mbBear said:
bearsandgiants said:
We used to be really good at the sports that don't matter. Now we're barely good in anything. AD needs to go. Fox needs to go. And now the football is "well endowed," donation money should be used for stepping up the hires of every other sport.
Men's swimming finished 2nd in the NCAA's...Women finished 4th. Women's gymnastics, 5th ranked, just recorded the 2nd best team score in school history, won their regional, heading to the finals. Men's Water Polo finished 4th....
I won't list the AD accomplishments again...okay, except he worked his ass off to get the grad program...that counts for a lot so worth repeating.
I agree. Overall JK is a solid hire. BB is a notable exception but I think we also need to understand that he was new to the job, it was an extraordinarily bad situation he was handed and really his predecessor is to blame.
But what JK does need to do is be planning on "what next". It seems highly doubtful that the Mark Fox experiment is going to work out. Feels like we are in the Dick Kutchen era - a hire that probably made some sense on paper but which, when confronted with the realities of the Pac12 (see below) were going to be a real problem for Fox.
To me I keep coming back to Pasternick. His record at UCSB is pretty solid. We know he wants the Cal job. There are pretty solid rumors that there are well heeled alumns in his corner and that part of that support could be the practice facility. It seems, honestly, a no brainer to pull that trigger and bring him on board. Worst case? He doesn't work, you move on, but now with a dedicated practice facility either paid for or built.
I would also be fine with Dennis or Travis or (I know I am a voice of one) Turner. But Mark Fox is a square peg in a round hole.
Footnote: SCT's take on the Pac12
The structural problem for Cal is that it competes in a league which isn't that RPI/Metric strong (because we just don't have a good track record of performing well in December and it is hard to get good schools to come West of the Mississippi to play us so pac12 is traveling - hurts the conference's metrics) BUT which has 3 schools (and perhaps 4) with strong structural advantages which make it, all things being equal, hard to top: UCLA, Zona and Oregon. If people really need to have it laid out for them (and some Cal fans are delusional so I get why) it is not a reach to predict, absent any other knowledge than team names, that those schools will finish above Cal in the standings.
That leaves a VERY small margin for error. To get to the dance you really need to finish no worse than 4th, Just very rare that the conference is getting 5 invites and if they do then they are in the dreading seeds of death which in the pod system creates high hurdles to overcome.
Now can Cal break into the top 3? Sure. It has in the past. But usually in era's where there were strange things going on at the big 3 that caused them to slip: Lute's retirement, bad hiring decisions at Westwood, the Ernie Kent era. And it isn't like we don't have another tier of schools striving for that 4th slot (USC, FUrd, Washington, ASU, possibly now Tinkle and OSU).
