Who says Cal isn't competitive?

SFCityBear

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11:38p, 12/31/20

It has been posted here many times and especially recently that Cal's hiring of Fox showed that Cal did not care about having a competitive basketball team. And so I was mildly surprised by how well Cal competed against #21 ranked Oregon, the team picked to win the PAC12. Oregon was missing one of their best players, and Cal was missing our 2nd best player. Cal made mistakes all over the place, but Cal's 2-3 zone defense forced Oregon into numerous errors as well. Cal started so slow, it looked like maybe those who doubted Cal could be competitive were right. But they began to break the Oregon full court press, and came storming back behind one of the most competitive players I've ever seen at Cal, Matt Bradley. Cal passed Oregon and we were up 7 with a minute or so to go in the half, when Oregon made some key buckets and were up by one at halftime. In the 2nd half, Altman added another man, and with 3 defenders pressing Cal in the backcourt, Cal had trouble with the press. Still Cal was only down 3 or 4 points with less than 10 minutes to go, before the athleticism of Oregon took over the game.

I never thought the game would be this close, but Cal made Oregon look pretty beatable for 3/4 of the game. I don't know if Cal played well, or Oregon took Cal for granted, but if Oregon is the PAC12 favorite, then the conference has slipped a notch or two this season, no matter how good a teame Casey Jacobsen thinks Oregon is. Maybe Richardson will make a huge difference. I don't know if Cal can sustain this and give us close games in conference on most nights, but for this night, Cal was competitive, against a team which has a huge home court advantage, and we were even missing a very good player, and not playing well in the turnover department. We could have won that game. Do we play them at Haas? That would be interesting.

SFCityBear

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LateHit

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12:28a, 1/1/21

Odd that the offense - turnovers notwithstanding- traveled better than the defense.
17-22 free throws. Lots of lapses on defense, inside and outside.
Betley seems to have become a streak shooter, so if he starts 1-5 or 0-4, he should sit.
Overall, encouraging, especially without Grant.

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BearlyCareAnymore

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In reply to SFCityBear • 1:07a, 1/1/21

SFCityBear said:
It has been posted here many times and especially recently that Cal's hiring of Fox showed that Cal did not care about having a competitive basketball team. And so I was mildly surprised by how well Cal competed against #21 ranked Oregon, the team picked to win the PAC12. Oregon was missing one of their best players, and Cal was missing our 2nd best player. Cal made mistakes all over the place, but Cal's 2-3 zone defense forced Oregon into numerous errors as well. Cal started so slow, it looked like maybe those who doubted Cal could be competitive were right. But they began to break the Oregon full court press, and came storming back behind one of the most competitive players I've ever seen at Cal, Matt Bradley. Cal passed Oregon and we were up 7 with a minute or so to go in the half, when Oregon made some key buckets and were up by one at halftime. In the 2nd half, Altman added another man, and with 3 defenders pressing Cal in the backcourt, Cal had trouble with the press. Still Cal was only down 3 or 4 points with less than 10 minutes to go, before the athleticism of Oregon took over the game.

I never thought the game would be this close, but Cal made Oregon look pretty beatable for 3/4 of the game. I don't know if Cal played well, or Oregon took Cal for granted, but if Oregon is the PAC12 favorite, then the conference has slipped a notch or two this season, no matter how good a teame Casey Jacobsen thinks Oregon is. Maybe Richardson will make a huge difference. I don't know if Cal can sustain this and give us close games in conference on most nights, but for this night, Cal was competitive, against a team which has a huge home court advantage, and we were even missing a very good player, and not playing well in the turnover department. We could have won that game. Do we play them at Haas? That would be interesting.

When people use losses to argue you have a competitive program, you don't have a competitive program.

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calumnus

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In reply to BearlyCareAnymore • 1:45a, 1/1/21

OaktownBear said:
SFCityBear said:
It has been posted here many times and especially recently that Cal's hiring of Fox showed that Cal did not care about having a competitive basketball team. And so I was mildly surprised by how well Cal competed against #21 ranked Oregon, the team picked to win the PAC12. Oregon was missing one of their best players, and Cal was missing our 2nd best player. Cal made mistakes all over the place, but Cal's 2-3 zone defense forced Oregon into numerous errors as well. Cal started so slow, it looked like maybe those who doubted Cal could be competitive were right. But they began to break the Oregon full court press, and came storming back behind one of the most competitive players I've ever seen at Cal, Matt Bradley. Cal passed Oregon and we were up 7 with a minute or so to go in the half, when Oregon made some key buckets and were up by one at halftime. In the 2nd half, Altman added another man, and with 3 defenders pressing Cal in the backcourt, Cal had trouble with the press. Still Cal was only down 3 or 4 points with less than 10 minutes to go, before the athleticism of Oregon took over the game.

I never thought the game would be this close, but Cal made Oregon look pretty beatable for 3/4 of the game. I don't know if Cal played well, or Oregon took Cal for granted, but if Oregon is the PAC12 favorite, then the conference has slipped a notch or two this season, no matter how good a teame Casey Jacobsen thinks Oregon is. Maybe Richardson will make a huge difference. I don't know if Cal can sustain this and give us close games in conference on most nights, but for this night, Cal was competitive, against a team which has a huge home court advantage, and we were even missing a very good player, and not playing well in the turnover department. We could have won that game. Do we play them at Haas? That would be interesting.

When people use losses to argue you have a competitive program, you don't have a competitive program.

Sagarin had us as 12 point dogs, 14 with the home court advantage. We lost by 13. Pretty much as expected. The only score that counts is the final score.

The issue was Knowlton citing Fox's record at Georgia (9 years losing conference record, two trips to the NCAA, zero wins) as a positive, as what he wanted for Cal. There is no evidence he aspired to more for our program. He was originally going to keep Wyking after all.

However I have no reason to doubt Fox aspires to much more. Hopefully he gets us back to the Tournament, and once there we win a few, but I don't think it will be because he is under pressure from Knowlton to do so.

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In reply to BearlyCareAnymore • 7:53a, 1/1/21

OaktownBear said:
SFCityBear said:
It has been posted here many times and especially recently that Cal's hiring of Fox showed that Cal did not care about having a competitive basketball team. And so I was mildly surprised by how well Cal competed against #21 ranked Oregon, the team picked to win the PAC12. Oregon was missing one of their best players, and Cal was missing our 2nd best player. Cal made mistakes all over the place, but Cal's 2-3 zone defense forced Oregon into numerous errors as well. Cal started so slow, it looked like maybe those who doubted Cal could be competitive were right. But they began to break the Oregon full court press, and came storming back behind one of the most competitive players I've ever seen at Cal, Matt Bradley. Cal passed Oregon and we were up 7 with a minute or so to go in the half, when Oregon made some key buckets and were up by one at halftime. In the 2nd half, Altman added another man, and with 3 defenders pressing Cal in the backcourt, Cal had trouble with the press. Still Cal was only down 3 or 4 points with less than 10 minutes to go, before the athleticism of Oregon took over the game.

I never thought the game would be this close, but Cal made Oregon look pretty beatable for 3/4 of the game. I don't know if Cal played well, or Oregon took Cal for granted, but if Oregon is the PAC12 favorite, then the conference has slipped a notch or two this season, no matter how good a teame Casey Jacobsen thinks Oregon is. Maybe Richardson will make a huge difference. I don't know if Cal can sustain this and give us close games in conference on most nights, but for this night, Cal was competitive, against a team which has a huge home court advantage, and we were even missing a very good player, and not playing well in the turnover department. We could have won that game. Do we play them at Haas? That would be interesting.

When people use losses to argue you have a competitive program, you don't have a competitive program.

I know that a line like this is representative of the "winner mentality." But doesn't the word "competitive" mean the ability to compete? Like SFCB, I watched the game last night and it was pretty obvious that the Bears gave Oregon a good run for their money. Looked like a competitve team to me.

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HoopDreams

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8:54a, 1/1/21

I think Fox can coach. He used zone which slowed the ducks until their wing got hot with 4 straight threes. That blew a close game open.

Cal's game is to play smart and they did so for stretches. But they lost their discipline at times by forcing it resulting in turnovers. Bradley needs to understand that every team has scouted him so he needs to see the help defender better. Probably a little late to become a Jerome Randle or Tre Young, but like Paris last year, he needs to develop a floater.

I think Fox can coach. I like how he changes up both his offense and defense based on personnel and opponent. This year we have shooters so he's allowing the ball to fly. He used a lot of zone this game and last, and I think I even saw a 1-3-1 once last game

We really miss Grant. He gives us another scorer, defender, rebounder and passer. I'm sure Fox makes him a central player in our offense. Without him Lars, DJ get more minutes than they are ready for. Both are too foul and turnover prone and not a significant offensive threat. Without Grant, Kelly and Bentley also had to play 32 and 34 minutes which were probably too many for them. I think we will need to go through Jan or longer without Grant.

I still hope 2K will be the next man up. I thought he played good defense but got two bad calls. I continue to think he shows potential

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sluggo

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In reply to BearlyCareAnymore • 8:54a, 1/1/21

OaktownBear said:
SFCityBear said:
It has been posted here many times and especially recently that Cal's hiring of Fox showed that Cal did not care about having a competitive basketball team. And so I was mildly surprised by how well Cal competed against #21 ranked Oregon, the team picked to win the PAC12. Oregon was missing one of their best players, and Cal was missing our 2nd best player. Cal made mistakes all over the place, but Cal's 2-3 zone defense forced Oregon into numerous errors as well. Cal started so slow, it looked like maybe those who doubted Cal could be competitive were right. But they began to break the Oregon full court press, and came storming back behind one of the most competitive players I've ever seen at Cal, Matt Bradley. Cal passed Oregon and we were up 7 with a minute or so to go in the half, when Oregon made some key buckets and were up by one at halftime. In the 2nd half, Altman added another man, and with 3 defenders pressing Cal in the backcourt, Cal had trouble with the press. Still Cal was only down 3 or 4 points with less than 10 minutes to go, before the athleticism of Oregon took over the game.

I never thought the game would be this close, but Cal made Oregon look pretty beatable for 3/4 of the game. I don't know if Cal played well, or Oregon took Cal for granted, but if Oregon is the PAC12 favorite, then the conference has slipped a notch or two this season, no matter how good a teame Casey Jacobsen thinks Oregon is. Maybe Richardson will make a huge difference. I don't know if Cal can sustain this and give us close games in conference on most nights, but for this night, Cal was competitive, against a team which has a huge home court advantage, and we were even missing a very good player, and not playing well in the turnover department. We could have won that game. Do we play them at Haas? That would be interesting.

When people use losses to argue you have a competitive program, you don't have a competitive program.

And by double digits. There is a particular delusion of Cal fans where you take the good stuff as given (Foreman getting hot from very long range, Bradley hitting multiple verydifficult shots) and discount the bad stuff (Betley being off target, the turnovers). Or the part of the game where Cal did better as if the other part counts less. To me it all averages out to who Cal is, a double digit loser to Oregon.

My favorite part was when Cal went to a 1-4 set and just had Bradley go 1-on-1. A cynic might say Cal runs a pretend offense where this is what happens anyway. Good for Coach Fox to just admit it, if only for a few possessions.

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Chapman_is_Gone

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9:54a, 1/1/21

We are bottom dwelling wankers, as another poster coined many years ago.

