Wilner's article today on Cal and Furd:

Wake Forest 98
Cal and Furd 10

Atleast we lead the Nation in a category...

Most total penalties.
Most penalty yards.

LarsBear74 said:

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Golden One said:

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TandemBear said:

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Please stop making excuses. Injuries. New coordinators. Timing. Bye week. New coach. First-string players. Road game. Too little playing time. Early start.

What excuses did I miss?

fUCLA is showing us how it SHOULD be done.

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Amen, brother! Cal fans have used every excuse in the books for decades, and it's all BS. The fact is that we have a horrible coaching staff from the head coach on down, and have for years. The drive and motivation to have a top tier team is just not there. We, as a university community, are just too comfortable with a bottom dwelling football program, and we always find a rationale to justify it. Frankly, we deserve relegation. We will never be able to be competitive with legitimate P4 programs. I'm not happy to admit this, but after 66 years of being a fan of Cal football and season ticket holder, I've come to accept the obvious.

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I'm at 58 years and agree with your take, sadly. Never seems to get any better

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Wow...took Golden One 66 years and you at 58. I feel so much better now with only 51 years. Thank you.

HearstMining said:

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calumnus said:

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sycasey said:

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01Bear said:

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Golden One said:

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TandemBear said:

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Please stop making excuses. Injuries. New coordinators. Timing. Bye week. New coach. First-string players. Road game. Too little playing time. Early start.

What excuses did I miss?

fUCLA is showing us how it SHOULD be done.

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Amen, brother! Cal fans have used every excuse in the books for decades, and it's all BS. The fact is that we have a horrible coaching staff from the head coach on down, and have for years. The drive and motivation to have a top tier team is just not there. We, as a university community, are just too comfortable with a bottom dwelling football program, and we always find a rationale to justify it. Frankly, we deserve relegation. We will never be able to be competitive with legitimate P4 programs. I'm not happy to admit this, but after 66 years of being a fan of Cal football and season ticket holder, I've come to accept the obvious.

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I agree with your remarks about the BS excuses an the horrible coaching staff. I disagree about the drive and motivation to be a top tier team. We were told the whale donors lined up to make the Tosh hire happen. So that does show that there's hope the whale donors want to see Cal actually be a good program. The problem is they let their own hubris get in the way of the goal. Rather than donating and letting real college football people handle the hiring, they brought in RL an RR and on top of that, they kept insisting on Tosh.

The whales may be titans of the financial world, but they've proven they know jack all about college football. But their egos have now forced Cal to be stuck with someone whose greatest skill is irrelevant in the NIL era and whose weaknesses have and always will be significant liabilities for a head football coach.

Cal fans don't deserve to see Cal football relegated. Cal fans deserve to see a real winning football coach take over the program. The problem is that the powers that be have their heads too far up their own bungholes. Rather than bringing in real college football minds, they brought in a NFL retread HC with no college football experience (aside from his playing days) and the Chancellor. Great job! /sarcasm

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Part of the problem here is that Cal did not put "real college football people" in place of their own accord. Cal had Jim Knowlton running the show. As such, the donors kind of had to take matters into their own hands and start picking their own people.

I liked that change and would rather have those folks doing the hiring than a guy like Knowlton. But long-term, yeah, you need an actual healthy program where people care about winning from the top down and it's not just donors calling the shots. Cal (let's be honest) was starting from a pretty poor position in that regard.

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We keep blowing our chances to become a big time program, a program that, with Stanford, could rejoin USC, UCLA, UW and Oregon as a West Coast pod of the B1G. At least we are free of Knowlton, Christ and Wilcox. However, the move to Lyons, keeping Jenny and Jay, bringing in Rivera and Tosh is a huge disappointment, because it is far short of what we might have done and need to do.

However, I agree with the OP, the sky is not falling. While we will most likely miss out on the next realignment if it happens soon, the reality is that the conference we are in, the ACC, has a media contract with ESPN through 2036. So we are "safe" for 10 years.

The ACC is a good conference and our media share increases to full membership. Even if some schools pay to bolt to the SEC or B1G, the ACC will survive as a conference. Schools can he added. We need to improve our program, but we should not panic. We should cut expenses by parking most of the non-revenue sports in the Big West. Tosh will almost certainly get a year two, but we should not be afraid to cut bait. What we cannot do ever again is extend a coach who is finishing in the bottom half of the conference. Our goal, over the next 8 to 10 years has to be to compete for ACC Championships and CFP berths.

