ncbears said:

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Richard_Lee said:

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Cal8285 said:

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It doesn't seem so obvious to me that JP is better than MM. I would take MM over JP…

I absolutely hated the Jones and Fox hires, they were both horrific.

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Agree on the above. Wyking Jones was an absolute zero in terms of a hire. That was easy to see. That hire made me want to throw up. And he took Cal basketball down into the toilet.

Mark Fox was also a zero when he got hired, but then Fox went out and proved everyone wrong. That is, Fox actually turned out to be LESS THAN ZERO. Fox took us out of Wyking's toilet and onto the street corner, hooked on hard drugs and getting bent over and violated on a nightly basis by strangers

Less Than Zero. Just like Bret Easton Ellis imagined.

Thank you, Mark Fox. I have felt nothing but shame, embarrassment, guilt, and low self-esteem for the past 4 years whenever Cal basketball crosses my mind or the screen of my TV or phone.

I also agree on the preference for Mark Madsen over Ben Braun's old 4th string assistant videotape indexing manager. I'm not a fan of the audio-visual squad guy. Never have been. Even before he kicked Jorge Gutierrez, my all-time favorite Cal basketball player, my impression of Joe was "meh." After that, and after observing Joe's attitude and non-apology, my impression was "go *****yourself."

When it comes to leadership and program building, being a high character guy and role model counts for something. Mark Madsen, even though the thought of Mark, in his Stanford uniform, destroying our Cal teams led by Sean Lampley back at the Oakland Coliseum / Arena, remains a huge turnoff, has always played and carried himself as a model human being. I wanted to dislike him when he played for Stanford, but I couldn't. It was much easier to dislike mouthy guys like Brevin Knight and Casey Jacobsen or really ugly guys like Matt Lottich.

Coaches have to recruit to parents as well as the high school players. Madsen can do that.

i would have preferred Shantay Legans or Amir Abdur-Rahim over Madsen, but I'll take Madsen anyday of the week over someone I can't stand.

Madsen actually makes me kind of excited about Cal basketball again! It's been a long time. I had almost given up.

In fact, I was feeling pretty refreshed and almost able to move on with my life, having given up on all our former hopes and dreams. I could focus on positive things in life…i.e., anything other than Cal basketball. Happy happy joy joy!

Now, I'm back to feeling like a traumatized, delusional girlfriend who keeps getting cheated on, disappointed by, and lied to by her loser boyfriend. But now, the loser boyfriend has a new job, suddenly cleaned up his appearance, smiles a lot more, converted to being a Mormon, and revealed himself to have played in the NBA for a decade alongside my 2 of the greatest players of all time, Kobe and Shaq.

Deep down, I know it's just a con. I know the loser is just going to disappoint us in the future again and break all our hearts. This time in the future, we might not be able to put ourselves back together after the inevitable wreckage. We will never love again. We will never be whole. We will always have a void inside that is impossible to fill.

But whatever! Mark Madsen brings positive energy, an NBA career, a Pac 12 star pedigree as the leader of Stanford's Final Four team, and an infectious enthusiasm. So I'm willing to once again completely ignore the plethora of red flags that continue to inundate the Cal Athletic Department and Cal basketball program.

So I'm coming back for one more cycle of abuse. Whoo hoo! Bring it on! LOL

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Surprised that Richard Lee is so forgiving of Legans for leaving Cal - although leaving for Fresno is not leaving for Oregon. (I don't recall his viewpoint at the time)

Oh, and welcome back Mr. Lee

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Legans left to play for his mentor who had just gotten the Fresno job with intent to go into coaching himself to also make a difference in young men's lives. He has always said he is a Bear at heart and even though the coaching part worked out he has said leaving Cal was a mistake.

Madsen also has said he always wanted to go into coaching. Pasternack too, he even went to Indiana for undergrad just so he could be Bobby Knight's student manager. His first paid coaching job was at Cal working for Braun. I agree with Richard, Pasternack always rubbed me the wrong way (though so did Coach K) but I could see him succeeding in the new era. He would push Cal donors to FULLY compete in the NIL to the boundaries other are (ie actual pay to play, not staying to the letter of the law or other payments for Name, Image and Likeness).

I see Madsen at Cal as being a lot like Ted Lasso, a good coach, good person, smart, relentlessly positive, nerdy, not-worldly, naive, not really understanding the situation he is getting into…. He will either fail miserably or be a great success, maybe both, but at least it will be entertaining to watch and he is someone to root for.

calumnus said:

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ncbears said:

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Richard_Lee said:

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Cal8285 said:

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It doesn't seem so obvious to me that JP is better than MM. I would take MM over JP…

I absolutely hated the Jones and Fox hires, they were both horrific.