Like the Washington Generals, we fulfilled our role perfectly...we were competitive, we gave the good guys "a scare" or two, yet in the end, as everyone knew would occur, we folded, and all was right with the world. At least, I'm sure that's how other fan bases perceive Cal. But, it's OK, "you'll be working for us some day..."

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HoopDreams

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In reply to Chapman_is_Gone • 10:06a, 1/1/21

Yeah, I guess that's how Oregon football thought ...until we forced the fumble

Chapman_is_Gone said:
We are bottom dwelling wankers, as another poster coined many years ago.

Like the Washington Generals, we fulfilled our role perfectly...we were competitive, we gave the good guys "a scare" or two, yet in the end, as everyone knew would occur, we folded, and all was right with the world. At least, I'm sure that's how other fan bases perceive Cal. But, it's OK, "you'll be working for us some day..."

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BearlyCareAnymore

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In reply to RedlessWardrobe • 12:50p, 1/1/21

RedlessWardrobe said:
OaktownBear said:
SFCityBear said:
It has been posted here many times and especially recently that Cal's hiring of Fox showed that Cal did not care about having a competitive basketball team. And so I was mildly surprised by how well Cal competed against #21 ranked Oregon, the team picked to win the PAC12. Oregon was missing one of their best players, and Cal was missing our 2nd best player. Cal made mistakes all over the place, but Cal's 2-3 zone defense forced Oregon into numerous errors as well. Cal started so slow, it looked like maybe those who doubted Cal could be competitive were right. But they began to break the Oregon full court press, and came storming back behind one of the most competitive players I've ever seen at Cal, Matt Bradley. Cal passed Oregon and we were up 7 with a minute or so to go in the half, when Oregon made some key buckets and were up by one at halftime. In the 2nd half, Altman added another man, and with 3 defenders pressing Cal in the backcourt, Cal had trouble with the press. Still Cal was only down 3 or 4 points with less than 10 minutes to go, before the athleticism of Oregon took over the game.

I never thought the game would be this close, but Cal made Oregon look pretty beatable for 3/4 of the game. I don't know if Cal played well, or Oregon took Cal for granted, but if Oregon is the PAC12 favorite, then the conference has slipped a notch or two this season, no matter how good a teame Casey Jacobsen thinks Oregon is. Maybe Richardson will make a huge difference. I don't know if Cal can sustain this and give us close games in conference on most nights, but for this night, Cal was competitive, against a team which has a huge home court advantage, and we were even missing a very good player, and not playing well in the turnover department. We could have won that game. Do we play them at Haas? That would be interesting.

When people use losses to argue you have a competitive program, you don't have a competitive program.
I know that a line like this is representative of the "winner mentality." But doesn't the word "competitive" mean the ability to compete? Like SFCB, I watched the game last night and it was pretty obvious that the Bears gave Oregon a good run for their money. Looked like a competitve team to me.

I learned this in the early Tedford era when we were a top team. I basically realized being on the winning side for a change that games like this never concerned me in the slightest. Every time I had thought Cal had been in games only to have it get away from them at the end I was kidding myself. We were never going to win.

When you have a close score with 6 minutes left and the other team boat races you by 13 over the next 4 and a half, that is not competitive. That is the other team playing with its food. Yes, the mouse occasionally gets away from the cat, but 99 times out of a hundred the mouse eventually goes down the gullet. That doesn't make the mouse competitive.

I comment very little because I don't feel the need to stomp on a handful of optimistic posters and I don't like to be a kill joy. I appreciate all you guys and am truly glad if you still find enjoyment in Cal basketball. The problem I'd like you to consider is that most people who have found that enjoyment in the past have lost it. Covid is covering up what would have been calamitous attendance figures. Look at how few people are posting here. Look at the names who were die hard basketball posters who no longer post or extremely rarely post. Most of the most knowledgeable posters are gone because they know this program is not approaching competitive any time soon.

The concept that Fox may be a decent X's and O's coach seems to give some of you solace because you seem to think that is what being a coach is about. However, you can't x and o your way out of being a crashing failure at everything else.

I'm sorry, but if you think a 13 point loss makes you competitive, you are delusional. If you think being better than Wyking is improvement that will lead anywhere, you are delusional. I don't want to just hammer you guys day in and day out, but I think every once in a while you need a reminder that the reason you are not getting push back on the massively optimistic takes like this thread, it is because this program has become such an uninteresting, crashing failure that everyone who use to care enough to give a critical analysis in hopes of improving it are so hopeless they have left. Every year we do this, we are reducing our chances of ever turning things around and adding 2 years to any required rebuild

So enjoy the odd 34 minutes where a team like Oregon is unmotivated before they absolute blow our doors off with a stretch that equates to beating us by 104 points over 40 minutes and pretend like that means something. Just realize that enjoyment comes at the expense of 90% of former and would be Cal fans who can't delude themselves anymore

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Chapman_is_Gone

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1:15p, 1/1/21

If you see us, please call 9-1-1

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Chapman_is_Gone

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1:19p, 1/1/21

May be found in the company of these two. Sadly, the championship banners are assumed deceased.

Again, please call 9-1-1 with any leads.

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stu

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In reply to BearlyCareAnymore • 1:20p, 1/1/21

Quote:
When you have a close score with 6 minutes left and the other team boat races you by 13 over the next 4 and a half, that is not competitive. That is the other team playing with its food. Yes, the mouse occasionally gets away from the cat, but 99 times out of a hundred the mouse eventually goes down the gullet. That doesn't make the mouse competitive.

I saw only the first half but from that I'd say Oregon has vastly better athletes and I know Altman can get the most out of his players. So I don't think we're going to be competitive with the likes of Oregon until we can recruit better athletes.

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BearlyCareAnymore

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In reply to HoopDreams • 1:22p, 1/1/21

HoopDreams said:
Yeah, I guess that's how Oregon football thought ...until we forced the fumble

Chapman_is_Gone said:
We are bottom dwelling wankers, as another poster coined many years ago.

Like the Washington Generals, we fulfilled our role perfectly...we were competitive, we gave the good guys "a scare" or two, yet in the end, as everyone knew would occur, we folded, and all was right with the world. At least, I'm sure that's how other fan bases perceive Cal. But, it's OK, "you'll be working for us some day..."

No, I doubt they didn't think that way before we forced the fumble. We aren't particularly good at football, but we are competitive. Not to say that the football program is acceptable, but anyone should assume we can beat Oregon on a given day. If you think our basketball team is on par with the football team, you are kidding yourself.

RedlessWardrobe

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2:03p, 1/1/21

Well I guess we shouldn't even watch the games and always rate our competiveness by the final score. My bad, it was should have been obvious to me that with 6 minutes to play Oregon decided to flip the switch from unmotivated to motivated.

I.'m not trying to be an optimist. I'm simply commenting on SF. City's statement. Last night's game was competitive. Oregon hasn't lost at home in a long time. Cal competed well with them. Simple as that.

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BearlyCareAnymore

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In reply to RedlessWardrobe • 3:20p, 1/1/21

Quote:
Well I guess we shouldn't even watch the games

If the games entertain you, you should watch. If the fantasy that this game was competitive helps you enjoy, have at it.

Quote:
and always rate our competiveness by the final score

Not necessarily. But If you think that losing by 13 after getting boat raced in the final 6 minutes when you've beaten fewer than a handful of good teams in the past 4 years is competitive, you are fooling yourself. Cal was never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever going to win that game. When a good team crushes a bad team over a 4 minute period like that it is ALWAYS because they ALWAYS could have done that. Certainly, when it is 62-60, get excited. Wisconsin Green Bay happens. But it was always about Oregon. The second Oregon showed up, it was done. Once the game played out and Oregon did in fact boat race us in the end, it should be obvious to you what happened.

Quote:
My bad, it was should have been obvious to me that with 6 minutes to play Oregon decided to flip the switch from unmotivated to motivated.

Yes. It should have been. Call me when we actually win a few of these.

Quote:
I.'m not trying to be an optimist

.You might not be trying but you are one. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Quote:
Last night's game was competitive.

Whatever keeps you coming back, Peaches

Quote:
Oregon hasn't lost at home in a long time.

True

Quote:
Cal competed well with them. Simple as that

Whatever keeps you coming back, Peaches.

Bottom line is that you have fewer than half the posters on the game thread than you had on game threads 2 years ago and fewer than a third from 4 years ago. 5 years ago the Oregon game thread garnered over 250 posts. Only 8 people actually posted during the game this year. I am fully aware that my opinion here is not popular among those who still believe in unicorns and the tooth fairy, but I'm pretty sure the bulk of the people have spoken loud in their clear by leaving and you guys need to face that reality.

In answer to the the OP's question, who says Cal isn't competitive? 329,999,990 Americans out of 330M. The fact that all 10 of the others are on this board doesn't change the proportion.

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HoopDreams

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3:49p, 1/1/21

Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?

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BearlyCareAnymore

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In reply to HoopDreams • 5:15p, 1/1/21

HoopDreams said:
Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?

I didn't. And I'm sure that will make you think AHA! But I can read a box score. When a team gets its doors blown off by 13 over a 4 and a half minute period, literally a pace to lose by more than 100 over a whole game, it wasn't a close game. It frankly amazes me that people that watch sports their whole life do not get this equation. Teams that never win have games that are close because every other team knows they suck, plays accordingly and normally at some point says, "okay, this is too close guys. time to turn on the jets".

So fine, was Cal competitive for 34 minutes with an Oregon team that was not playing up to its full capability? Yes. Was Cal competitive for 6 minutes with a team that was playing to about 75% capability. No. Had one of the good teams in conference gone up to Oregon and played like Cal did, against an Oregon team that was expecting to be playing a good team and to have to go all out start to finish to win, that team would have lost by 30.

Further, the post game analysis that is basically, well if only we had no injuries and every player had a career game we woulda won is silly.

You are going to find very few Cal fans who watch that game to say that Cal was not competitive because their are very few watching period and those that do are family, friends, and the hopelessly delusional. The rest of us have left.

Wyking Jones last team beat San Diego State, SJSU, Santa Clara, and lost to a Sweet 16 Oregon team on the road by 12. So if you think beating Seattle by 5 and losing to Oregon by 13 makes us competitive, you must have loved Wyking.

Fox was a cluster eff hire the minute it was made and has been every minute since and has doomed us to at least 5 years of a cluster eff program.

If you guys want to be complete suckers and waste your time when Cal is not remotely attempting to compete, they are only attempting to con a few of you into thinking they are attempting to compete, be my guest. But when OP wants to post a gloating "who says Cal isn't competitive?" post, based on a 13 point loss, it needs to be taken down more than a peg. Cal is not competitive. Not going to be any time soon. Having the theoretical ability to win a game does not make a team competitive. We lost to a team this year that lost to Bakersfield by 28 and we were out of the game by halftime.

As for the fantasy that the roster is getting better, it is just that. 3 of our starters were inherited from Wyking and 2 of the guys that left when Fox was hired would easily be starting. Fox has recruited exactly 1 player out of high school who is playing double digit minutes and no one can figure out why he is playing 30 seconds. He has back filled with an Ivy League player and an American Easter Conference player both of whom who have walked into major major minutes on a freaking Pac-12 team. You guys seem to be stoked about a sophomore who doesn't score 3 points a game. We will be lucky if any Freshman or Sophomore on this team at all will develop into a player that would start on a top half conference team by their senior year.

