This is a very long post. If you are a TLDR person I get it. Stop now.
Recently there is a consistent theme of Cal and its surrogates essentially asking Cal fans to be patient with Cal generally and specifically with Rich Lyons and Ron Rivera. I get that. I really do. However, I think there are real issues with that ask that are just not being addressed.
I'm going to address a few points from Greg's post and some others as well. I'm doing a new thread because Greg's substantive points were embedded in a thread about board etiquette and the topic really deserves its own discussion. I appreciate Greg laying out his substantive view of the situation and everyone should go read his post.
Recent signs that Cal takes football seriously:
The Regents hired Rich Lyons and part of his vetting process was based on his knowledge and ideas about athletics
Problem number one with this. And this is a running theme. UC is very opaque about their processes and frankly, everything. They did not make this public, and even if they did, I don't know what that really means. What are Lyons' ideas? What did they like about them? How much leeway are they giving him to implement them. Are they willing to cut through process to enact them faster?
Problem number two with this. And this is another running theme. There is not much trust right now on that when I hear similar themes with every change of regime that this time is different. Especially when combined with problem number 1 that there is very little transparency about what is actually being done. I acknowledge that there have been public facing steps. I will address those below.
Problem number three and third running theme. While they have been few and far between, Cal has taken positive steps before. I 100% believe that this is one of those times. And that is great. The problem is, even when Cal has made progress in the past, they are changes that would have been great 10 or 20 years earlier, but they are obsolete on arrival. I have to be honest, I suspect that is still the case.
Donations are way up and the amount of money being spent on Football relative to our peers is significantly improved.
Again no transparency on what that actually means. How much are we spending? We were very, very, very far behind our peers. I 100% believe our donations are up and significantly. I don't have confidence that Cal truly understands what our peers spent 2 years ago, 1 year ago, and today. Or that this is a constantly increasing number. In the article I posted about Indiana, they indicated that their football spend had been basically on the bottom of the Big10 and the year they hired Cignetti, their spending was higher than the median spend in the conference. Are we at or above the median spend for football for our conference? Do we know? Again, great that we are making progress, but there is no indication where we actually are. Based on the past, I'm dubious it is where we need to be.
Lyons and Rivera have big ambitions and have set a high bar and they have been explicit about that.
They have been explicit. 6 games is disappointing. Chancellor said 8 wins is good. Rivera said 8 or 9 is good. That is not a high bar. And further it is a lower bar than chancellors, AD's and coaches have talked about before. It used to consistently be conference championships. Specifically that was said when Dykes was hired. And with that bar we've gone 16 years without a winning record in conference. So I don't understand how a bar of 8 wins is supposed to excite the fan base.
Bottom line is, we've heard a lot of words without a lot of data or tangible promises. Cal fans are not in the meetings. We can only see what we can see. And Cal and its surrogates have said these things before.
But we have seen a couple of things. Mainly Knowlton retiring and Rivera being hired. And we have also seen Wilcox retained. My issue here is even those things have taken way too long and do not indicate fundamental changes that bring Cal in line with its peers. Let's do some timeline comparisons.
On September 27, Penn State was ranked 3rd in the country. On October 4, they were ranked 7th in the country. On October 12, their coach was fired. 8 days from top ten to fired.
On September 27, LSU was ranked 4th in the country. On October 26, their coach was fired. One month from top 5 to fired.
Okay, but Cal can't do that. Too much bureaucracy. Too many hoops to jump through. It just takes longer.
Well, On August 30, UCLA played their first game of the season. On September 14, their coach was fired. 2 weeks. Why is UCLA different? We live in the same bureaucracy.
Compare to the new regime at Cal.
April 11, 2024, Rich Lyons is named next chancellor. He has been on campus during the entire Cal career of Jim Knowlton and Justin Wilcox. He is an avid sports fan and so has had a front seat to their performance. He knows with Jim Knowlton he is inheriting an AD that has presided over a horrible basketball program and a bad football program. Knowlton gave a ridiculous extension to a mediocre to bad football coach. He failed in his duty of care to Cal athletes in the McKeever situation putting Cal in a very bad legal situation. I would think if sports is that important that he would be ready to hit the ground running on that.
7/1/2024 Rich Lyons starts as chancellor.
On general athletics:
There is no reason why Knowlton should have lasted beyond 8/1/2024. Picking up the phone and saying "You're fired. We'll negotiate the buyout tomorrow" takes 10 seconds. If sports was important it would have been done.
