Jim Knowlton Announces Retirement

Rank these items and people, 1-7, as reasons Cal basketball has failed to have a winning season since 2016-17 and might not see one this decade. I know some of these only entered the scene in the last two years, which is why I'm asking for both the past and the projected future.
Jim Knowlton; Wyking Jones; weak donor base; Mark Fox; NIL system of paying players; the decision to move to the ACC vs some other conference; Markeisha Everett and the Athletics marketing team (that one's for Shocky1); Mark Madsen.
I have my own ranking but I'll hold off because I'm curious to see what people put at the top of the list.

calumnus said:

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The damage he has done is immense and cannot be undone. Hopefully we will survive his legacy. I am just glad I soon won't ever have to look at his face again, hear his voice or read anything he writes (or AI writes for him).

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It can be undone It will be undone. This is the year we turn everything around, starting with football.

barsad said:

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Rank these items and people, 1-7, as reasons Cal basketball has failed to have a winning season since 2016-17 and might not see one this decade. I know some of these only entered the scene in the last two years, which is why I'm asking for both the past and the projected future.
Jim Knowlton; Wyking Jones; weak donor base; Mark Fox; NIL system of paying players; the decision to move to the ACC vs some other conference; Markeisha Everett and the Athletics marketing team (that one's for Shocky1); Mark Madsen.
I have my own ranking but I'll hold off because I'm curious to see what people put at the top of the list.

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Barsad, this is a tough task. You're asking for us to model Cal's situation as a hierarchy of problems when it's really an interlocking network. There are all sorts of interdependencies and one issue, which in isolation is relatively small, can suddenly have a huge amplifying effect on another issue. But here's my crack at it:

#1: Jim Knowlton by far the biggest problem

After that, prioritizing all the other issues doesn't matter because a good Athletic Director would have dealt with them, but before addressing them, a good AD would have shown Carol Christ how a (her) vision for successful athletics required robust football and basketball programs in order to finance all the rest. Now to the other items:

• Wyking Jones - a good AD would have recognized his incompetence and fired him after a single season
• Mark Fox - never would have been hired. Other options (Kyle Smith, Todd Golden, blah blah) too numerous to mention.
• Weak donor base - AD's quick WJ firing and hiring of competent replacement, as well as better engagement with donors, could have turned this around.
• NIL - a tough nut, but a good AD wouldn't (correction: would)have donor base to draw upon.
• ACC move - a good AD would have been more proactive when all the realignment stuff hit the fan and prodded/guided Carol on key decisions. Cal's football and basketball programs could have made a much better case for getting into the B1G and/or coordinating with Stanford for more favorable ACC terms

Maybe a "good" Athletic Director wouldn't have been enough, maybe it required a "great" AD and Cal hasn't had one of those in my 70 years on the planet. But hiring a guy who'd spent his entire career as a cog in the machine, waiting for orders from his superiors that he could push down to his subordinates was the wrong way to go.

barsad said:

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Rank these items and people, 1-7, as reasons Cal basketball has failed to have a winning season since 2016-17 and might not see one this decade. I know some of these only entered the scene in the last two years, which is why I'm asking for both the past and the projected future.
Jim Knowlton; Wyking Jones; weak donor base; Mark Fox; NIL system of paying players; the decision to move to the ACC vs some other conference; Markeisha Everett and the Athletics marketing team (that one's for Shocky1); Mark Madsen.
I have my own ranking but I'll hold off because I'm curious to see what people put at the top of the list.

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You are missing the key issue.

Replacing Martin with Jones is the turning point. Not because Jones was bad, though he was. Because there is no way any sane person/organization makes that hire with an expectation of success. There is only one sane reason to make that hire. You have looked at the finances of the situation and you realize that paying a real coach and hoping for success is a bad return on investment for basketball. I pointed this out several times in the years that followed. Looking at the public financial statements, given that most of the money basketball was making was coming from conference/tv payouts and looking at the difference in ticket revenue and donations in successful years vs. horrid years, the financially prudent thing to do on paper was to hire a cheap coach and become the Washington Generals. Paying the salary you needed to pay for a coach that could succeed and giving them the resources needed to succeed was simply not going to pay for itself in increased ticket sales and donations. I made the point at the time Jones was hired that it meant one of two things. 1. the above; or 2. This Wyking Jones guy was just clearly so brilliant you couldn't let him get out the door. It became very clear very quickly that #2 was not it.