Edit:

Look where we are compared to Wyking Jones last year. 5 of the top 6 players by minutes on his team and 6 of the top 8 were freshman or sophomores. 3 of those players are still in our top minute getters. The other 3 are making significant contributions on other teams. We now have 1 underclassman getting significant minutes (Wyking recruit) and 1 getting 12.9 minutes per game which is about 12.8 minutes more than he would get on any other Pac-12 team.

That is the mark of how bad the future is. It is not improved from the depths of the last 40 years.

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HoopDreams

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5:25p, 1/1/21

Oak, got it

RedlessWardrobe

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7:50p, 1/1/21

Waste of time to interact with posters that don,t even watch the game. Irrelevant discussion. I'm leaving this one.

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DrewFisher

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In reply to BearlyCareAnymore • 9:10p, 1/1/21

OaktownBear said:
HoopDreams said:
Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?
I didn't. And I'm sure that will make you think AHA! But I can read a box score. When a team gets its doors blown off by 13 over a 4 and a half minute period, literally a pace to lose by more than 100 over a whole game, it wasn't a close game. It frankly amazes me that people that watch sports their whole life do not get this equation. Teams that never win have games that are close because every other team knows they suck, plays accordingly and normally at some point says, "okay, this is too close guys. time to turn on the jets".

So fine, was Cal competitive for 34 minutes with an Oregon team that was not playing up to its full capability? Yes. Was Cal competitive for 6 minutes with a team that was playing to about 75% capability. No. Had one of the good teams in conference gone up to Oregon and played like Cal did, against an Oregon team that was expecting to be playing a good team and to have to go all out start to finish to win, that team would have lost by 30.

Further, the post game analysis that is basically, well if only we had no injuries and every player had a career game we woulda won is silly.

You are going to find very few Cal fans who watch that game to say that Cal was not competitive because their are very few watching period and those that do are family, friends, and the hopelessly delusional. The rest of us have left.

Wyking Jones last team beat San Diego State, SJSU, Santa Clara, and lost to a Sweet 16 Oregon team on the road by 12. So if you think beating Seattle by 5 and losing to Oregon by 13 makes us competitive, you must have loved Wyking.

Fox was a cluster eff hire the minute it was made and has been every minute since and has doomed us to at least 5 years of a cluster eff program.

If you guys want to be complete suckers and waste your time when Cal is not remotely attempting to compete, they are only attempting to con a few of you into thinking they are attempting to compete, be my guest. But when OP wants to post a gloating "who says Cal isn't competitive?" post, based on a 13 point loss, it needs to be taken down more than a peg. Cal is not competitive. Not going to be any time soon. Having the theoretical ability to win a game does not make a team competitive. We lost to a team this year that lost to Bakersfield by 28 and we were out of the game by halftime.

As for the fantasy that the roster is getting better, it is just that. 3 of our starters were inherited from Wyking and 2 of the guys that left when Fox was hired would easily be starting. Fox has recruited exactly 1 player out of high school who is playing double digit minutes and no one can figure out why he is playing 30 seconds. He has back filled with an Ivy League player and an American Easter Conference player both of whom who have walked into major major minutes on a freaking Pac-12 team. You guys seem to be stoked about a sophomore who doesn't score 3 points a game. We will be lucky if any Freshman or Sophomore on this team at all will develop into a player that would start on a top half conference team by their senior year.

Edit:

Look where we are compared to Wyking Jones last year. 5 of the top 6 players by minutes on his team and 6 of the top 8 were freshman or sophomores. 3 of those players are still in our top minute getters. The other 3 are making significant contributions on other teams. We now have 1 underclassman getting significant minutes (Wyking recruit) and 1 getting 12.9 minutes per game which is about 12.8 minutes more than he would get on any other Pac-12 team.

That is the mark of how bad the future is. It is not improved from the depths of the last 40 years.

Sorta have to agree with your big point, a thread based on a 13 point loss showing Cal is competitive seems awfully silly, don't it?

The rest of your emphatic disdain for Fox and the program? Not feeling you. Don't get me wrong, Fox may turn out to be a bad hire but isn't it a bit early to make that call?

Of course, the roster and primary players are made up of Wyking's players. Fox only got to Cal eighteen months ago. I guess you expected him to pick up the poop pie that Jones left him and make it immediately smell sweet enough to recruit some impact HS kids?

Perhaps I missed something but didn't Fox win 2x as many games as Jones did after taking over even though he lost three starters to transfer outs and had no time to recruit? I guess he should have made the tourney with last years group for you to even deign to watch his team?

I'm an old guy who can a recall a bunch of Cal players who didn't quite figure it out until their third years. And that's when that had non COVID offseasons to work on their games. Does anyone remember Ayinde Ubaka, Solomon Hughes, Sean Marks, etc? To write off Bowser, Celestine, Kunary, Thiemann, Thorpe, Brown etc at this point (not even 18 months into their Bears careers) feels like premature "something". In reading through your post, I now see that Thorpe and Brown don't count because Wyking originally recruited them. Makes sense. Had Fox known he needed to prove something to you, he would have let them go and dug up more than few of the many studs who were academically qualified and hadn't signed anywhere after he took the Cal job. Bwahahahaha. Sounds like someone likes to read a lot of fairy tales around here.

Maybe you think the grad transfer thing is stupid when you're turning around a dumpster fire of a program? I guess Hyder was a terrible pick up for you? Ironically, Oregon beat the stuffing out of us last night with a roster primarily made up of transfers from lower tier conferences. I guess Altman didn't call you to ask first?!

If you're a big follower of hoops recruiting, maybe you saw the 2021 class Fox landed? Two of the three were rated in the top 100 nationally. The other kid's highlights look awfully tasty. Certainly looks like recruiting's improving quite a bit.

Loads of points one could make being skeptical of Fox, just not sure the ones you made make me feel in tandem with your complete write off of the guy.

And you know sometimes the eye test does matter. Us old farts remember watching the early Bruce Snyder teams and having a clear view he was building something despite some tough losses. He turned out okay. Same dealio with Wilcox. Some coaches come to Cal and seem to fit. I think Mr. Fox may just be one of those. Similar to Monty's arrival, the players and the team as a whole seem to get better as they get coached up. You can see it when you watch. Oh yeah, forgot you're too busy writing long-winded pontificating posts to actually watch the games.

I wish you well, hope you get your hope back and can open up your heart and invest more time in watching Fox and his kids rather than ripping fans who are enjoying the ride. If not, that's cool. Most coaches do fail, so sitting on the sidelines waiting for him to crash and burn so you can say you were "right" might work out for you. I'm sure someone out there will appreciate you for that type of cynical future predictions.

Ciao

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In reply to DrewFisher • 9:42p, 1/1/21

DrewFisher said:
OaktownBear said:
HoopDreams said:
Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?
I didn't. And I'm sure that will make you think AHA! But I can read a box score. When a team gets its doors blown off by 13 over a 4 and a half minute period, literally a pace to lose by more than 100 over a whole game, it wasn't a close game. It frankly amazes me that people that watch sports their whole life do not get this equation. Teams that never win have games that are close because every other team knows they suck, plays accordingly and normally at some point says, "okay, this is too close guys. time to turn on the jets".

So fine, was Cal competitive for 34 minutes with an Oregon team that was not playing up to its full capability? Yes. Was Cal competitive for 6 minutes with a team that was playing to about 75% capability. No. Had one of the good teams in conference gone up to Oregon and played like Cal did, against an Oregon team that was expecting to be playing a good team and to have to go all out start to finish to win, that team would have lost by 30.

Further, the post game analysis that is basically, well if only we had no injuries and every player had a career game we woulda won is silly.

You are going to find very few Cal fans who watch that game to say that Cal was not competitive because their are very few watching period and those that do are family, friends, and the hopelessly delusional. The rest of us have left.

Wyking Jones last team beat San Diego State, SJSU, Santa Clara, and lost to a Sweet 16 Oregon team on the road by 12. So if you think beating Seattle by 5 and losing to Oregon by 13 makes us competitive, you must have loved Wyking.

Fox was a cluster eff hire the minute it was made and has been every minute since and has doomed us to at least 5 years of a cluster eff program.

If you guys want to be complete suckers and waste your time when Cal is not remotely attempting to compete, they are only attempting to con a few of you into thinking they are attempting to compete, be my guest. But when OP wants to post a gloating "who says Cal isn't competitive?" post, based on a 13 point loss, it needs to be taken down more than a peg. Cal is not competitive. Not going to be any time soon. Having the theoretical ability to win a game does not make a team competitive. We lost to a team this year that lost to Bakersfield by 28 and we were out of the game by halftime.

As for the fantasy that the roster is getting better, it is just that. 3 of our starters were inherited from Wyking and 2 of the guys that left when Fox was hired would easily be starting. Fox has recruited exactly 1 player out of high school who is playing double digit minutes and no one can figure out why he is playing 30 seconds. He has back filled with an Ivy League player and an American Easter Conference player both of whom who have walked into major major minutes on a freaking Pac-12 team. You guys seem to be stoked about a sophomore who doesn't score 3 points a game. We will be lucky if any Freshman or Sophomore on this team at all will develop into a player that would start on a top half conference team by their senior year.

Edit:

Look where we are compared to Wyking Jones last year. 5 of the top 6 players by minutes on his team and 6 of the top 8 were freshman or sophomores. 3 of those players are still in our top minute getters. The other 3 are making significant contributions on other teams. We now have 1 underclassman getting significant minutes (Wyking recruit) and 1 getting 12.9 minutes per game which is about 12.8 minutes more than he would get on any other Pac-12 team.

That is the mark of how bad the future is. It is not improved from the depths of the last 40 years.
Sorta have to agree with your big point, a thread based on a 13 point loss showing Cal is competitive seems awfully silly, don't it?

The rest of your emphatic disdain for Fox and the program? Not feeling you. Don't get me wrong, Fox may turn out to be a bad hire but isn't it a bit early to make that call?

Of course, the roster and primary players are made up of Wyking's players. Fox only got to Cal eighteen months ago. I guess you expected him to pick up the poop pie that Jones left him and make it immediately smell sweet enough to recruit some impact HS kids?

Perhaps I missed something but didn't Fox win 2x as many games as Jones did after taking over even though he lost three starters to transfer outs and had no time to recruit? I guess he should have made the tourney with last years group for you to even deign to watch his team?

I'm an old guy who can a recall a bunch of Cal players who didn't quite figure it out until their third years. And that's when that had non COVID offseasons to work on their games. Does anyone remember Ayinde Ubaka, Solomon Hughes, Sean Marks, etc? To write off Bowser, Celestine, Kunary, Thiemann, Thorpe, Brown etc at this point (not even 18 months into their Bears careers) feels like premature "something". In reading through your post, I now see that Thorpe and Brown don't count because Wyking originally recruited them. Makes sense. Had Fox known he needed to prove something to you, he would have let them go and dug up more than few of the many studs who were academically qualified and hadn't signed anywhere after he took the Cal job. Bwahahahaha. Sounds like someone likes to read a lot of fairy tales around here.

Maybe you think the grad transfer thing is stupid when you're turning around a dumpster fire of a program? I guess Hyder was a terrible pick up for you? Ironically, Oregon beat the stuffing out of us last night with a roster primarily made up of transfers from lower tier conferences. I guess Altman didn't call you to ask first?!

