Bear Insider Video: Cal Offensive Line Coach Famika Anae

New Cal offensive line coach Famika Anae may be on the young said having graduated from BYU in 2014 but he also brings a wealth of experience with him to Berkeley.

Anae signed with BYU out of high school and started for the Cougars as a sophomore, earning Honorable Mention honors. He also grew up around football, being from a football family, starting with father Robert, who coached at BYU when his son was there and most recently the offensive coordinator at North Carolina State through 2024.

"My redshirt freshman year was the end of his first stint as an offensive coordinator there (at BYU) and then he went to the University of Arizona during my playing career and then came back to BYU right when I was done," Anae noted. "So I got to work for him. I was a scout team redshirt freshman guy when he was coordinating at BYU."

The new Bears OL coach took inspiration learning from his father, with lessons he brought with him to Cal.

"I did," Anae said. "My dad is my greatest mentor. I learned everything that I do from him - resiliency, toughness, grit, all that stuff. But I do come from a lineage of coaches. My grandfather was a longtime coach Punahou High School in Hawaii. That is the house my grandfather built. And I take great pride in that my dad kind of followed in his footsteps. I'm just continuing the family tree of coaching. And I do consider it that way. I do look at it that way, and it is a great source of motivation and strength for me."

Anae got his feet wet coaching at Dixie State, Campbell and Texas-Commerce before taking the job at New Mexico last season.

It was a tough assignment for the new OL coach, with just two returning linemen who didn’t play in 2023 and saw little time on the field last season after his arrival.

Nevertheless, Anae helped work a veritable miracle with the Lobos, cobbling together a line from small programs through the portal and building a unit that led the nation in sacks allowed with just five and finishing fourth overall in total offense.

"Oh, geez, yeah, that was a tall task," Anae exclaimed. "What ended up happening is every starter on that offensive line this past year was a transfer. And you know, I have always attributed that to recruiting and the evaluation of the correct person. The way that I recruit and look at things is different in terms of, I really don't care first about measurables, and I really don't care first about how pretty a pass that is, or stuff. It's all toughness with me. And I was able to gauge everything that I was looking at off of that lens first. And I do believe that that contributed to that group. 

"So basically, I got five really tough kids, and they endured everything that I put them through. They endured everything that the season gave to them, and they just thrived in all of those situations. I will get text messages and calls from them when this article comes out if I do not mention that none of those sacks were given up by the five starters. They were positions outside of that room. They still guard that heavily, so they will call me on that if I don't mention that, because on paper, it says five, but for those boys, it was zero from the start to the finish of that year."

One of the players Anae has brought aboard from the portal was redshirt frosh lineman LaJuan Owens‍, who started for him at OT at New Mexico in 2024.

"Yeah, young guy," Anae noted. "I had recruited him in high school and I knew what he was about. He ended up going to Tulane. I was at Texas-Commerce at the time. So he ended up going to Tulane. Got back in the portal, but I had already known who that kid was and what he was about. So he came to New Mexico as a redshirt freshman. Ended up starting for us and being one of the higher PFF graders at that position. 

"And so that was the same thing here. Recruited them here and then told them, 'Hey, you already know how this thing goes, what I expect, but now we're talking about an elite education on top of that.' All worked out and I told him and his mom this - 'I got hit by a bus on my way home. This is absolutely a school that you need to be at.' So I have a very close relationship with his mother and it all worked out in terms of him being here at Cal."

In assessing Cal’s returning linemen and the new players he’s brought aboard, he’s excited about what he has to work with.

"Very athletic, very skilled," Anae said of his new charges. "They're smart. They know how to process a playbook and be where they're supposed to be. And to me, that's kind of been the connector piece. I do believe I was hired for a very specific reason on on how to do those things right but they have shown a really strong capacity to be very talented athletically and a strong capacity to kind of pick up information on the go and process it. So I do consider those very high qualities of this room currently, and man, we're fighting like crazy every day to bring up the other stuff."

Having watched new Cal offensive coordinator Bryan Harsin coach at Boise State, the new head of the trenches at Cal is excited to learn from and compete with his new OC.

"It's been great," Anae said. "That guy is extremely detailed. You can see why he's been a head coach at Power-5 schools, why he's been an offensive coordinator at Power-5 schools, the detail in which it takes to one coordinate an offense, but the expectation of our players to operate at, I think, is was the secret to why he's been so successful. And now that I've seen it in real time, it all makes sense, right? Because when you're playing at BYU, you know the Boise thing, there's a rivalry there, right? And you see it from our side. It's just tough dudes, but they're really good players, right? And they're very smart, and now that I've seen the details of how that iswith Coach Harsin, and it all makes total sense to me why Boise State has been a perennial powerhouse program for so long, and it's because of the way that coach Harsin expects us to be as coaches and expects our offense to be as players."

The new Cal OL coach doesn’t go by the book in assessing what makes a lineman the right guy for him but toughness is always a necessary ingredient for any of his players.

"Well, in the recruiting process, to me, it's always been the third thing," Anae noted. "School's mandatory. Football - I mean in that arena (recruiting), everybody's doing that. Then a guy's ability to show something else as to what dedicates him to that thing has always told me that he has some form of grit.

“The normal thing is (having) a job, because if you're balancing football, high school and working at Dairy Queen or something - now there is a level of grit to that, but to me, it's always been the third thing, and then a coach caring enough to pay attention to put them in those situations and see how they respond. I think it's always been the number one thing once they're here, or guys that you've inherited that are now yours.

“I think it's the O-line coach's job to put them in compromising situations daily and seeing how they respond to those things. So that's kind of how I check, checks and balances, the whole deal in terms of gauging, where our toughness level is at. And you know, I told the guys yesterday - man on our run, did we do good enough to earn individual time? And their answer was no. So they pushed 45 pound plates up and down the sideline. They chose that right? And I think that stuff, to me, is where you start to develop a mentality of toughness and grit through adversity, that just because you're tired in a run, that doesn't mean you get to do worse at your job. You know what I mean? And if you do not have that relentless mindset, oh man, it's not very fun playing anymore."

Stay tuned for more new coach and player interviews in days to come leading up to spring ball and beyond.