---

Agree on the above. Wyking Jones was an absolute zero in terms of a hire. That was easy to see. That hire made me want to throw up. And he took Cal basketball down into the toilet.

Mark Fox was also a zero when he got hired, but then Fox went out and proved everyone wrong. That is, Fox actually turned out to be LESS THAN ZERO. Fox took us out of Wyking's toilet and onto the street corner, hooked on hard drugs and getting bent over and violated on a nightly basis by strangers

Less Than Zero. Just like Bret Easton Ellis imagined.

Thank you, Mark Fox. I have felt nothing but shame, embarrassment, guilt, and low self-esteem for the past 4 years whenever Cal basketball crosses my mind or the screen of my TV or phone.

I also agree on the preference for Mark Madsen over Ben Braun's old 4th string assistant videotape indexing manager. I'm not a fan of the audio-visual squad guy. Never have been. Even before he kicked Jorge Gutierrez, my all-time favorite Cal basketball player, my impression of Joe was "meh." After that, and after observing Joe's attitude and non-apology, my impression was "go *****yourself."

When it comes to leadership and program building, being a high character guy and role model counts for something. Mark Madsen, even though the thought of Mark, in his Stanford uniform, destroying our Cal teams led by Sean Lampley back at the Oakland Coliseum / Arena, remains a huge turnoff, has always played and carried himself as a model human being. I wanted to dislike him when he played for Stanford, but I couldn't. It was much easier to dislike mouthy guys like Brevin Knight and Casey Jacobsen or really ugly guys like Matt Lottich.

Coaches have to recruit to parents as well as the high school players. Madsen can do that.

i would have preferred Shantay Legans or Amir Abdur-Rahim over Madsen, but I'll take Madsen anyday of the week over someone I can't stand.

Madsen actually makes me kind of excited about Cal basketball again! It's been a long time. I had almost given up.

In fact, I was feeling pretty refreshed and almost able to move on with my life, having given up on all our former hopes and dreams. I could focus on positive things in life…i.e., anything other than Cal basketball. Happy happy joy joy!

Now, I'm back to feeling like a traumatized, delusional girlfriend who keeps getting cheated on, disappointed by, and lied to by her loser boyfriend. But now, the loser boyfriend has a new job, suddenly cleaned up his appearance, smiles a lot more, converted to being a Mormon, and revealed himself to have played in the NBA for a decade alongside my 2 of the greatest players of all time, Kobe and Shaq.

Deep down, I know it's just a con. I know the loser is just going to disappoint us in the future again and break all our hearts. This time in the future, we might not be able to put ourselves back together after the inevitable wreckage. We will never love again. We will never be whole. We will always have a void inside that is impossible to fill.

But whatever! Mark Madsen brings positive energy, an NBA career, a Pac 12 star pedigree as the leader of Stanford's Final Four team, and an infectious enthusiasm. So I'm willing to once again completely ignore the plethora of red flags that continue to inundate the Cal Athletic Department and Cal basketball program.

So I'm coming back for one more cycle of abuse. Whoo hoo! Bring it on! LOL

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Surprised that Richard Lee is so forgiving of Legans for leaving Cal - although leaving for Fresno is not leaving for Oregon. (I don't recall his viewpoint at the time)

Oh, and welcome back Mr. Lee

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Legans left to play for his mentor who had just gotten the Fresno job with intent to go into coaching himself to also make a difference in young men's lives. He has always said he is a Bear at heart and even though the coaching part worked out he has said leaving Cal was a mistake.

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Agree 100%.

In addition, I would add that Ray Lopes, the new Fresno State head coach at the time, was not only Shantay Legans' mentor, he was literally his older brother (through the Big Brothers program) and had been since Shantay was just a kid. So Ray Lopes was basically family.

On top of that, when Shantay was being recruited in high school, Ray Lopes, who was then an assistant to Kelvin Sampson at Oklahoma, wanted to offer Shantay a scholarship. Kelvin Sampson nixed the idea and was not pleased with Ray Lopes, as Sampson thought Lopes was letting personal feelings interfere with his job and objective player evaluation. Had Oklahoma offered Shantay, Shantay would have accepted and played for Sampson and Lopes. As it happened, Oklahoma offered Hollis Price at the same PG position, and Hollis Price later became a great college PG for Oklahoma.

But when Ray Lopes got the Fresno State head coaching job, there was no Kelvin Sampson to tell him no. And Shantay couldn't refuse family.

Shantay started for us for 3 years at PG. He did everything Cal and Ben Braun asked of him and was a model representative of the program at the time. He had some memorable highlights, too, including leading to Cal to a 29-point destruction of a very talented UCLA team at Haas Pavilion, getting knocked unconscious by Matt Barnes (who got ejected as a result) during that game. I hold Shantay in high regard, and I would hope that others would, too.