If you're a big follower of hoops recruiting, maybe you saw the 2021 class Fox landed? Two of the three were rated in the top 100 nationally. The other kid's highlights look awfully tasty. Certainly looks like recruiting's improving quite a bit.

Loads of points one could make being skeptical of Fox, just not sure the ones you made make me feel in tandem with your complete write off of the guy.

And you know sometimes the eye test does matter. Us old farts remember watching the early Bruce Snyder teams and having a clear view he was building something despite some tough losses. He turned out okay. Same dealio with Wilcox. Some coaches come to Cal and seem to fit. I think Mr. Fox may just be one of those. Similar to Monty's arrival, the players and the team as a whole seem to get better as they get coached up. You can see it when you watch. Oh yeah, forgot you're too busy writing long-winded pontificating posts to actually watch the games.

I wish you well, hope you get your hope back and can open up your heart and invest more time in watching Fox and his kids rather than ripping fans who are enjoying the ride. If not, that's cool. Most coaches do fail, so sitting on the sidelines waiting for him to crash and burn so you can say you were "right" might work out for you. I'm sure someone out there will appreciate you for that type of cynical future predictions.

Ciao

Strong post top to bottom. I'm not quite as optimistic on the Fox hire, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong, and he hasn't done anything to make me me think he won't prove me wrong.

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In reply to Civil Bear • 12:10a, 1/2/21

Civil Bear said:
DrewFisher said:
OaktownBear said:
HoopDreams said:
Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?
I didn't. And I'm sure that will make you think AHA! But I can read a box score. When a team gets its doors blown off by 13 over a 4 and a half minute period, literally a pace to lose by more than 100 over a whole game, it wasn't a close game. It frankly amazes me that people that watch sports their whole life do not get this equation. Teams that never win have games that are close because every other team knows they suck, plays accordingly and normally at some point says, "okay, this is too close guys. time to turn on the jets".

So fine, was Cal competitive for 34 minutes with an Oregon team that was not playing up to its full capability? Yes. Was Cal competitive for 6 minutes with a team that was playing to about 75% capability. No. Had one of the good teams in conference gone up to Oregon and played like Cal did, against an Oregon team that was expecting to be playing a good team and to have to go all out start to finish to win, that team would have lost by 30.

Further, the post game analysis that is basically, well if only we had no injuries and every player had a career game we woulda won is silly.

You are going to find very few Cal fans who watch that game to say that Cal was not competitive because their are very few watching period and those that do are family, friends, and the hopelessly delusional. The rest of us have left.

Wyking Jones last team beat San Diego State, SJSU, Santa Clara, and lost to a Sweet 16 Oregon team on the road by 12. So if you think beating Seattle by 5 and losing to Oregon by 13 makes us competitive, you must have loved Wyking.

Fox was a cluster eff hire the minute it was made and has been every minute since and has doomed us to at least 5 years of a cluster eff program.

If you guys want to be complete suckers and waste your time when Cal is not remotely attempting to compete, they are only attempting to con a few of you into thinking they are attempting to compete, be my guest. But when OP wants to post a gloating "who says Cal isn't competitive?" post, based on a 13 point loss, it needs to be taken down more than a peg. Cal is not competitive. Not going to be any time soon. Having the theoretical ability to win a game does not make a team competitive. We lost to a team this year that lost to Bakersfield by 28 and we were out of the game by halftime.

As for the fantasy that the roster is getting better, it is just that. 3 of our starters were inherited from Wyking and 2 of the guys that left when Fox was hired would easily be starting. Fox has recruited exactly 1 player out of high school who is playing double digit minutes and no one can figure out why he is playing 30 seconds. He has back filled with an Ivy League player and an American Easter Conference player both of whom who have walked into major major minutes on a freaking Pac-12 team. You guys seem to be stoked about a sophomore who doesn't score 3 points a game. We will be lucky if any Freshman or Sophomore on this team at all will develop into a player that would start on a top half conference team by their senior year.

Edit:

Look where we are compared to Wyking Jones last year. 5 of the top 6 players by minutes on his team and 6 of the top 8 were freshman or sophomores. 3 of those players are still in our top minute getters. The other 3 are making significant contributions on other teams. We now have 1 underclassman getting significant minutes (Wyking recruit) and 1 getting 12.9 minutes per game which is about 12.8 minutes more than he would get on any other Pac-12 team.

That is the mark of how bad the future is. It is not improved from the depths of the last 40 years.
Sorta have to agree with your big point, a thread based on a 13 point loss showing Cal is competitive seems awfully silly, don't it?

The rest of your emphatic disdain for Fox and the program? Not feeling you. Don't get me wrong, Fox may turn out to be a bad hire but isn't it a bit early to make that call?

Of course, the roster and primary players are made up of Wyking's players. Fox only got to Cal eighteen months ago. I guess you expected him to pick up the poop pie that Jones left him and make it immediately smell sweet enough to recruit some impact HS kids?

Perhaps I missed something but didn't Fox win 2x as many games as Jones did after taking over even though he lost three starters to transfer outs and had no time to recruit? I guess he should have made the tourney with last years group for you to even deign to watch his team?

I'm an old guy who can a recall a bunch of Cal players who didn't quite figure it out until their third years. And that's when that had non COVID offseasons to work on their games. Does anyone remember Ayinde Ubaka, Solomon Hughes, Sean Marks, etc? To write off Bowser, Celestine, Kunary, Thiemann, Thorpe, Brown etc at this point (not even 18 months into their Bears careers) feels like premature "something". In reading through your post, I now see that Thorpe and Brown don't count because Wyking originally recruited them. Makes sense. Had Fox known he needed to prove something to you, he would have let them go and dug up more than few of the many studs who were academically qualified and hadn't signed anywhere after he took the Cal job. Bwahahahaha. Sounds like someone likes to read a lot of fairy tales around here.

Maybe you think the grad transfer thing is stupid when you're turning around a dumpster fire of a program? I guess Hyder was a terrible pick up for you? Ironically, Oregon beat the stuffing out of us last night with a roster primarily made up of transfers from lower tier conferences. I guess Altman didn't call you to ask first?!

If you're a big follower of hoops recruiting, maybe you saw the 2021 class Fox landed? Two of the three were rated in the top 100 nationally. The other kid's highlights look awfully tasty. Certainly looks like recruiting's improving quite a bit.

Loads of points one could make being skeptical of Fox, just not sure the ones you made make me feel in tandem with your complete write off of the guy.

And you know sometimes the eye test does matter. Us old farts remember watching the early Bruce Snyder teams and having a clear view he was building something despite some tough losses. He turned out okay. Same dealio with Wilcox. Some coaches come to Cal and seem to fit. I think Mr. Fox may just be one of those. Similar to Monty's arrival, the players and the team as a whole seem to get better as they get coached up. You can see it when you watch. Oh yeah, forgot you're too busy writing long-winded pontificating posts to actually watch the games.

I wish you well, hope you get your hope back and can open up your heart and invest more time in watching Fox and his kids rather than ripping fans who are enjoying the ride. If not, that's cool. Most coaches do fail, so sitting on the sidelines waiting for him to crash and burn so you can say you were "right" might work out for you. I'm sure someone out there will appreciate you for that type of cynical future predictions.

Ciao

Strong post top to bottom. I'm not quite as optimistic on the Fox hire, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong, and he hasn't done anything to make me me think he won't prove me wrong.

Yeah, my view is Fox was a really bad hire by Knowlton, but I hope Knowlton gets lucky and Fox proves us all wrong. I certainly have nothing against Fox for going after and taking the job and the past does not always predict the future. Moreover, I always root for Cal and the players who wear the Blue and Gold and will be fellow alumni, so by extension I "root for their coach."

However, I do try to be rational and realistic about what is actually happening on the court.

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In reply to calumnus • 9:35a, 1/2/21

calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
DrewFisher said:
OaktownBear said:
HoopDreams said:
Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?
I didn't. And I'm sure that will make you think AHA! But I can read a box score. When a team gets its doors blown off by 13 over a 4 and a half minute period, literally a pace to lose by more than 100 over a whole game, it wasn't a close game. It frankly amazes me that people that watch sports their whole life do not get this equation. Teams that never win have games that are close because every other team knows they suck, plays accordingly and normally at some point says, "okay, this is too close guys. time to turn on the jets".

So fine, was Cal competitive for 34 minutes with an Oregon team that was not playing up to its full capability? Yes. Was Cal competitive for 6 minutes with a team that was playing to about 75% capability. No. Had one of the good teams in conference gone up to Oregon and played like Cal did, against an Oregon team that was expecting to be playing a good team and to have to go all out start to finish to win, that team would have lost by 30.

Further, the post game analysis that is basically, well if only we had no injuries and every player had a career game we woulda won is silly.

You are going to find very few Cal fans who watch that game to say that Cal was not competitive because their are very few watching period and those that do are family, friends, and the hopelessly delusional. The rest of us have left.

Wyking Jones last team beat San Diego State, SJSU, Santa Clara, and lost to a Sweet 16 Oregon team on the road by 12. So if you think beating Seattle by 5 and losing to Oregon by 13 makes us competitive, you must have loved Wyking.

Fox was a cluster eff hire the minute it was made and has been every minute since and has doomed us to at least 5 years of a cluster eff program.

If you guys want to be complete suckers and waste your time when Cal is not remotely attempting to compete, they are only attempting to con a few of you into thinking they are attempting to compete, be my guest. But when OP wants to post a gloating "who says Cal isn't competitive?" post, based on a 13 point loss, it needs to be taken down more than a peg. Cal is not competitive. Not going to be any time soon. Having the theoretical ability to win a game does not make a team competitive. We lost to a team this year that lost to Bakersfield by 28 and we were out of the game by halftime.

As for the fantasy that the roster is getting better, it is just that. 3 of our starters were inherited from Wyking and 2 of the guys that left when Fox was hired would easily be starting. Fox has recruited exactly 1 player out of high school who is playing double digit minutes and no one can figure out why he is playing 30 seconds. He has back filled with an Ivy League player and an American Easter Conference player both of whom who have walked into major major minutes on a freaking Pac-12 team. You guys seem to be stoked about a sophomore who doesn't score 3 points a game. We will be lucky if any Freshman or Sophomore on this team at all will develop into a player that would start on a top half conference team by their senior year.

Edit:

Look where we are compared to Wyking Jones last year. 5 of the top 6 players by minutes on his team and 6 of the top 8 were freshman or sophomores. 3 of those players are still in our top minute getters. The other 3 are making significant contributions on other teams. We now have 1 underclassman getting significant minutes (Wyking recruit) and 1 getting 12.9 minutes per game which is about 12.8 minutes more than he would get on any other Pac-12 team.

That is the mark of how bad the future is. It is not improved from the depths of the last 40 years.
Sorta have to agree with your big point, a thread based on a 13 point loss showing Cal is competitive seems awfully silly, don't it?

The rest of your emphatic disdain for Fox and the program? Not feeling you. Don't get me wrong, Fox may turn out to be a bad hire but isn't it a bit early to make that call?

Of course, the roster and primary players are made up of Wyking's players. Fox only got to Cal eighteen months ago. I guess you expected him to pick up the poop pie that Jones left him and make it immediately smell sweet enough to recruit some impact HS kids?

Perhaps I missed something but didn't Fox win 2x as many games as Jones did after taking over even though he lost three starters to transfer outs and had no time to recruit? I guess he should have made the tourney with last years group for you to even deign to watch his team?

