaraderie has morphed into a high-stakes spectacle, driven by winning, national broadcasts, and multimillion-dollar revenue, often overshadowing the educational mission of the university.
Signed,
120 years of family at UCB.
Here's the thing, Tom. None of that has anything to do with what you said. So your real issue isn't the demand for wins. It is the loss of the olden days and it is people willing to chuck whatever amounts of money at this proposition that you find less important than a lot of things we could be doing. Like curing cancer.
As an aside to you, at risk of much criticism, I am sympathetic to a lot of that argument. I've always felt like college revenue sports (and let's not kid ourselves it has been a big money grab for our entire lives) is a bizarre marriage. It doesn't seem like it should be a business that institutions of higher learning should be in. But they are. Now, I've been loud on this board saying that people are living in a fantasy land not realizing just how far behind our competitors, not tOSU, but Duke, on the spending front. That with the university spending $60M a year just on operating losses on athletics, the community needs to step up and through private funds make up the difference between us and our reasonable competitors or the community has spoken about the value the program has to them. They can't just keep asking the university to pay bigger and bigger bills for their hobby. (I can't go into a Porsche dealer and scream because I want a $150K Porsche and I want to pay $30K for it. I go buy a Subaru).
So if you want to argue that society's spending on this endeavor is ridiculous, or Cal's spending is ridiculous, that is a different discussion. One that is frankly weird to have on a football board, but be my guest. If you 1. didn't choose to chastise people with "shame", because there is no shame in having a different opinion, and 2. asked how much money are you willing to spend instead of how many wins is enough, I'd have no issue with you. But what you just said above has nothing to do with what you said before.
Now in terms of what you say here, I get it. I miss a lot of that too. I am old enough that I didn't just play catch with my father in the parking lot. We played catch on the field after the game, which was a thrill for a little kid. I miss that games always started at 1:00 and were on TV or not. And you got annoyed when it was on TV because TV timeouts slowed down the game. I missed the limited ads. I miss the focus on the band. I miss the family section and kids meeting up and walking all around the stadium unimpeded. Yes, college football has become maximizing every dollar rather than the enjoyment (which is why I think people are naive about how realignment is going to go). This is frankly a microcosm of society where everything is that way. Buildings are ugly because making them pretty might cost a few bucks more. I get it Tom. I really do.
But you know what. When I was catching passes on the field at Memorial you know what everyone was talking about? Firing that moron Theder for a record that was on par with Wilcox. And that was when USC, UCLA, and Washington were spending us into oblivion. And we fired him in 4 years. No Cal coach has lasted as long as Wilcox with such a bad record. You have shamed everyone for wanting what contingents of Cal fans have always wanted even in the days you are nostalgic for.
You pushed everyone to name a win standard, but when pushed back you won't name a loss standard. You redirected the argument to a nostalgic argument about the good old days.
I get that argument. I went to a Cal women's basketball game and very much enjoyed it because it reminded me of my days at Harmon where they didn't spend the entire time turning me over and shaking the money out of my pockets. You want to make that argument. Make it. I think there is a distinct possibility that if Cal got out of the rat race, they would spend less money, make less money and have smaller but happier crowds.
But that is all beside the point which is no one should be ashamed to demand better results than Wilcox has provided. And going back to that discussion, which you started, your shaming people was ridiculous. A lot of people here agree with you on the nostalgia front. But they don't have a nostalgia for losing. If you posted "I miss the good old days when..." you would have gotten a lot of likes. You didn't post that. You posted "shame on you for wanting to win more".