6/16/2025 Knowlton retires. 11 and a half months after Lyons started as chancellor. I'm not necessarily blaming Lyons. What I'm saying is it should have been clear to him before he started that Knowlton had to go immediately. It may have been. But either it wasn't and it took him months to figure that out or the process took 11 and a half months. Either way, if we want to be competitive, we can't take 11.5 months to fire Knowlton. See UCLA.
Other issue. He retired. I have no desire to kick the guy on the way out the door, but you can't send that message. You can say "no longer the AD". You can say "mutually agreed to part ways". You can't make it sound like his idea.
Bigger issue. No succession plan even though this should have been obvious for 11.5 months. As SFGate said Cal replaced scandal ridden AD with deputy AD's involved in all the same scandals. Announced they will be co-AD's for at least a year and that there will be a full year of transition to an undefined "new leadership structure" and since then no indication of a job search or what they are doing to replace the role.
On purely football:
11/30/2024. Wilcox finishes the regular season at 6-6. The last time he beat a winning FBS team was 2022. The last time he beat a team that finished with a winning record in a P4 conference was 2021. He has 8 losing conference records. It should be clear to Lyons that he needs to be fired. You don't wait to change your AD etc. to fire a failing football coach. Like with Knowlton, either he doesn't know Wilcox is failing or the process to fire him is too cumbersome or the money isn't there to fire him. Any of those are a big problem
March 20, 2025 Rivera named GM but Knowlton retained. Unclear for months what Rivera's role/authority is. This is all clear when Knowlton retires, although the process leaves open the possibility that Cal was dragged kicking and screaming by donor protests rather than it actually chose to push Knowlton out and give Ron the keys. Messaging matters. It should have been clear.
To be clear, it is not feasible to fire your football coach in March. Wilcox coaching in 2025 is not on Rivera. Until…
September 20, 2025, Cal gets abused by a Mountain West team in what has to be top 5 most humiliating losses in Cal football history. That Wilcox made it to September 27th is a huge problem. If you ask me to guess the number of other P4 schools that would allow a coach with Wilcox's record to have a defeat like that against a non-P4 opponent and still have his job at the end of the week, I'd truly guess zero. I'd be very confident it is fewer than 5. That absolutely can't happen. I'm sorry, from September 21 it is on the Rivera regime that Wilcox is still here. Maybe he wanted to fire him and couldn't. I don't know. But he needed to be fired after that game for us to have any credibility. Instead…
9/23/25 3 days later Rivera goes on local radio and when asked about Cal fan frustration says:
"That [Cal fan's mentality] is part of the problem. The mentality. You have to change your mind and stick to that. You can't sit there and go 'Oh, everything's great, it's wonderful and then something bad happens and you go the other way. You have to continue to believe and if you don't believe, get out of it. Okay. Get out of it. And that's the thing everyone has to understand."
I'm sorry. You can't say that. No one thought everything was great and you cannot blame Cal fans for questioning the program after SDSU. You can't tell them they just have to believe at that point.
Further troubling is the idea being expressed, including by Rivera, that we need to see if Wilcox can succeed if given better administrative support. I'm sorry. You don't need to "be fair" to coaches. Indiana knows they didn't give the prior coach enough support. They fired him anyway because they needed a whole new start. Tough luck. We don't need to prove Wilcox is a bad coach. The results weren't there.
And one last point from Greg to counter:
I would say that in December 2024 the only thing that mattered is how capable the coaching staff and how talented the Cal football team would be in 2025. We are where we are in 2025 because of 2024. And that is what matters here. Failing to take action in 2024 is the issue and the Lyons regime had plenty of time to do that.
It seems like at every other school, the chancellor can say "Hey, coach. Your tie is ugly today. You're fired. We'll negotiate the buyout tomorrow" It seems like at Cal the chancellor can say "Hey coach. You've been caught red handed as a serial killer. We are going to do an 18 month investigation, and you might be fired then. Just so you know."
To sum up, have we improved? I absolutely believe we have. But it doesn't look like enough. We can't judge just by being better than Cal. Nearly a year for this regime to take action on a horrible AD and what appears to be 2 seasons for this regime to take action on a failed football coach isn't good enough even if it is better than Christ or Dirks. I don't know if it is the chancellor or Rivera or the process, but it just can't take this long or be this difficult when our competitors can do this stuff in days. And you just can't ask fans to be this patient when they see what our peers can do. It is just taking too long, not because I'm impatient, but because we can't compete if these things take this long to enact.
Recently there is a consistent theme of Cal and its surrogates essentially asking Cal fans to be patient with Cal generally and specifically with Rich Lyons and Ron Rivera. I get that. I really do. However, I think there are real issues with that ask that are just not being addressed.