Maybe Tosh ends up working out? I have my doubts, but that would he great. The key for us is getting everything else (administration, marketing) straight so that if we have to make another hire, we have the people in place to get it right the next time.

Getting rid of Jenny and Jay would be a start. I would still like to see Cal outsource the revenue sports to a broadbased alumni run organization. Whales might be major shareholders, but all shareholders would get a vote, and most importantly, a voice, and votes would be public, with public debate. It would be a better mechanism for paying the players without them being university employees.

However, the main point is, I agree with the OP, the sky is not falling. We have time, but the sooner we start making smart decisions, the better.

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I liked your idea better before we saw what happens when we let the "whales" have major input into the football HC hiring process. They may be good at their professions, but they've demonstrated they don't know how to select a successful college football head coach. No matter how broadbased the alumni-run organization was, the people with the most shares would call the shots, and that would be the whales.

In addition, consider the following scenario: the four top teams in the ACC bolt for the SEC or B1G. Sure, the conference can backfill, but if I'm ESPN, I'd demand a discount because the value of the product has decreased substantially. In short, I'll be amazed of Cal ever receives the full media payment as it exists now.

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The ACC has a contract with ESPN. They aren't getting out of that, especially if they help induce a team to go to the SEC, where they also have a contract.

sycasey said:

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01Bear said:

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Golden One said:

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TandemBear said:

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Please stop making excuses. Injuries. New coordinators. Timing. Bye week. New coach. First-string players. Road game. Too little playing time. Early start.

What excuses did I miss?

fUCLA is showing us how it SHOULD be done.

---

Amen, brother! Cal fans have used every excuse in the books for decades, and it's all BS. The fact is that we have a horrible coaching staff from the head coach on down, and have for years. The drive and motivation to have a top tier team is just not there. We, as a university community, are just too comfortable with a bottom dwelling football program, and we always find a rationale to justify it. Frankly, we deserve relegation. We will never be able to be competitive with legitimate P4 programs. I'm not happy to admit this, but after 66 years of being a fan of Cal football and season ticket holder, I've come to accept the obvious.

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I agree with your remarks about the BS excuses an the horrible coaching staff. I disagree about the drive and motivation to be a top tier team. We were told the whale donors lined up to make the Tosh hire happen. So that does show that there's hope the whale donors want to see Cal actually be a good program. The problem is they let their own hubris get in the way of the goal. Rather than donating and letting real college football people handle the hiring, they brought in RL an RR and on top of that, they kept insisting on Tosh.

The whales may be titans of the financial world, but they've proven they know jack all about college football. But their egos have now forced Cal to be stuck with someone whose greatest skill is irrelevant in the NIL era and whose weaknesses have and always will be significant liabilities for a head football coach.

Cal fans don't deserve to see Cal football relegated. Cal fans deserve to see a real winning football coach take over the program. The problem is that the powers that be have their heads too far up their own bungholes. Rather than bringing in real college football minds, they brought in a NFL retread HC with no college football experience (aside from his playing days) and the Chancellor. Great job! /sarcasm

---

Part of the problem here is that Cal did not put "real college football people" in place of their own accord. Cal had Jim Knowlton running the show. As such, the donors kind of had to take matters into their own hands and start picking their own people.

I liked that change and would rather have those folks doing the hiring than a guy like Knowlton. But long-term, yeah, you need an actual healthy program where people care about winning from the top down and it's not just donors calling the shots. Cal (let's be honest) was starting from a pretty poor position in that regard.

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It's less complicated than it might look, IMO. The chancellor doesn't have to (and shouldn't) micromanage the athletic department. The chancellor's task wrt athletics is to appoint a really good AD who has both the know-how to recommend the right coaches for each team and the relating-to-whales skills needed to raise $$$ and to sell both the whales and the chancellor on things that require a lot of money like coach hiring and firing and big-ticket infrastructure needs.