(as an aside, football was never in this situation. Winning at least arguably is a good investment in that ticket sales and donations can pay the cost of resources required to achieve success. The question is whether it is worth the risk that you spend the money and still don't win)

IMO that is the decision that was made by either Michael Williams, Chancellor Christ, or both and that is the fundamental cause of the issue. Had we hired a reasonable coach at that point in time and dedicated reasonable resources to basketball, we should have at least been able to keep going in the middle of the pack. The Jones hire was a giant message that we were essentially tanking the program. Well, I shouldn't say that. I don't think they cared if the program was good or bad. If they happened to luck into a good program while paying no money, they were fine with that. But they weren't going to pay any money.

And you also have to look at Chancellor Dirks' role in this. He fired Sandy Barbour, who wasn't my favorite but she was a reasonable quality, professional athletic director. That would have been fine if he hired a different reasonable quality professional athletic director. But he went cheap and lazy and hired a completely unqualified athletic director in Williams who was essentially just an alum. Hard to argue that wasn't telegraphing Cal's views of the importance of sports and the cheaping out on the basketball decision with hiring Jones.

The coup de grace is that they figured out that they got a lot of blow back for that decision and then decided to try again. But at that point:

1. Most of the damage was already done and now you had to dig yourself out of the hole you created
2. You hired a theoretically professional athletic director and paid the cost of doing so, but you hired a really bad one.
3. You increased the salary you were willing to pay the basketball coach and your really bad athletic director went out and overpaid for a really bad coach because he looked professional on paper.

Frankly, it seems like trashing the program and then regretting was the worst of all worlds. You could have not trashed the program. You could have trashed the program and doubled down on it and at least not chucked money down the toilet. But you chose to trash it, then chuck money down the toilet.

So I think you miss the key issues with who you ask us to rank. Jones is a pawn. He did what he was supposed to do. Fill the chair as cheaply as possible. Yes, it would have changed things if he was good, but he was never meant to be. Markeisha is a rounding error. For marketing to really matter, you have to have something worth marketing. NIL is the system. You either participate in the system or you don't. Fox was terrible, but anyone could see that coming. I'm not thrilled with Madsen nor am I optimistic he can dig this program out, but I think he is a competent coach who could succeed somewhere.

So I will rank who I want to rank:

1. Dirks - chopped the program off at the knees financially and started the mess
1. (tie) Christ - continued the chopping off at the knees financially, then changed her mind, then was in totally over her head in the world of revenue sports, and worse, didn't realize that and bring in somebody who could help, made a terrible AD hire and was buffaloed into extending that hire at too high a cost for far too long a term.
3. Michael Williams who may have just been a pawn in this, but under his watch they tanked the program by going beyond cheap
4. Knowlton very close behind only because at least they signalled that okay, we will pay SOMETHING for the program and somehow I feel that trying comes in ahead of not trying even if your trying is wholly incompetent.

5. Really not a blame thing, but a cause thing that allows all this to happen. As a community we just don't care as much about this as our peers do and that colors everything. We need to come to terms with that. I don't blame anyone for that. You like what you like. You prioritize what you prioritize. A lot of our peers do not prioritize their academic programs as much as we do, and that is crazy to me. But you can't win in basketball if it is a cute hobby to you and to others it is everything.

bearsandgiants said:

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calumnus said:

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The damage he has done is immense and cannot be undone. Hopefully we will survive his legacy. I am just glad I soon won't ever have to look at his face again, hear his voice or read anything he writes (or AI writes for him).

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It can be undone It will be undone. This is the year we turn everything around, starting with football.

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The years of abuse of the women swimmers cannot be undone, the lost decade of Wilcox and the over $100 million we will have spent on him and his friends cannot be recovered, getting left behind when the PAC-12 broke up cannot be undone, not hiring Dennis Gates or Kyle Smith when we had the chance cannot be undone…. Even if we eventually get into the B1G, we will have a deficit of roughly $50 million a year vs UCLA for that time period that we will never get back even if we eventually get into the B1G too. The bleeding may eventually stop, but the damage cannot be undone. If we were to assess "damages" it would be $hundreds of millions even if we eventually get into the B1G, and if we don't….

You see football turning around this year? What is the scenario you are hoping for? Wilcox wins 8 and we extend him, then he wins 10 next year? Wilcox wins 8 and we fire him? Is that turning it around? What is the scenario where football turns around this year? Does "turning it around this year" have to mean Wilcox turns into a great, championship caliber football coach?