I'm going to address a few points from Greg's post and some others as well. I'm doing a new thread because Greg's substantive points were embedded in a thread about board etiquette and the topic really deserves its own discussion. I appreciate Greg laying out his substantive view of the situation and everyone should go read his post.
Recent signs that Cal takes football seriously:
The Regents hired Rich Lyons and part of his vetting process was based on his knowledge and ideas about athletics
Problem number one with this. And this is a running theme. UC is very opaque about their processes and frankly, everything. They did not make this public, and even if they did, I don't know what that really means. What are Lyons' ideas? What did they like about them? How much leeway are they giving him to implement them. Are they willing to cut through process to enact them faster?
Problem number two with this. And this is another running theme. There is not much trust right now on that when I hear similar themes with every change of regime that this time is different. Especially when combined with problem number 1 that there is very little transparency about what is actually being done. I acknowledge that there have been public facing steps. I will address those below.
Problem number three and third running theme. While they have been few and far between, Cal has taken positive steps before. I 100% believe that this is one of those times. And that is great. The problem is, even when Cal has made progress in the past, they are changes that would have been great 10 or 20 years earlier, but they are obsolete on arrival. I have to be honest, I suspect that is still the case.
Donations are way up and the amount of money being spent on Football relative to our peers is significantly improved.
Again no transparency on what that actually means. How much are we spending? We were very, very, very far behind our peers. I 100% believe our donations are up and significantly. I don't have confidence that Cal truly understands what our peers spent 2 years ago, 1 year ago, and today. Or that this is a constantly increasing number. In the article I posted about Indiana, they indicated that their football spend had been basically on the bottom of the Big10 and the year they hired Cignetti, their spending was higher than the median spend in the conference. Are we at or above the median spend for football for our conference? Do we know? Again, great that we are making progress, but there is no indication where we actually are. Based on the past, I'm dubious it is where we need to be.
Lyons and Rivera have big ambitions and have set a high bar and they have been explicit about that.
They have been explicit. 6 games is disappointing. Chancellor said 8 wins is good. Rivera said 8 or 9 is good. That is not a high bar. And further it is a lower bar than chancellors, AD's and coaches have talked about before. It used to consistently be conference championships. Specifically that was said when Dykes was hired. And with that bar we've gone 16 years without a winning record in conference. So I don't understand how a bar of 8 wins is supposed to excite the fan base.
Bottom line is, we've heard a lot of words without a lot of data or tangible promises. Cal fans are not in the meetings. We can only see what we can see. And Cal and its surrogates have said these things before.
But we have seen a couple of things. Mainly Knowlton retiring and Rivera being hired. And we have also seen Wilcox retained. My issue here is even those things have taken way too long and do not indicate fundamental changes that bring Cal in line with its peers. Let's do some timeline comparisons.
On September 27, Penn State was ranked 3rd in the country. On October 4, they were ranked 7th in the country. On October 12, their coach was fired. 8 days from top ten to fired.
On September 27, LSU was ranked 4th in the country. On October 26, their coach was fired. One month from top 5 to fired.
Okay, but Cal can't do that. Too much bureaucracy. Too many hoops to jump through. It just takes longer.
Well, On August 30, UCLA played their first game of the season. On September 14, their coach was fired. 2 weeks. Why is UCLA different? We live in the same bureaucracy.
Compare to the new regime at Cal.
April 11, 2024, Rich Lyons is named next chancellor. He has been on campus during the entire Cal career of Jim Knowlton and Justin Wilcox. He is an avid sports fan and so has had a front seat to their performance. He knows with Jim Knowlton he is inheriting an AD that has presided over a horrible basketball program and a bad football program. Knowlton gave a ridiculous extension to a mediocre to bad football coach. He failed in his duty of care to Cal athletes in the McKeever situation putting Cal in a very bad legal situation. I would think if sports is that important that he would be ready to hit the ground running on that.
7/1/2024 Rich Lyons starts as chancellor.
On general athletics:
There is no reason why Knowlton should have lasted beyond 8/1/2024. Picking up the phone and saying "You're fired. We'll negotiate the buyout tomorrow" takes 10 seconds. If sports was important it would have been done.
6/16/2025 Knowlton retires. 11 and a half months after Lyons started as chancellor. I'm not necessarily blaming Lyons. What I'm saying is it should have been clear to him before he started that Knowlton had to go immediately. It may have been. But either it wasn't and it took him months to figure that out or the process took 11 and a half months. Either way, if we want to be competitive, we can't take 11.5 months to fire Knowlton. See UCLA.