Guys like Garrett Sim and Kennedy Winston are another story. They not only verbally committed to Cal as high school recruits, they each signed written LOIs to play for Cal. We stopped recruiting at their positions as a result. And then after or right about when their high school senior years were done, but before they actually enrolled at Cal, they reneged on their WRITTEN and SIGNED letters of intent. Selfish and immature and disloyal. And shortsighted.

They left us high and dry in recruiting. Kennedy Winston probably got paid under the table by Alabama people to renege. Garrett Sim just didn't want to play for Cal after Ben Braun got fired and then Mike Montgomery got hired. So he dumped us for Oregon, which wasn't as good as us at the time. That made no sense.

We ended up lucking out with Sim because he turned out not to be very good, and the last minute replacement recruit, Jorge Gutierrez, later blossomed into the conference player of the year as a senior. But that was pure luck for us, and it doesn't detract away from Sim's immaturity and selfishness when it came to keeping his word.

Kennedy Winston, unlike Sim, turned out to be an excellent college basketball player, and we got no one even close to comparable to replace him that year in recruiting. And Winston had come up with some cockamamie story about a sick grandma in Alabama as his supposed reason for reneging. Sucks. Hard to compete with Southern good old boys who want to win and are willing to break the rules, though.

Richard_Lee said:

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Cal8285 said:

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It doesn't seem so obvious to me that JP is better than MM. I would take MM over JP…

I absolutely hated the Jones and Fox hires, they were both horrific.

---

Agree on the above. Wyking Jones was an absolute zero in terms of a hire. That was easy to see. That hire made me want to throw up. And he took Cal basketball down into the toilet.

Mark Fox was also a zero when he got hired, but then Fox went out and proved everyone wrong. That is, Fox actually turned out to be LESS THAN ZERO. Fox took us out of Wyking's toilet and onto the street corner, hooked on hard drugs and getting bent over and violated on a nightly basis by strangers

Less Than Zero. Just like Bret Easton Ellis imagined.

Thank you, Mark Fox. I have felt nothing but shame, embarrassment, guilt, and low self-esteem for the past 4 years whenever Cal basketball crosses my mind or the screen of my TV or phone.

I also agree on the preference for Mark Madsen over Ben Braun's old 4th string assistant videotape indexing manager. I'm not a fan of the audio-visual squad guy. Never have been. Even before he kicked Jorge Gutierrez, my all-time favorite Cal basketball player, my impression of Joe was "meh." After that, and after observing Joe's attitude and non-apology, my impression was "go *****yourself."

When it comes to leadership and program building, being a high character guy and role model counts for something. Mark Madsen, even though the thought of Mark, in his Stanford uniform, destroying our Cal teams led by Sean Lampley back at the Oakland Coliseum / Arena, remains a huge turnoff, has always played and carried himself as a model human being. I wanted to dislike him when he played for Stanford, but I couldn't. It was much easier to dislike mouthy guys like Brevin Knight and Casey Jacobsen or really ugly guys like Matt Lottich.

Coaches have to recruit to parents as well as the high school players. Madsen can do that.

i would have preferred Shantay Legans or Amir Abdur-Rahim over Madsen, but I'll take Madsen anyday of the week over someone I can't stand.

Madsen actually makes me kind of excited about Cal basketball again! It's been a long time. I had almost given up.

In fact, I was feeling pretty refreshed and almost able to move on with my life, having given up on all our former hopes and dreams. I could focus on positive things in life…i.e., anything other than Cal basketball. Happy happy joy joy!

Now, I'm back to feeling like a traumatized, delusional girlfriend who keeps getting cheated on, disappointed by, and lied to by her loser boyfriend. But now, the loser boyfriend has a new job, suddenly cleaned up his appearance, smiles a lot more, converted to being a Mormon, and revealed himself to have played in the NBA for a decade alongside my 2 of the greatest players of all time, Kobe and Shaq.

Deep down, I know it's just a con. I know the loser is just going to disappoint us in the future again and break all our hearts. This time in the future, we might not be able to put ourselves back together after the inevitable wreckage. We will never love again. We will never be whole. We will always have a void inside that is impossible to fill.

But whatever! Mark Madsen brings positive energy, an NBA career, a Pac 12 star pedigree as the leader of Stanford's Final Four team, and an infectious enthusiasm. So I'm willing to once again completely ignore the plethora of red flags that continue to inundate the Cal Athletic Department and Cal basketball program.

So I'm coming back for one more cycle of abuse. Whoo hoo! Bring it on! LOL

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welcome back

this is like a BI basketball alum reunion