I'm an old guy who can a recall a bunch of Cal players who didn't quite figure it out until their third years. And that's when that had non COVID offseasons to work on their games. Does anyone remember Ayinde Ubaka, Solomon Hughes, Sean Marks, etc? To write off Bowser, Celestine, Kunary, Thiemann, Thorpe, Brown etc at this point (not even 18 months into their Bears careers) feels like premature "something". In reading through your post, I now see that Thorpe and Brown don't count because Wyking originally recruited them. Makes sense. Had Fox known he needed to prove something to you, he would have let them go and dug up more than few of the many studs who were academically qualified and hadn't signed anywhere after he took the Cal job. Bwahahahaha. Sounds like someone likes to read a lot of fairy tales around here.

Maybe you think the grad transfer thing is stupid when you're turning around a dumpster fire of a program? I guess Hyder was a terrible pick up for you? Ironically, Oregon beat the stuffing out of us last night with a roster primarily made up of transfers from lower tier conferences. I guess Altman didn't call you to ask first?!

If you're a big follower of hoops recruiting, maybe you saw the 2021 class Fox landed? Two of the three were rated in the top 100 nationally. The other kid's highlights look awfully tasty. Certainly looks like recruiting's improving quite a bit.

Loads of points one could make being skeptical of Fox, just not sure the ones you made make me feel in tandem with your complete write off of the guy.

And you know sometimes the eye test does matter. Us old farts remember watching the early Bruce Snyder teams and having a clear view he was building something despite some tough losses. He turned out okay. Same dealio with Wilcox. Some coaches come to Cal and seem to fit. I think Mr. Fox may just be one of those. Similar to Monty's arrival, the players and the team as a whole seem to get better as they get coached up. You can see it when you watch. Oh yeah, forgot you're too busy writing long-winded pontificating posts to actually watch the games.

I wish you well, hope you get your hope back and can open up your heart and invest more time in watching Fox and his kids rather than ripping fans who are enjoying the ride. If not, that's cool. Most coaches do fail, so sitting on the sidelines waiting for him to crash and burn so you can say you were "right" might work out for you. I'm sure someone out there will appreciate you for that type of cynical future predictions.

Ciao

Strong post top to bottom. I'm not quite as optimistic on the Fox hire, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong, and he hasn't done anything to make me me think he won't prove me wrong.

Yeah, my view is Fox was a really bad hire by Knowlton, but I hope Knowlton gets lucky and Fox proves us all wrong. I certainly have nothing against Fox for going after and taking the job and the past does not always predict the future. Moreover, I always root for Cal and the players who wear the Blue and Gold and will be fellow alumni, so by extension I "root for their coach."

However, I do try to be rational and realistic about what is actually happening on the court.

Knowlton essentially had two options: A) Take a complete flyer on an unproven like DeCure or Gates and hope for the best while risking the Bears continue to crash & burn, or B) hire someone that will get the Bears out of the basement. He went with B), and although I would have preferred option A), I'm not sure he could have done better with his option B) hire.

Personally, I was actually leaning to go with an option C) where Knowlton retained Jones for the final year of his contract and then use the saved $ to go after a true up & comer. In COVID hindsight I'm happy we dodged that bullet!

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11:49a, 1/2/21

What is "realistic" about what is happening on the court is that the players are improving. Anyone with any degree of basketball knowledge will see that Lars is moving earlier on defense to help, that Foreman, and Bradley are playing with more confidence, that even Thorpe is playing more aggressively on the boards. Brown is getting better on offense ( he is at least looking for offense, though his shooting is still weak). Those and other incremental improvements are a result of coaching. My view is that this team is night and day better than it was in the first two games. Based on last year's improvements, one can anticipate that the Bears will be much better still in another month. The constant whining that Cal is not a tournament team is not only old and tedious, it reflects badly on the writers who don't seem to appreciate improvement and progress. Please recall Antedivitch (sp)? in his first two years: he has improved tremendously. As fans of the "players" and the program, we should embrace and celebrate the improvement and maturation of these players.

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11:55a, 1/2/21

Excellent points bearchamp. Unfortunately some of the posters on this board can't really agree or disagree with you because their observations are limited to reading the boxscores.

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1:05p, 1/2/21

Nice to come back after a couple of days and actually see some good discussion.

But I'm going to disagree with SFCity's premise. I watched the game and thought Oregon stunk it up. That is why we were within 1pt at halftime. They gave up a 14-1 run mainly on offensive confusion, missed shots and unforced turnovers - not to mention silly travelling calls and offensive fouls. I give the Bears credit in that they took advantage of the oppy's (which is something the Jones programs never figured out). But in the end, the talent gap caught up with us. And as much as I don't respect the program - Altman is a good enough coach to adapt and finish.

I'm afraid the last quarter of the game reflects the reality of both of these programs this year.

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In reply to Civil Bear • 2:49p, 1/2/21

Civil Bear said:
calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
DrewFisher said:
OaktownBear said:
HoopDreams said:
Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?
I didn't. And I'm sure that will make you think AHA! But I can read a box score. When a team gets its doors blown off by 13 over a 4 and a half minute period, literally a pace to lose by more than 100 over a whole game, it wasn't a close game. It frankly amazes me that people that watch sports their whole life do not get this equation. Teams that never win have games that are close because every other team knows they suck, plays accordingly and normally at some point says, "okay, this is too close guys. time to turn on the jets".

So fine, was Cal competitive for 34 minutes with an Oregon team that was not playing up to its full capability? Yes. Was Cal competitive for 6 minutes with a team that was playing to about 75% capability. No. Had one of the good teams in conference gone up to Oregon and played like Cal did, against an Oregon team that was expecting to be playing a good team and to have to go all out start to finish to win, that team would have lost by 30.

Further, the post game analysis that is basically, well if only we had no injuries and every player had a career game we woulda won is silly.

You are going to find very few Cal fans who watch that game to say that Cal was not competitive because their are very few watching period and those that do are family, friends, and the hopelessly delusional. The rest of us have left.

Wyking Jones last team beat San Diego State, SJSU, Santa Clara, and lost to a Sweet 16 Oregon team on the road by 12. So if you think beating Seattle by 5 and losing to Oregon by 13 makes us competitive, you must have loved Wyking.

Fox was a cluster eff hire the minute it was made and has been every minute since and has doomed us to at least 5 years of a cluster eff program.

If you guys want to be complete suckers and waste your time when Cal is not remotely attempting to compete, they are only attempting to con a few of you into thinking they are attempting to compete, be my guest. But when OP wants to post a gloating "who says Cal isn't competitive?" post, based on a 13 point loss, it needs to be taken down more than a peg. Cal is not competitive. Not going to be any time soon. Having the theoretical ability to win a game does not make a team competitive. We lost to a team this year that lost to Bakersfield by 28 and we were out of the game by halftime.

As for the fantasy that the roster is getting better, it is just that. 3 of our starters were inherited from Wyking and 2 of the guys that left when Fox was hired would easily be starting. Fox has recruited exactly 1 player out of high school who is playing double digit minutes and no one can figure out why he is playing 30 seconds. He has back filled with an Ivy League player and an American Easter Conference player both of whom who have walked into major major minutes on a freaking Pac-12 team. You guys seem to be stoked about a sophomore who doesn't score 3 points a game. We will be lucky if any Freshman or Sophomore on this team at all will develop into a player that would start on a top half conference team by their senior year.

Edit:

Look where we are compared to Wyking Jones last year. 5 of the top 6 players by minutes on his team and 6 of the top 8 were freshman or sophomores. 3 of those players are still in our top minute getters. The other 3 are making significant contributions on other teams. We now have 1 underclassman getting significant minutes (Wyking recruit) and 1 getting 12.9 minutes per game which is about 12.8 minutes more than he would get on any other Pac-12 team.

That is the mark of how bad the future is. It is not improved from the depths of the last 40 years.
Sorta have to agree with your big point, a thread based on a 13 point loss showing Cal is competitive seems awfully silly, don't it?

The rest of your emphatic disdain for Fox and the program? Not feeling you. Don't get me wrong, Fox may turn out to be a bad hire but isn't it a bit early to make that call?

Of course, the roster and primary players are made up of Wyking's players. Fox only got to Cal eighteen months ago. I guess you expected him to pick up the poop pie that Jones left him and make it immediately smell sweet enough to recruit some impact HS kids?

Perhaps I missed something but didn't Fox win 2x as many games as Jones did after taking over even though he lost three starters to transfer outs and had no time to recruit? I guess he should have made the tourney with last years group for you to even deign to watch his team?

I'm an old guy who can a recall a bunch of Cal players who didn't quite figure it out until their third years. And that's when that had non COVID offseasons to work on their games. Does anyone remember Ayinde Ubaka, Solomon Hughes, Sean Marks, etc? To write off Bowser, Celestine, Kunary, Thiemann, Thorpe, Brown etc at this point (not even 18 months into their Bears careers) feels like premature "something". In reading through your post, I now see that Thorpe and Brown don't count because Wyking originally recruited them. Makes sense. Had Fox known he needed to prove something to you, he would have let them go and dug up more than few of the many studs who were academically qualified and hadn't signed anywhere after he took the Cal job. Bwahahahaha. Sounds like someone likes to read a lot of fairy tales around here.

Maybe you think the grad transfer thing is stupid when you're turning around a dumpster fire of a program? I guess Hyder was a terrible pick up for you? Ironically, Oregon beat the stuffing out of us last night with a roster primarily made up of transfers from lower tier conferences. I guess Altman didn't call you to ask first?!

If you're a big follower of hoops recruiting, maybe you saw the 2021 class Fox landed? Two of the three were rated in the top 100 nationally. The other kid's highlights look awfully tasty. Certainly looks like recruiting's improving quite a bit.

Loads of points one could make being skeptical of Fox, just not sure the ones you made make me feel in tandem with your complete write off of the guy.

And you know sometimes the eye test does matter. Us old farts remember watching the early Bruce Snyder teams and having a clear view he was building something despite some tough losses. He turned out okay. Same dealio with Wilcox. Some coaches come to Cal and seem to fit. I think Mr. Fox may just be one of those. Similar to Monty's arrival, the players and the team as a whole seem to get better as they get coached up. You can see it when you watch. Oh yeah, forgot you're too busy writing long-winded pontificating posts to actually watch the games.

I wish you well, hope you get your hope back and can open up your heart and invest more time in watching Fox and his kids rather than ripping fans who are enjoying the ride. If not, that's cool. Most coaches do fail, so sitting on the sidelines waiting for him to crash and burn so you can say you were "right" might work out for you. I'm sure someone out there will appreciate you for that type of cynical future predictions.

Ciao

Strong post top to bottom. I'm not quite as optimistic on the Fox hire, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong, and he hasn't done anything to make me me think he won't prove me wrong.

Yeah, my view is Fox was a really bad hire by Knowlton, but I hope Knowlton gets lucky and Fox proves us all wrong. I certainly have nothing against Fox for going after and taking the job and the past does not always predict the future. Moreover, I always root for Cal and the players who wear the Blue and Gold and will be fellow alumni, so by extension I "root for their coach."

However, I do try to be rational and realistic about what is actually happening on the court.
Knowlton essentially had two options: A) Take a complete flyer on an unproven like DeCure or Gates and hope for the best while risking the Bears continue to crash & burn, or B) hire someone that will get the Bears out of the basement. He went with B), and although I would have preferred option A), I'm not sure he could have done better with his option B) hire.