Cal hasn't gotten that done, and also unfortunately seems to have mucked up the athletic director position by taking football away from the AD, resulting in a situation where no top-notch candidate would want the job because it has no authority over the highest profile sport. Even that part of the situation is still fixable -- by promising an elite candidate that they would have full authority notwithstanding Rivera's presence -- but it's fair to doubt whether the university will fix it.

DoubtfulBear said:

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calumnus said:

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sycasey said:

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01Bear said:

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Golden One said:

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TandemBear said:

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Please stop making excuses. Injuries. New coordinators. Timing. Bye week. New coach. First-string players. Road game. Too little playing time. Early start.

What excuses did I miss?

fUCLA is showing us how it SHOULD be done.

---

Amen, brother! Cal fans have used every excuse in the books for decades, and it's all BS. The fact is that we have a horrible coaching staff from the head coach on down, and have for years. The drive and motivation to have a top tier team is just not there. We, as a university community, are just too comfortable with a bottom dwelling football program, and we always find a rationale to justify it. Frankly, we deserve relegation. We will never be able to be competitive with legitimate P4 programs. I'm not happy to admit this, but after 66 years of being a fan of Cal football and season ticket holder, I've come to accept the obvious.

---

I agree with your remarks about the BS excuses an the horrible coaching staff. I disagree about the drive and motivation to be a top tier team. We were told the whale donors lined up to make the Tosh hire happen. So that does show that there's hope the whale donors want to see Cal actually be a good program. The problem is they let their own hubris get in the way of the goal. Rather than donating and letting real college football people handle the hiring, they brought in RL an RR and on top of that, they kept insisting on Tosh.

The whales may be titans of the financial world, but they've proven they know jack all about college football. But their egos have now forced Cal to be stuck with someone whose greatest skill is irrelevant in the NIL era and whose weaknesses have and always will be significant liabilities for a head football coach.

Cal fans don't deserve to see Cal football relegated. Cal fans deserve to see a real winning football coach take over the program. The problem is that the powers that be have their heads too far up their own bungholes. Rather than bringing in real college football minds, they brought in a NFL retread HC with no college football experience (aside from his playing days) and the Chancellor. Great job! /sarcasm

---

Part of the problem here is that Cal did not put "real college football people" in place of their own accord. Cal had Jim Knowlton running the show. As such, the donors kind of had to take matters into their own hands and start picking their own people.

I liked that change and would rather have those folks doing the hiring than a guy like Knowlton. But long-term, yeah, you need an actual healthy program where people care about winning from the top down and it's not just donors calling the shots. Cal (let's be honest) was starting from a pretty poor position in that regard.

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However, the main point is, I agree with the OP, the sky is not falling. We have time, but the sooner we start making smart decisions, the better.

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The sky is not falling because it has already fallen. At this point the goal posts have moved from having a good shot of getting into the B1G to coping about being in the ACC. Albeit one with less viewers and less media money after the top program leave for P2.

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Unless there is some major reorg of college football, we still have a shot a joining the B1G when the ACC media rights expire in 2036. That is ten years from now. In the meantime our media revenues will increase every year. The ACC is improving. Miami was in the National Championship Game and is currently #1. We have 4 teams getting votes and none are the three that keep talking about leaving. We just need to adjust to potentially being in the ACC long term and start challenging Miami, Wake Forest, SMU and Virginia Tech for the ACC Championship and CFP berth. It is no coincidence that the top of the ACC Standings and offensive rankings are:
1. Miami #1
2. SMU #4
3. Wake Forest #3
4. Virginia Tech #5
5. Louisville #2
The top five ACC teams have the top five ACC offenses and are coached by 5 guys who came up as OCs.

Holmoe, Wilcox and Lupoi were just teally bad hires. Obviously Lupoi still could, but he was not a good bet. My hope was that his aggressiveness, his Madden playing, would give him enough of the "be aggressive, creative and score points" mindset that was missing from Holmoe and Wilcox (who even forced out the one OC who had it midseason). My fear is that, like the 14 years we churned through 9 OCs trying to prop up Holmoe and Wilcox, thinking "If he only had a good OC" we fall into the same trap with Tosh.

Tosh had a $10 million assistants budget. $2-3 million needed to be spent on getting a great, proven OC even if he hired his friends as understudies. There are guys that are great OCs, but not great HC material or are looking to step back from that (see Chip Kelly at Nortwestern).