socaliganbear said:
The thing that stands out to me about Wyking's statement is how royally CAL (not Wyking) effed the program. Everyone from the Chancellor, Mike Williams, down to the associate ADs that oversee it, dropped the ball to say the least. "Rebuilding a program is never easy".
The three years prior to Wyking's tenure, Cal won 18, 23, and 21 games respectively. What happened immediately after shouldn't have happened. We were not placed on sanctions. We did not have a massive recruiting or academic scandal looming over us. We were not rotting at the core. We had underperformed, sure, but we were a very solid program. This shouldn't have been a complete and total tear down. With where we are now, you'd think we're recovering from USC or Ole Miss like NCAA scandals.
Believe it or not, I've moved on. But man... the people in charge of the program, and by extension, our brand, really effed us.
With all due respect, this is a lot of hooey. We were not a "very solid program" at all before Wyking took over. Cuonzo Martin had wrecked the Cal program, and he got out in the nick of time, so he would not be blamed for where it was headed. Yes, Cal won 18, 23, and 21 games under him. But look at what he started with: SIX VERY GOOD PLAYERS all turned over to him by Mike Montgomery. Jabari Bird, Tyrone Wallace, Jordan Mathews, David Kravish, Rooks, and Sam Singer. Martin brought in two recruits, Okoroh and Chauca, plus transfer Tarwater. Okoroh contributed very little at all, Tarwater slightly more, and Chauca contributed NOTHING. That team was successful entirely due to Montgomery's recruiting. And the bonus was that only one of those players, Kravish, would graduate, but he would be replaced by another good player, Kameron Rooks, also a Montgomery recruit returning from missing a season with injury. So for his second year, Martin had a very good nucleus to work with.
Martin turned over no such roster and program to Wyking Jones. Martin's next recruits were fabulously highly ranked, Rabb and Brown, enabling to him to add them to Montgomery's nucleus, and the team was even better. Tarwater graduated, so Martin signed a transfer who was a very highly rated recruit in Stephen Domingo, who played two seasons, and was nearly a complete bust. He also signed Roman Davis, who redshirted, but became a three year bust. The team struggled, and underperformed in the early season, and put things together at the end but injuries to two of Cal's lesser stars, Bird and Wallace, doomed the team to a first round loss in the NCAA. The team still had five good players, including Rabb and Brown, and should have been able to beat Hawaii easily, but failed.
That was the start of things beginning to unravel for Martin and the Cal program. Brown left for the NBA as expected. Tyrone Wallace graduated, and Jordan Mathews and Martin did not see eye to eye, I believe, and Mathews transferred to Gonzaga. Rabb decided to stay on for another season. Martin did sign a good recruit in Charlie Moore, a very erratic unranked Don Coleman, and a good grad transfer in Grant Mullins, along with transfer Marcus Lee for the future. The team did alright. However, Martin had run out of tricks. He had failed more than any Cal coach on his way out to having planned his roster to have a mix of underclassmen and upperclassmen for the future. Bird, Singer, Mullins, Domingo, and RMB would all graduate at the same time. His recruiting, except for the big stars, Rabb and Brown, plus Moore, was abysmal. He would have had Okoroh, Rooks, Lee, Moore, Coleman and Davis coming back. But Moore's father already was ill, and Moore transferred. Rooks transferred to be with his family after the death of his father. No one knows if they would have stayed for Cuonzo, but even if they had, the team would have struggled to play .500, IMO. Maybe Baker would have stayed, but he has been injured and missed a lot of games in Kentucky, so maybe he would have been injured at Cal as well.
I want to give Martin the benefit of the doubt, and just say he did not plan his recruiting well for the future, or too many of his recruits did not deliver, but the cynic in me thinks he might have planned his exit all along. He started with Montgomery's best recruiting class ever, 6 good players, and rode that for a year, until he could sign Brown and Rabb, thus solidifying his rep as a master recruiter. I think if Rabb had left as expected, Cuonzo's 2016-17 team would not have won 20 games. Not even close. Martin over three years brought in 3 good recruits, Rabb, Brown, and Moore, and two good transfers, Mullins and Lee. The bad thing about them was only one, Rabb, played longer than one year for Cal.
It was Montgomery who built Cal into a competitive program (with help from the roster left to him by Ben Braun). And it was Cuonzo Martin who broke it down, did a nearly complete teardown. He left Jones with a roster of 4 players, including Davis, who is not much of a player yet. Coleman would be a major challenge under any coach. Two were seniors. Martin left the next coach only Davis for his second season. Contrast that with the roster that Ben Braun left for Montgomery: Juniors Randle, Christopher, Theo, Boykin, Soph Kamp, Frosh Amok, Seeley, and Max Zhang. Two seasons later, Cal wins the PAC10 title with these players. Compared with that, Martin didn't leave himself or Wyking much of anything for 2017 and 2018.
SFCityBear