Personally, I was actually leaning to go with an option C) where Knowlton retained Jones for the final year of his contract and then use the saved $ to go after a true up & comer. In COVID hindsight I'm happy we dodged that bullet!

DeCuire was not "unproven" at that point, he had just won the Big Sky Conference, Big Sky Tournament, Big Sky Coach of the Year and in the NCAA Tournament Montana was as "competitive" against #1 seed Michigan as this thread claims we were against #25 Oregon.

Also, Jason Kidd said in the press the Cal job was the only college job he was interested in, implying he would take it over waiting on the Lakers, but we apparently had already hired Fox.

"Getting out of the cellar" should not be the objective. The idea of hiring a guy you think is good "Xs and Os" coach to only get you out of the cellar, is even that is not guaranteed and the chances are he leaves the roster with less talent than he found it. As Georgia found out it can be 9 years wasted dwelling in the bottom half of the conference.

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In reply to calumnus • 3:17p, 1/2/21

calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
DrewFisher said:
OaktownBear said:
HoopDreams said:
Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?
I didn't. And I'm sure that will make you think AHA! But I can read a box score. When a team gets its doors blown off by 13 over a 4 and a half minute period, literally a pace to lose by more than 100 over a whole game, it wasn't a close game. It frankly amazes me that people that watch sports their whole life do not get this equation. Teams that never win have games that are close because every other team knows they suck, plays accordingly and normally at some point says, "okay, this is too close guys. time to turn on the jets".

So fine, was Cal competitive for 34 minutes with an Oregon team that was not playing up to its full capability? Yes. Was Cal competitive for 6 minutes with a team that was playing to about 75% capability. No. Had one of the good teams in conference gone up to Oregon and played like Cal did, against an Oregon team that was expecting to be playing a good team and to have to go all out start to finish to win, that team would have lost by 30.

Further, the post game analysis that is basically, well if only we had no injuries and every player had a career game we woulda won is silly.

You are going to find very few Cal fans who watch that game to say that Cal was not competitive because their are very few watching period and those that do are family, friends, and the hopelessly delusional. The rest of us have left.

Wyking Jones last team beat San Diego State, SJSU, Santa Clara, and lost to a Sweet 16 Oregon team on the road by 12. So if you think beating Seattle by 5 and losing to Oregon by 13 makes us competitive, you must have loved Wyking.

Fox was a cluster eff hire the minute it was made and has been every minute since and has doomed us to at least 5 years of a cluster eff program.

If you guys want to be complete suckers and waste your time when Cal is not remotely attempting to compete, they are only attempting to con a few of you into thinking they are attempting to compete, be my guest. But when OP wants to post a gloating "who says Cal isn't competitive?" post, based on a 13 point loss, it needs to be taken down more than a peg. Cal is not competitive. Not going to be any time soon. Having the theoretical ability to win a game does not make a team competitive. We lost to a team this year that lost to Bakersfield by 28 and we were out of the game by halftime.

As for the fantasy that the roster is getting better, it is just that. 3 of our starters were inherited from Wyking and 2 of the guys that left when Fox was hired would easily be starting. Fox has recruited exactly 1 player out of high school who is playing double digit minutes and no one can figure out why he is playing 30 seconds. He has back filled with an Ivy League player and an American Easter Conference player both of whom who have walked into major major minutes on a freaking Pac-12 team. You guys seem to be stoked about a sophomore who doesn't score 3 points a game. We will be lucky if any Freshman or Sophomore on this team at all will develop into a player that would start on a top half conference team by their senior year.

Edit:

Look where we are compared to Wyking Jones last year. 5 of the top 6 players by minutes on his team and 6 of the top 8 were freshman or sophomores. 3 of those players are still in our top minute getters. The other 3 are making significant contributions on other teams. We now have 1 underclassman getting significant minutes (Wyking recruit) and 1 getting 12.9 minutes per game which is about 12.8 minutes more than he would get on any other Pac-12 team.

That is the mark of how bad the future is. It is not improved from the depths of the last 40 years.
Sorta have to agree with your big point, a thread based on a 13 point loss showing Cal is competitive seems awfully silly, don't it?

The rest of your emphatic disdain for Fox and the program? Not feeling you. Don't get me wrong, Fox may turn out to be a bad hire but isn't it a bit early to make that call?

Of course, the roster and primary players are made up of Wyking's players. Fox only got to Cal eighteen months ago. I guess you expected him to pick up the poop pie that Jones left him and make it immediately smell sweet enough to recruit some impact HS kids?

Perhaps I missed something but didn't Fox win 2x as many games as Jones did after taking over even though he lost three starters to transfer outs and had no time to recruit? I guess he should have made the tourney with last years group for you to even deign to watch his team?

I'm an old guy who can a recall a bunch of Cal players who didn't quite figure it out until their third years. And that's when that had non COVID offseasons to work on their games. Does anyone remember Ayinde Ubaka, Solomon Hughes, Sean Marks, etc? To write off Bowser, Celestine, Kunary, Thiemann, Thorpe, Brown etc at this point (not even 18 months into their Bears careers) feels like premature "something". In reading through your post, I now see that Thorpe and Brown don't count because Wyking originally recruited them. Makes sense. Had Fox known he needed to prove something to you, he would have let them go and dug up more than few of the many studs who were academically qualified and hadn't signed anywhere after he took the Cal job. Bwahahahaha. Sounds like someone likes to read a lot of fairy tales around here.

Maybe you think the grad transfer thing is stupid when you're turning around a dumpster fire of a program? I guess Hyder was a terrible pick up for you? Ironically, Oregon beat the stuffing out of us last night with a roster primarily made up of transfers from lower tier conferences. I guess Altman didn't call you to ask first?!

If you're a big follower of hoops recruiting, maybe you saw the 2021 class Fox landed? Two of the three were rated in the top 100 nationally. The other kid's highlights look awfully tasty. Certainly looks like recruiting's improving quite a bit.

Loads of points one could make being skeptical of Fox, just not sure the ones you made make me feel in tandem with your complete write off of the guy.

And you know sometimes the eye test does matter. Us old farts remember watching the early Bruce Snyder teams and having a clear view he was building something despite some tough losses. He turned out okay. Same dealio with Wilcox. Some coaches come to Cal and seem to fit. I think Mr. Fox may just be one of those. Similar to Monty's arrival, the players and the team as a whole seem to get better as they get coached up. You can see it when you watch. Oh yeah, forgot you're too busy writing long-winded pontificating posts to actually watch the games.

I wish you well, hope you get your hope back and can open up your heart and invest more time in watching Fox and his kids rather than ripping fans who are enjoying the ride. If not, that's cool. Most coaches do fail, so sitting on the sidelines waiting for him to crash and burn so you can say you were "right" might work out for you. I'm sure someone out there will appreciate you for that type of cynical future predictions.

Ciao

Strong post top to bottom. I'm not quite as optimistic on the Fox hire, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong, and he hasn't done anything to make me me think he won't prove me wrong.

Yeah, my view is Fox was a really bad hire by Knowlton, but I hope Knowlton gets lucky and Fox proves us all wrong. I certainly have nothing against Fox for going after and taking the job and the past does not always predict the future. Moreover, I always root for Cal and the players who wear the Blue and Gold and will be fellow alumni, so by extension I "root for their coach."

However, I do try to be rational and realistic about what is actually happening on the court.
Knowlton essentially had two options: A) Take a complete flyer on an unproven like DeCure or Gates and hope for the best while risking the Bears continue to crash & burn, or B) hire someone that will get the Bears out of the basement. He went with B), and although I would have preferred option A), I'm not sure he could have done better with his option B) hire.

Personally, I was actually leaning to go with an option C) where Knowlton retained Jones for the final year of his contract and then use the saved $ to go after a true up & comer. In COVID hindsight I'm happy we dodged that bullet!

DeCuire was not "unproven" at that point, he had just won the Big Sky Conference, Big Sky Tournament, Big Sky Coach of the Year and in the NCAA Tournament Montana was as "competitive" against #1 seed Michigan as this thread claims we were against #25 Oregon.

Also, Jason Kidd said in the press the Cal job was the only college job he was interested in, implying he would take it over waiting on the Lakers, but we apparently had already hired Fox.

"Getting out of the cellar" should not be the objective. The idea of hiring a guy you think is good "Xs and Os" coach to only get you out of the cellar, is even that is not guaranteed and the chances are he leaves the roster with less talent than he found it. As Georgia found out it can be 9 years wasted dwelling in the bottom half of the conference.

I would have preferred a DeCuire hire as well, but winning the Big Sky hardly makes him a proven commodity, it least at the major conference level. And do we know for a fact that he wanted to take over a dumpster fire? Kidd would have been an even bigger crapshoot in my mind, although, again, I would have preferred it. Apparently, Knowlton felt the immediate need was to get Cal out of the cellar and back to some sort of respectability, and Fox was likey the safest hire to do that. As a near 30-year season ticket holder that gave them up under the last regime, I can say I am at least watching the Bears with some interest again.

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In reply to BearlyCareAnymore • 5:14p, 1/2/21

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In reply to calumnus • 7:01p, 1/2/21

calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
DrewFisher said:
OaktownBear said:
HoopDreams said:
Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?
I didn't. And I'm sure that will make you think AHA! But I can read a box score. When a team gets its doors blown off by 13 over a 4 and a half minute period, literally a pace to lose by more than 100 over a whole game, it wasn't a close game. It frankly amazes me that people that watch sports their whole life do not get this equation. Teams that never win have games that are close because every other team knows they suck, plays accordingly and normally at some point says, "okay, this is too close guys. time to turn on the jets".

So fine, was Cal competitive for 34 minutes with an Oregon team that was not playing up to its full capability? Yes. Was Cal competitive for 6 minutes with a team that was playing to about 75% capability. No. Had one of the good teams in conference gone up to Oregon and played like Cal did, against an Oregon team that was expecting to be playing a good team and to have to go all out start to finish to win, that team would have lost by 30.

Further, the post game analysis that is basically, well if only we had no injuries and every player had a career game we woulda won is silly.

You are going to find very few Cal fans who watch that game to say that Cal was not competitive because their are very few watching period and those that do are family, friends, and the hopelessly delusional. The rest of us have left.

Wyking Jones last team beat San Diego State, SJSU, Santa Clara, and lost to a Sweet 16 Oregon team on the road by 12. So if you think beating Seattle by 5 and losing to Oregon by 13 makes us competitive, you must have loved Wyking.

Fox was a cluster eff hire the minute it was made and has been every minute since and has doomed us to at least 5 years of a cluster eff program.

If you guys want to be complete suckers and waste your time when Cal is not remotely attempting to compete, they are only attempting to con a few of you into thinking they are attempting to compete, be my guest. But when OP wants to post a gloating "who says Cal isn't competitive?" post, based on a 13 point loss, it needs to be taken down more than a peg. Cal is not competitive. Not going to be any time soon. Having the theoretical ability to win a game does not make a team competitive. We lost to a team this year that lost to Bakersfield by 28 and we were out of the game by halftime.

As for the fantasy that the roster is getting better, it is just that. 3 of our starters were inherited from Wyking and 2 of the guys that left when Fox was hired would easily be starting. Fox has recruited exactly 1 player out of high school who is playing double digit minutes and no one can figure out why he is playing 30 seconds. He has back filled with an Ivy League player and an American Easter Conference player both of whom who have walked into major major minutes on a freaking Pac-12 team. You guys seem to be stoked about a sophomore who doesn't score 3 points a game. We will be lucky if any Freshman or Sophomore on this team at all will develop into a player that would start on a top half conference team by their senior year.