BearlyCareAnymore said:

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barsad said:

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Rank these items and people, 1-7, as reasons Cal basketball has failed to have a winning season since 2016-17 and might not see one this decade. I know some of these only entered the scene in the last two years, which is why I'm asking for both the past and the projected future.
Jim Knowlton; Wyking Jones; weak donor base; Mark Fox; NIL system of paying players; the decision to move to the ACC vs some other conference; Markeisha Everett and the Athletics marketing team (that one's for Shocky1); Mark Madsen.
I have my own ranking but I'll hold off because I'm curious to see what people put at the top of the list.

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Looking at the public financial statements, given that most of the money basketball was making was coming from conference/tv payouts and looking at the difference in ticket revenue and donations in successful years vs. horrid years, the financially prudent thing to do on paper was to hire a cheap coach and become the Washington Generals. Paying the salary you needed to pay for a coach that could succeed and giving them the resources needed to succeed was simply not going to pay for itself in increased ticket sales and donations. I made the point at the time Jones was hired that it meant one of two things. 1. the above; or 2. This Wyking Jones guy was just clearly so brilliant you couldn't let him get out the door. It became very clear very quickly that #2 was not it.

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I agree with everything you said except this. There are more rising mid major coaches or young assistants of top programs than there are power conference job openings. We could've hired one of them for the same price and had at least a sliver of a chance at being competitive. At the very least, they certainly could do no worse. The Wyking hire was DOA. Waking was a known *******, not respected by the team, and his coaching experience was basically being Pitino's bag man.

concernedparent said:

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BearlyCareAnymore said:

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barsad said:

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Rank these items and people, 1-7, as reasons Cal basketball has failed to have a winning season since 2016-17 and might not see one this decade. I know some of these only entered the scene in the last two years, which is why I'm asking for both the past and the projected future.
Jim Knowlton; Wyking Jones; weak donor base; Mark Fox; NIL system of paying players; the decision to move to the ACC vs some other conference; Markeisha Everett and the Athletics marketing team (that one's for Shocky1); Mark Madsen.
I have my own ranking but I'll hold off because I'm curious to see what people put at the top of the list.

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Looking at the public financial statements, given that most of the money basketball was making was coming from conference/tv payouts and looking at the difference in ticket revenue and donations in successful years vs. horrid years, the financially prudent thing to do on paper was to hire a cheap coach and become the Washington Generals. Paying the salary you needed to pay for a coach that could succeed and giving them the resources needed to succeed was simply not going to pay for itself in increased ticket sales and donations. I made the point at the time Jones was hired that it meant one of two things. 1. the above; or 2. This Wyking Jones guy was just clearly so brilliant you couldn't let him get out the door. It became very clear very quickly that #2 was not it.

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I agree with everything you said except this. There are more rising mid major coaches or young assistants of top programs than there are power conference job openings. We could've hired one of them for the same price and had at least a sliver of a chance at being competitive. At the very least, they certainly could do no worse. The Wyking hire was DOA. Waking was a known *******, not respected by the team, and his coaching experience was basically being Pitino's bag man.

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Not in disagreement. Not saying they couldn't have. Saying they didn't care to. I said it was cheap AND lazy. He was there already. He was dirt cheap. If anything, hiring a coach who was cheap with a chance to become successful was counterproductive because if he became successful you'd have to give him a raise.

barsad said:

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It was interesting to see how diverse (and as expected, strong) the opinions were on trying to rank all of Cal basketball's woes in the last 10 years.
Most of you went to blaming a menagerie of coaches and administrators. I see it differently. In my own ranking I would put all of the terrible hires lower than the institutional issues. That's because in an alternative universe, where we hired stellar coaches, Knowlton stayed out of Berkeley, and we had athletics-loving Chancellors, I don't think everything would be radically different.
Here are my top 3 reasons we're where we are and, because of institutional and conference disadvantages, we're likely to stay.
1. We joined a conference we have no business playing in. We are outmatched on 7 or 8 KPIs. It's hard to say it out loud, but we will never be ACC champions, just putting that reality check out there.
2. College basketball is now about who is the highest bidder. We will never be the highest bidders. There are great ideas on how to reform the system, but no one at the NCAA (or in university admin offices) seems to be listening.
3. Cal is not a sports school, never has been, never will be. Never SHOULD be, in my opinion. If I wanted to go to a school so I could see winning teams all the time I'd be wearing a 'Bama cap.
When I dated a woman from Duke I watched students take shifts in tents, during the coldest winter days (yes, there's snow in Durham sometimes), just to get into a game. Let me repeat, sleeping outside in the winter.
Now think of a typical Cal student in 2025 (NOT when you were in school, today). The enthusiasm gap is too great in the ACC.
I don't have quick remedies. But to start let's get real about getting out of the ACC contract and to a west coast conference, pronto.
Word on the street is that we'll no longer have an actual AD. Some kind of weird triumvirate, with two GMs and one "AD" for all other sports who can't direct football or basketball. OK. Let's stop messing around with interims and get that GM on campus NOW to make sure NIL money is there every year.
I'm not on the practice facility bandwagon. If a kid thinks he's too good to make baskets in the RSF gym, good riddance. Let's stop obsessing over it, can we? Focus on what we can fix in the next three months instead of living in the past.