Other issue. He retired. I have no desire to kick the guy on the way out the door, but you can't send that message. You can say "no longer the AD". You can say "mutually agreed to part ways". You can't make it sound like his idea.
Bigger issue. No succession plan even though this should have been obvious for 11.5 months. As SFGate said Cal replaced scandal ridden AD with deputy AD's involved in all the same scandals. Announced they will be co-AD's for at least a year and that there will be a full year of transition to an undefined "new leadership structure" and since then no indication of a job search or what they are doing to replace the role.
On purely football:
11/30/2024. Wilcox finishes the regular season at 6-6. The last time he beat a winning FBS team was 2022. The last time he beat a team that finished with a winning record in a P4 conference was 2021. He has 8 losing conference records. It should be clear to Lyons that he needs to be fired. You don't wait to change your AD etc. to fire a failing football coach. Like with Knowlton, either he doesn't know Wilcox is failing or the process to fire him is too cumbersome or the money isn't there to fire him. Any of those are a big problem
March 20, 2025 Rivera named GM but Knowlton retained. Unclear for months what Rivera's role/authority is. This is all clear when Knowlton retires, although the process leaves open the possibility that Cal was dragged kicking and screaming by donor protests rather than it actually chose to push Knowlton out and give Ron the keys. Messaging matters. It should have been clear.
To be clear, it is not feasible to fire your football coach in March. Wilcox coaching in 2025 is not on Rivera. Until…
September 20, 2025, Cal gets abused by a Mountain West team in what has to be top 5 most humiliating losses in Cal football history. That Wilcox made it to September 27th is a huge problem. If you ask me to guess the number of other P4 schools that would allow a coach with Wilcox's record to have a defeat like that against a non-P4 opponent and still have his job at the end of the week, I'd truly guess zero. I'd be very confident it is fewer than 5. That absolutely can't happen. I'm sorry, from September 21 it is on the Rivera regime that Wilcox is still here. Maybe he wanted to fire him and couldn't. I don't know. But he needed to be fired after that game for us to have any credibility. Instead…
9/23/25 3 days later Rivera goes on local radio and when asked about Cal fan frustration says:
"That [Cal fan's mentality] is part of the problem. The mentality. You have to change your mind and stick to that. You can't sit there and go 'Oh, everything's great, it's wonderful and then something bad happens and you go the other way. You have to continue to believe and if you don't believe, get out of it. Okay. Get out of it. And that's the thing everyone has to understand."
I'm sorry. You can't say that. No one thought everything was great and you cannot blame Cal fans for questioning the program after SDSU. You can't tell them they just have to believe at that point.
Further troubling is the idea being expressed, including by Rivera, that we need to see if Wilcox can succeed if given better administrative support. I'm sorry. You don't need to "be fair" to coaches. Indiana knows they didn't give the prior coach enough support. They fired him anyway because they needed a whole new start. Tough luck. We don't need to prove Wilcox is a bad coach. The results weren't there.
And one last point from Greg to counter:
Quote:
BUT. HERE"S THE REALITY - The ONLY THING that really matters is how capable is the coaching staff and how talented is the roster of the Cal Football Team in 2026. That's it. The rest is just noise. Sure, you can have some PR and marketing wins or losses between now and knowing whether the above is true, but it's ephemeral and in the end insignificant.
I would say that in December 2024 the only thing that mattered is how capable the coaching staff and how talented the Cal football team would be in 2025. We are where we are in 2025 because of 2024. And that is what matters here. Failing to take action in 2024 is the issue and the Lyons regime had plenty of time to do that.
It seems like at every other school, the chancellor can say "Hey, coach. Your tie is ugly today. You're fired. We'll negotiate the buyout tomorrow" It seems like at Cal the chancellor can say "Hey coach. You've been caught red handed as a serial killer. We are going to do an 18 month investigation, and you might be fired then. Just so you know."
To sum up, have we improved? I absolutely believe we have. But it doesn't look like enough. We can't judge just by being better than Cal. Nearly a year for this regime to take action on a horrible AD and what appears to be 2 seasons for this regime to take action on a failed football coach isn't good enough even if it is better than Christ or Dirks. I don't know if it is the chancellor or Rivera or the process, but it just can't take this long or be this difficult when our competitors can do this stuff in days. And you just can't ask fans to be this patient when they see what our peers can do. It is just taking too long, not because I'm impatient, but because we can't compete if these things take this long to enact.