Edit:

Look where we are compared to Wyking Jones last year. 5 of the top 6 players by minutes on his team and 6 of the top 8 were freshman or sophomores. 3 of those players are still in our top minute getters. The other 3 are making significant contributions on other teams. We now have 1 underclassman getting significant minutes (Wyking recruit) and 1 getting 12.9 minutes per game which is about 12.8 minutes more than he would get on any other Pac-12 team.

That is the mark of how bad the future is. It is not improved from the depths of the last 40 years.
Sorta have to agree with your big point, a thread based on a 13 point loss showing Cal is competitive seems awfully silly, don't it?

The rest of your emphatic disdain for Fox and the program? Not feeling you. Don't get me wrong, Fox may turn out to be a bad hire but isn't it a bit early to make that call?

Of course, the roster and primary players are made up of Wyking's players. Fox only got to Cal eighteen months ago. I guess you expected him to pick up the poop pie that Jones left him and make it immediately smell sweet enough to recruit some impact HS kids?

Perhaps I missed something but didn't Fox win 2x as many games as Jones did after taking over even though he lost three starters to transfer outs and had no time to recruit? I guess he should have made the tourney with last years group for you to even deign to watch his team?

I'm an old guy who can a recall a bunch of Cal players who didn't quite figure it out until their third years. And that's when that had non COVID offseasons to work on their games. Does anyone remember Ayinde Ubaka, Solomon Hughes, Sean Marks, etc? To write off Bowser, Celestine, Kunary, Thiemann, Thorpe, Brown etc at this point (not even 18 months into their Bears careers) feels like premature "something". In reading through your post, I now see that Thorpe and Brown don't count because Wyking originally recruited them. Makes sense. Had Fox known he needed to prove something to you, he would have let them go and dug up more than few of the many studs who were academically qualified and hadn't signed anywhere after he took the Cal job. Bwahahahaha. Sounds like someone likes to read a lot of fairy tales around here.

Maybe you think the grad transfer thing is stupid when you're turning around a dumpster fire of a program? I guess Hyder was a terrible pick up for you? Ironically, Oregon beat the stuffing out of us last night with a roster primarily made up of transfers from lower tier conferences. I guess Altman didn't call you to ask first?!

If you're a big follower of hoops recruiting, maybe you saw the 2021 class Fox landed? Two of the three were rated in the top 100 nationally. The other kid's highlights look awfully tasty. Certainly looks like recruiting's improving quite a bit.

Loads of points one could make being skeptical of Fox, just not sure the ones you made make me feel in tandem with your complete write off of the guy.

And you know sometimes the eye test does matter. Us old farts remember watching the early Bruce Snyder teams and having a clear view he was building something despite some tough losses. He turned out okay. Same dealio with Wilcox. Some coaches come to Cal and seem to fit. I think Mr. Fox may just be one of those. Similar to Monty's arrival, the players and the team as a whole seem to get better as they get coached up. You can see it when you watch. Oh yeah, forgot you're too busy writing long-winded pontificating posts to actually watch the games.

I wish you well, hope you get your hope back and can open up your heart and invest more time in watching Fox and his kids rather than ripping fans who are enjoying the ride. If not, that's cool. Most coaches do fail, so sitting on the sidelines waiting for him to crash and burn so you can say you were "right" might work out for you. I'm sure someone out there will appreciate you for that type of cynical future predictions.

Ciao

Strong post top to bottom. I'm not quite as optimistic on the Fox hire, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong, and he hasn't done anything to make me me think he won't prove me wrong.

Yeah, my view is Fox was a really bad hire by Knowlton, but I hope Knowlton gets lucky and Fox proves us all wrong. I certainly have nothing against Fox for going after and taking the job and the past does not always predict the future. Moreover, I always root for Cal and the players who wear the Blue and Gold and will be fellow alumni, so by extension I "root for their coach."

However, I do try to be rational and realistic about what is actually happening on the court.
Knowlton essentially had two options: A) Take a complete flyer on an unproven like DeCure or Gates and hope for the best while risking the Bears continue to crash & burn, or B) hire someone that will get the Bears out of the basement. He went with B), and although I would have preferred option A), I'm not sure he could have done better with his option B) hire.

Personally, I was actually leaning to go with an option C) where Knowlton retained Jones for the final year of his contract and then use the saved $ to go after a true up & comer. In COVID hindsight I'm happy we dodged that bullet!

DeCuire was not "unproven" at that point, he had just won the Big Sky Conference, Big Sky Tournament, Big Sky Coach of the Year and in the NCAA Tournament Montana was as "competitive" against #1 seed Michigan as this thread claims we were against #25 Oregon.

Also, Jason Kidd said in the press the Cal job was the only college job he was interested in, implying he would take it over waiting on the Lakers, but we apparently had already hired Fox.

"Getting out of the cellar" should not be the objective. The idea of hiring a guy you think is good "Xs and Os" coach to only get you out of the cellar, is even that is not guaranteed and the chances are he leaves the roster with less talent than he found it. As Georgia found out it can be 9 years wasted dwelling in the bottom half of the conference.

The idea of Fox as a good Xs and Os coach is hilarious. What game is are people watching?

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7:10p, 1/2/21

Lots of good comments.

I do want to touch on the "competitiveness" angle.

When the Showtime Lakers were rolling opponents I knew that if they were within X points of the opponent where X roughly equaled minutes left in the game then they would come away with the win. Down 8 with 8 minutes to play? A gimme win. Those were not competitive games.

Competitive games were when the score was tied with 30 seconds to play - still usually a win but you could say the opponent came to play. So I agree that a double digit loss to Oregon was not a competitive loss. That was the expected result.

That said, there are good thing that can be taken away from the game and I am not sure that SFCItyBear should be bashed because he saw some fire in the kids playing for Cal. There is a different definition of competitive which is that the team is playing hard and trying to win. By that definition I do think Cal is competing. The players are playing with confidence in the team and the strategy. That is important. Fox hasn't lost them. He needs more talent, though.

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In reply to Civil Bear • 7:32p, 1/2/21

Civil Bear said:
calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
DrewFisher said:
OaktownBear said:
HoopDreams said:
Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?
I didn't. And I'm sure that will make you think AHA! But I can read a box score. When a team gets its doors blown off by 13 over a 4 and a half minute period, literally a pace to lose by more than 100 over a whole game, it wasn't a close game. It frankly amazes me that people that watch sports their whole life do not get this equation. Teams that never win have games that are close because every other team knows they suck, plays accordingly and normally at some point says, "okay, this is too close guys. time to turn on the jets".

So fine, was Cal competitive for 34 minutes with an Oregon team that was not playing up to its full capability? Yes. Was Cal competitive for 6 minutes with a team that was playing to about 75% capability. No. Had one of the good teams in conference gone up to Oregon and played like Cal did, against an Oregon team that was expecting to be playing a good team and to have to go all out start to finish to win, that team would have lost by 30.

Further, the post game analysis that is basically, well if only we had no injuries and every player had a career game we woulda won is silly.

You are going to find very few Cal fans who watch that game to say that Cal was not competitive because their are very few watching period and those that do are family, friends, and the hopelessly delusional. The rest of us have left.

Wyking Jones last team beat San Diego State, SJSU, Santa Clara, and lost to a Sweet 16 Oregon team on the road by 12. So if you think beating Seattle by 5 and losing to Oregon by 13 makes us competitive, you must have loved Wyking.

Fox was a cluster eff hire the minute it was made and has been every minute since and has doomed us to at least 5 years of a cluster eff program.

If you guys want to be complete suckers and waste your time when Cal is not remotely attempting to compete, they are only attempting to con a few of you into thinking they are attempting to compete, be my guest. But when OP wants to post a gloating "who says Cal isn't competitive?" post, based on a 13 point loss, it needs to be taken down more than a peg. Cal is not competitive. Not going to be any time soon. Having the theoretical ability to win a game does not make a team competitive. We lost to a team this year that lost to Bakersfield by 28 and we were out of the game by halftime.

As for the fantasy that the roster is getting better, it is just that. 3 of our starters were inherited from Wyking and 2 of the guys that left when Fox was hired would easily be starting. Fox has recruited exactly 1 player out of high school who is playing double digit minutes and no one can figure out why he is playing 30 seconds. He has back filled with an Ivy League player and an American Easter Conference player both of whom who have walked into major major minutes on a freaking Pac-12 team. You guys seem to be stoked about a sophomore who doesn't score 3 points a game. We will be lucky if any Freshman or Sophomore on this team at all will develop into a player that would start on a top half conference team by their senior year.

Edit:

Look where we are compared to Wyking Jones last year. 5 of the top 6 players by minutes on his team and 6 of the top 8 were freshman or sophomores. 3 of those players are still in our top minute getters. The other 3 are making significant contributions on other teams. We now have 1 underclassman getting significant minutes (Wyking recruit) and 1 getting 12.9 minutes per game which is about 12.8 minutes more than he would get on any other Pac-12 team.

That is the mark of how bad the future is. It is not improved from the depths of the last 40 years.
Sorta have to agree with your big point, a thread based on a 13 point loss showing Cal is competitive seems awfully silly, don't it?

The rest of your emphatic disdain for Fox and the program? Not feeling you. Don't get me wrong, Fox may turn out to be a bad hire but isn't it a bit early to make that call?

Of course, the roster and primary players are made up of Wyking's players. Fox only got to Cal eighteen months ago. I guess you expected him to pick up the poop pie that Jones left him and make it immediately smell sweet enough to recruit some impact HS kids?

Perhaps I missed something but didn't Fox win 2x as many games as Jones did after taking over even though he lost three starters to transfer outs and had no time to recruit? I guess he should have made the tourney with last years group for you to even deign to watch his team?

I'm an old guy who can a recall a bunch of Cal players who didn't quite figure it out until their third years. And that's when that had non COVID offseasons to work on their games. Does anyone remember Ayinde Ubaka, Solomon Hughes, Sean Marks, etc? To write off Bowser, Celestine, Kunary, Thiemann, Thorpe, Brown etc at this point (not even 18 months into their Bears careers) feels like premature "something". In reading through your post, I now see that Thorpe and Brown don't count because Wyking originally recruited them. Makes sense. Had Fox known he needed to prove something to you, he would have let them go and dug up more than few of the many studs who were academically qualified and hadn't signed anywhere after he took the Cal job. Bwahahahaha. Sounds like someone likes to read a lot of fairy tales around here.

Maybe you think the grad transfer thing is stupid when you're turning around a dumpster fire of a program? I guess Hyder was a terrible pick up for you? Ironically, Oregon beat the stuffing out of us last night with a roster primarily made up of transfers from lower tier conferences. I guess Altman didn't call you to ask first?!

If you're a big follower of hoops recruiting, maybe you saw the 2021 class Fox landed? Two of the three were rated in the top 100 nationally. The other kid's highlights look awfully tasty. Certainly looks like recruiting's improving quite a bit.

Loads of points one could make being skeptical of Fox, just not sure the ones you made make me feel in tandem with your complete write off of the guy.