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I agree with everything you say. (I'm sure that is a first for us, but it is actually on the most important core issues). Actually, I agree with you VEHEMENTLY if you can agree vehemently. My response was about what took us from a mediocre to slightly above average program to and abysmal laughingstock. I believe that the Wyking hire was a give up. A reasonable hire probably keeps us in the middle of the PAC. I think that is roughly our ceiling now had we done everything right, and to your point, the ACC is not the PAC.

As someone who got up in the wee small hours of the morning to line up for my student ticket, at the rare time in our history when you felt you needed to do that, I still agree with you. I remember walking through a grocery store with my Cal shirt on and having an idiot with a Duke shirt (who clearly had nothing to do with Duke) say "Cal sucks" to me as we passed, which I pretended not to hear. But the response in my head was "Idiot. Cal is my school. Not my basketball team." By the way this was a few months before we beat Duke in the NCAA, so HA!. That is a tangent to say - Cal is my school. While I have always been a Cal fan too, I also think college revenue sports is a bizarre phenomenon and frankly it makes no sense. But it is what it is and we participate or not.

There are no quick remedies because as you say there is a tremendous enthusiasm gap not just with students, but alums and local community as well. That is kind of inherent in the situation. I agree with your reality check and I think that the unwillingness for the school and sports community to ask the basic hard question is the big problem. We need an actual analysis of what is realistically achievable and at what cost and to make an informed decision about what we are willing to spend for what result. Right now it seems like its "we want national championships and the cost is something more than we have" So we have a football GM now and we are supposedly going to get a basketball one. We need to see something like:

We want to achieve A
That will cost "X"
The university is willing to put in "Y" - firm commitment.
Alums and students need to put in "X-Y"

And see if alums and students will do that, and if not, reset expectations.

What I see right now is that we are spending the maximum amount necessary to be terrible. So it is the worst of all worlds.

BearlyCareAnymore said:

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barsad said:

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It was interesting to see how diverse (and as expected, strong) the opinions were on trying to rank all of Cal basketball's woes in the last 10 years.
Most of you went to blaming a menagerie of coaches and administrators. I see it differently. In my own ranking I would put all of the terrible hires lower than the institutional issues. That's because in an alternative universe, where we hired stellar coaches, Knowlton stayed out of Berkeley, and we had athletics-loving Chancellors, I don't think everything would be radically different.
Here are my top 3 reasons we're where we are and, because of institutional and conference disadvantages, we're likely to stay.
1. We joined a conference we have no business playing in. We are outmatched on 7 or 8 KPIs. It's hard to say it out loud, but we will never be ACC champions, just putting that reality check out there.
2. College basketball is now about who is the highest bidder. We will never be the highest bidders. There are great ideas on how to reform the system, but no one at the NCAA (or in university admin offices) seems to be listening.
3. Cal is not a sports school, never has been, never will be. Never SHOULD be, in my opinion. If I wanted to go to a school so I could see winning teams all the time I'd be wearing a 'Bama cap.
When I dated a woman from Duke I watched students take shifts in tents, during the coldest winter days (yes, there's snow in Durham sometimes), just to get into a game. Let me repeat, sleeping outside in the winter.
Now think of a typical Cal student in 2025 (NOT when you were in school, today). The enthusiasm gap is too great in the ACC.
I don't have quick remedies. But to start let's get real about getting out of the ACC contract and to a west coast conference, pronto.
Word on the street is that we'll no longer have an actual AD. Some kind of weird triumvirate, with two GMs and one "AD" for all other sports who can't direct football or basketball. OK. Let's stop messing around with interims and get that GM on campus NOW to make sure NIL money is there every year.
I'm not on the practice facility bandwagon. If a kid thinks he's too good to make baskets in the RSF gym, good riddance. Let's stop obsessing over it, can we? Focus on what we can fix in the next three months instead of living in the past.

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I agree with everything you say. (I'm sure that is a first for us, but it is actually on the most important core issues). Actually, I agree with you VEHEMENTLY if you can agree vehemently. My response was about what took us from a mediocre to slightly above average program to and abysmal laughingstock. I believe that the Wyking hire was a give up. A reasonable hire probably keeps us in the middle of the PAC. I think that is roughly our ceiling now had we done everything right, and to your point, the ACC is not the PAC.

