Losing so many starters on offense, almost all new coaches on offense, and losing defensive coordinator is not a great way to start the season. Even being competitive will be a challenge. Still excited to watch some football in 4 weeks.
Photo by X / Cal Football
Cal Football
Cal Football Fall Camp Kicks Off
The 2025 season officially kicked off today with the start of fall camp, a day after players officially reported after some time off yesterday. However, heading into head coach Justin Wilcox’s ninth season, it wasn’t business as usual, as the media did not have it’s usual access to practice and the staff also debuted a new practice system planned for the first four days of practice, with a blue squad and a gold squad practicing in different back-to-back periods that split the practice in half.
"It's just to get more intensive coaching on the individuals," Wilcox said of the initial practice changes. "So they get the same amount of reps and the coaches are doing two practices, but the players are doing one. So you're basically practicing with half the team, and they have a full practice. And then we cross over and do some special things together as an entire group, and then we go and take the gold group and do the same practice we did with the blue group.
“It's just basically half the team practicing against each other at one time, and that way, we get more attention to a lot of new players who maybe haven't been here or haven't played as much, and they just get more intensive one-on-one (time) with the coaches.
“I've done it before at other places, so it's not a new concept. We're just using it because we think it fits our team. And then just being able to spend more time with them, and also, I think it helps the practice. Those individual practices run a bit smoother, because sometimes when you have 115 (113 players at this stage) and you really want to get three and four groups reps, a given team period gets to be 30 minutes because you're going ones, twos, threes, fours, ones, twos, threes, fours, so this way you really kind of have two groups going against each other in each practice and it just moves better. But don't read into the blue or the gold (squads). I mean, we're literally just trying to get guys reps, and we balance it out so we have enough defensive and offensive players to populate the different groups, base and nickel on defense and all the different groupings on offense."
Wilcox noted that the team health is as good as it’s been heading into fall camp, noting that defensive lineman Nate Burrell is the only player expected to miss the season this year with an injury suffered in the offseason.
Adding more color to the team’s health and conditioning, Wilcox was asked about the impact that new strength and conditioning coach Jason Novak and his strength staff have had on the players, particularly receiver Dazmin James, who came to Cal on the slighter side after spending his freshman season at Arkansas but recently showed off his impressive new physique via Twitter.
"Yeah, that was evident. I had to text Daz and ask him if that was AI or not," Wilcox said with a smile. "It was a legitimate question. And man, physically, we've never been healthier or looked this good so that's that's great. I mean, it's good for the players. It's good for our team. Now we gotta have that translate to football. But really impressed with Coach Novak and his staff. Our players are believers and they feel really good. They look really good. And now, again, it's about translating that to the football field."
On the back battle, don’t expect to see a starter named between Ohio State junior transfer Devin Brown or 5 star frosh QB Jaron Keawe Sagapolutele any time soon.
"Just continuing to develop physically," Wilcox noted "We get time with them in June to spend meeting time with them. They did a really good job there. And so now it's about doing it on the field, but really excited about that quarterback room from top to bottom. And now it's another reason this split practice has really helped, because you get intensive coaching on those guys just like the rest of the positions."
Stay tuned for upcoming one-on-one interviews with some of the newest Cal additions, coming up.
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