And you know sometimes the eye test does matter. Us old farts remember watching the early Bruce Snyder teams and having a clear view he was building something despite some tough losses. He turned out okay. Same dealio with Wilcox. Some coaches come to Cal and seem to fit. I think Mr. Fox may just be one of those. Similar to Monty's arrival, the players and the team as a whole seem to get better as they get coached up. You can see it when you watch. Oh yeah, forgot you're too busy writing long-winded pontificating posts to actually watch the games.

I wish you well, hope you get your hope back and can open up your heart and invest more time in watching Fox and his kids rather than ripping fans who are enjoying the ride. If not, that's cool. Most coaches do fail, so sitting on the sidelines waiting for him to crash and burn so you can say you were "right" might work out for you. I'm sure someone out there will appreciate you for that type of cynical future predictions.

Ciao

Strong post top to bottom. I'm not quite as optimistic on the Fox hire, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong, and he hasn't done anything to make me me think he won't prove me wrong.

Yeah, my view is Fox was a really bad hire by Knowlton, but I hope Knowlton gets lucky and Fox proves us all wrong. I certainly have nothing against Fox for going after and taking the job and the past does not always predict the future. Moreover, I always root for Cal and the players who wear the Blue and Gold and will be fellow alumni, so by extension I "root for their coach."

However, I do try to be rational and realistic about what is actually happening on the court.
Knowlton essentially had two options: A) Take a complete flyer on an unproven like DeCure or Gates and hope for the best while risking the Bears continue to crash & burn, or B) hire someone that will get the Bears out of the basement. He went with B), and although I would have preferred option A), I'm not sure he could have done better with his option B) hire.

Personally, I was actually leaning to go with an option C) where Knowlton retained Jones for the final year of his contract and then use the saved $ to go after a true up & comer. In COVID hindsight I'm happy we dodged that bullet!

DeCuire was not "unproven" at that point, he had just won the Big Sky Conference, Big Sky Tournament, Big Sky Coach of the Year and in the NCAA Tournament Montana was as "competitive" against #1 seed Michigan as this thread claims we were against #25 Oregon.

Also, Jason Kidd said in the press the Cal job was the only college job he was interested in, implying he would take it over waiting on the Lakers, but we apparently had already hired Fox.

"Getting out of the cellar" should not be the objective. The idea of hiring a guy you think is good "Xs and Os" coach to only get you out of the cellar, is even that is not guaranteed and the chances are he leaves the roster with less talent than he found it. As Georgia found out it can be 9 years wasted dwelling in the bottom half of the conference.
I would have preferred a DeCuire hire as well, but winning the Big Sky hardly makes him a proven commodity, it least at the major conference level. And do we know for a fact that he wanted to take over a dumpster fire? Kidd would have been an even bigger crapshoot in my mind, although, again, I would have preferred it. Apparently, Knowlton felt the immediate need was to get Cal out of the cellar and back to some sort of respectability, and Fox was likey the safest hire to do that. As a near 30-year season ticket holder that gave them up under the last regime, I can say I am at least watching the Bears with some interest again.

oh, you mean like Monty? (who by the way strongly recommended DeCuire for the job ... twice)

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8:54p, 1/2/21

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In reply to HoopDreams • 11:31p, 1/2/21

HoopDreams said:
Civil Bear said:
calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
calumnus said:
Civil Bear said:
DrewFisher said:
OaktownBear said:
HoopDreams said:
Question for Oak:

If that's your perspective then why did you watch the game?
I didn't. And I'm sure that will make you think AHA! But I can read a box score. When a team gets its doors blown off by 13 over a 4 and a half minute period, literally a pace to lose by more than 100 over a whole game, it wasn't a close game. It frankly amazes me that people that watch sports their whole life do not get this equation. Teams that never win have games that are close because every other team knows they suck, plays accordingly and normally at some point says, "okay, this is too close guys. time to turn on the jets".

So fine, was Cal competitive for 34 minutes with an Oregon team that was not playing up to its full capability? Yes. Was Cal competitive for 6 minutes with a team that was playing to about 75% capability. No. Had one of the good teams in conference gone up to Oregon and played like Cal did, against an Oregon team that was expecting to be playing a good team and to have to go all out start to finish to win, that team would have lost by 30.

Further, the post game analysis that is basically, well if only we had no injuries and every player had a career game we woulda won is silly.

You are going to find very few Cal fans who watch that game to say that Cal was not competitive because their are very few watching period and those that do are family, friends, and the hopelessly delusional. The rest of us have left.

Wyking Jones last team beat San Diego State, SJSU, Santa Clara, and lost to a Sweet 16 Oregon team on the road by 12. So if you think beating Seattle by 5 and losing to Oregon by 13 makes us competitive, you must have loved Wyking.

Fox was a cluster eff hire the minute it was made and has been every minute since and has doomed us to at least 5 years of a cluster eff program.

If you guys want to be complete suckers and waste your time when Cal is not remotely attempting to compete, they are only attempting to con a few of you into thinking they are attempting to compete, be my guest. But when OP wants to post a gloating "who says Cal isn't competitive?" post, based on a 13 point loss, it needs to be taken down more than a peg. Cal is not competitive. Not going to be any time soon. Having the theoretical ability to win a game does not make a team competitive. We lost to a team this year that lost to Bakersfield by 28 and we were out of the game by halftime.

As for the fantasy that the roster is getting better, it is just that. 3 of our starters were inherited from Wyking and 2 of the guys that left when Fox was hired would easily be starting. Fox has recruited exactly 1 player out of high school who is playing double digit minutes and no one can figure out why he is playing 30 seconds. He has back filled with an Ivy League player and an American Easter Conference player both of whom who have walked into major major minutes on a freaking Pac-12 team. You guys seem to be stoked about a sophomore who doesn't score 3 points a game. We will be lucky if any Freshman or Sophomore on this team at all will develop into a player that would start on a top half conference team by their senior year.

Edit:

Look where we are compared to Wyking Jones last year. 5 of the top 6 players by minutes on his team and 6 of the top 8 were freshman or sophomores. 3 of those players are still in our top minute getters. The other 3 are making significant contributions on other teams. We now have 1 underclassman getting significant minutes (Wyking recruit) and 1 getting 12.9 minutes per game which is about 12.8 minutes more than he would get on any other Pac-12 team.

That is the mark of how bad the future is. It is not improved from the depths of the last 40 years.
Sorta have to agree with your big point, a thread based on a 13 point loss showing Cal is competitive seems awfully silly, don't it?

The rest of your emphatic disdain for Fox and the program? Not feeling you. Don't get me wrong, Fox may turn out to be a bad hire but isn't it a bit early to make that call?

Of course, the roster and primary players are made up of Wyking's players. Fox only got to Cal eighteen months ago. I guess you expected him to pick up the poop pie that Jones left him and make it immediately smell sweet enough to recruit some impact HS kids?

Perhaps I missed something but didn't Fox win 2x as many games as Jones did after taking over even though he lost three starters to transfer outs and had no time to recruit? I guess he should have made the tourney with last years group for you to even deign to watch his team?

I'm an old guy who can a recall a bunch of Cal players who didn't quite figure it out until their third years. And that's when that had non COVID offseasons to work on their games. Does anyone remember Ayinde Ubaka, Solomon Hughes, Sean Marks, etc? To write off Bowser, Celestine, Kunary, Thiemann, Thorpe, Brown etc at this point (not even 18 months into their Bears careers) feels like premature "something". In reading through your post, I now see that Thorpe and Brown don't count because Wyking originally recruited them. Makes sense. Had Fox known he needed to prove something to you, he would have let them go and dug up more than few of the many studs who were academically qualified and hadn't signed anywhere after he took the Cal job. Bwahahahaha. Sounds like someone likes to read a lot of fairy tales around here.

Maybe you think the grad transfer thing is stupid when you're turning around a dumpster fire of a program? I guess Hyder was a terrible pick up for you? Ironically, Oregon beat the stuffing out of us last night with a roster primarily made up of transfers from lower tier conferences. I guess Altman didn't call you to ask first?!

If you're a big follower of hoops recruiting, maybe you saw the 2021 class Fox landed? Two of the three were rated in the top 100 nationally. The other kid's highlights look awfully tasty. Certainly looks like recruiting's improving quite a bit.

Loads of points one could make being skeptical of Fox, just not sure the ones you made make me feel in tandem with your complete write off of the guy.

And you know sometimes the eye test does matter. Us old farts remember watching the early Bruce Snyder teams and having a clear view he was building something despite some tough losses. He turned out okay. Same dealio with Wilcox. Some coaches come to Cal and seem to fit. I think Mr. Fox may just be one of those. Similar to Monty's arrival, the players and the team as a whole seem to get better as they get coached up. You can see it when you watch. Oh yeah, forgot you're too busy writing long-winded pontificating posts to actually watch the games.

I wish you well, hope you get your hope back and can open up your heart and invest more time in watching Fox and his kids rather than ripping fans who are enjoying the ride. If not, that's cool. Most coaches do fail, so sitting on the sidelines waiting for him to crash and burn so you can say you were "right" might work out for you. I'm sure someone out there will appreciate you for that type of cynical future predictions.

Ciao

Strong post top to bottom. I'm not quite as optimistic on the Fox hire, but I'm hoping to be proven wrong, and he hasn't done anything to make me me think he won't prove me wrong.

Yeah, my view is Fox was a really bad hire by Knowlton, but I hope Knowlton gets lucky and Fox proves us all wrong. I certainly have nothing against Fox for going after and taking the job and the past does not always predict the future. Moreover, I always root for Cal and the players who wear the Blue and Gold and will be fellow alumni, so by extension I "root for their coach."

However, I do try to be rational and realistic about what is actually happening on the court.
Knowlton essentially had two options: A) Take a complete flyer on an unproven like DeCure or Gates and hope for the best while risking the Bears continue to crash & burn, or B) hire someone that will get the Bears out of the basement. He went with B), and although I would have preferred option A), I'm not sure he could have done better with his option B) hire.

Personally, I was actually leaning to go with an option C) where Knowlton retained Jones for the final year of his contract and then use the saved $ to go after a true up & comer. In COVID hindsight I'm happy we dodged that bullet!

DeCuire was not "unproven" at that point, he had just won the Big Sky Conference, Big Sky Tournament, Big Sky Coach of the Year and in the NCAA Tournament Montana was as "competitive" against #1 seed Michigan as this thread claims we were against #25 Oregon.

Also, Jason Kidd said in the press the Cal job was the only college job he was interested in, implying he would take it over waiting on the Lakers, but we apparently had already hired Fox.

"Getting out of the cellar" should not be the objective. The idea of hiring a guy you think is good "Xs and Os" coach to only get you out of the cellar, is even that is not guaranteed and the chances are he leaves the roster with less talent than he found it. As Georgia found out it can be 9 years wasted dwelling in the bottom half of the conference.
I would have preferred a DeCuire hire as well, but winning the Big Sky hardly makes him a proven commodity, it least at the major conference level. And do we know for a fact that he wanted to take over a dumpster fire? Kidd would have been an even bigger crapshoot in my mind, although, again, I would have preferred it. Apparently, Knowlton felt the immediate need was to get Cal out of the cellar and back to some sort of respectability, and Fox was likey the safest hire to do that. As a near 30-year season ticket holder that gave them up under the last regime, I can say I am at least watching the Bears with some interest again.
oh, you mean like Monty? (who by the way strongly recommended DeCuire for the job ... twice)

Source?