As someone who got up in the wee small hours of the morning to line up for my student ticket, at the rare time in our history when you felt you needed to do that, I still agree with you. I remember walking through a grocery store with my Cal shirt on and having an idiot with a Duke shirt (who clearly had nothing to do with Duke) say "Cal sucks" to me as we passed, which I pretended not to hear. But the response in my head was "Idiot. Cal is my school. Not my basketball team." By the way this was a few months before we beat Duke in the NCAA, so HA!. That is a tangent to say - Cal is my school. While I have always been a Cal fan too, I also think college revenue sports is a bizarre phenomenon and frankly it makes no sense. But it is what it is and we participate or not.

There are no quick remedies because as you say there is a tremendous enthusiasm gap not just with students, but alums and local community as well. That is kind of inherent in the situation. I agree with your reality check and I think that the unwillingness for the school and sports community to ask the basic hard question is the big problem. We need an actual analysis of what is realistically achievable and at what cost and to make an informed decision about what we are willing to spend for what result. Right now it seems like its "we want national championships and the cost is something more than we have" So we have a football GM now and we are supposedly going to get a basketball one. We need to see something like:

We want to achieve A
That will cost "X"
The university is willing to put in "Y" - firm commitment.
Alums and students need to put in "X-Y"

And see if alums and students will do that, and if not, reset expectations.

What I see right now is that we are spending the maximum amount necessary to be terrible. So it is the worst of all worlds.

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Wyking was a two-year coach hired by a two-year interim AD who at least recruited a core young team with some upside. It was a blip. It would not be a problem if followed up with a good hire (Kyle Smith, Dennis Gates…). You sometimes take swings on coaches but fire them quickly if the early evidence is they are not up to the task. Stanford hired Tevins and Harris but fired them quickly and then hired Harbaugh and Shaw and went to 3 Rose Bowls. Stanford hung onto Haase too long, but now they have Smith.

Cal's problem is not primarily that we often hire mediocre to poor coaches, most programs do at some point, it is that we too often settle for that, make excuses for them and keep them far too long. Fox and Wilcox as prime examples. Like Holmoe, Fox had to bottom out to get fired. If he could have kept closer to .350 in conference like Wilcox, Williams other bad hire, he would probably still be our coach. I see the same with Madsen: we have to hope he becomes a great coach because Cal will probably hang onto him for a long time at or near the current level of winning and losing.

I appreciate the specificity and analysis that have been applied here, and it looks pretty accurate to me. But I'll try to encapsulate it all into two trends which have combined to put Cal in its current predicament:

• The Cal community (Administration, faculty, students, alumni) does not believe that athletic success matters and many consider it an unnecessary annoyance. This was true when I was a little kid, while I was a student from 1973-1976, and all the time since then. Several of you will respond with, "What about the Roth/Muncie era? What about the Snyder era? What about the Kidd era? What about the Tedford era?". Well, only Tedford's era lasted more than a very few years. And even during these peaks, there were probably 20,000 Cal students on campus who didn't know or care about Cal's teams.

• Cal sports were still able to coexist with this institutional indifference because revenues were split pretty evenly between schools, so mediocrity was tolerated and affordable. That's changed rapidly. The gap between the revenue that sports (football and basketball) bring in and what they cost has increased greatly, making even those short-term periods of success almost impossible to recreate. So, winning new fans by creating a winning program, even a short-lived one, becomes almost impossible to achieve. To compound the matter, competition for scarce $ with the rest of the university means it's even less likely that administration or faculty can be won over.

Some of my happiest and saddest moments have been spent at Cal football and basketball games, and I happily join in discussions here about ways they can sell more tickets, get more fans, win more games. But these two trends have a lot of momentum and regardless of who has the keys, I don't know if there's enough force to change it.

You know if I'm agreeing with BCA and Calumnus the Four Horseman are probably about to come riding around the bend.
I do want to add a bit of optimism to all this Doomsday framing though. I said Cal is not a sports school and Hearst Mining said the same. But that doesn't mean we can't have a championship team playing in March Madness. It also doesn't mean that Cal alums and students won't change the current doldrums and get fired up once we see a team worth cheering for. They will. And this doesn't have to take 10 years. A turnaround can happen quickly with three Cs:
The right Conference - not a P5, sorry
The right Coach plus GM - is it Mad Dog?
The right reCord (fine, I cheated on the last C). Enthusiasm cannot grow in losing-season soil.