All sport fandom is built on hope. Most college football fandom is built on irrational hope.
It’s an important distinction. 82 out of 92 NBA/NFL/MLB franchises have reached the championship round. Any NBA franchise can win the lottery. The NFL’s entire system is built on parity. Baseball is a sport built on the intoxicating promise of a new season each spring. Even college basketball operates in a structure that provides a path to the post season for every single team in the country, and even the smallest schools can dream of their March moment.
College football is brutally different. In the 28 seasons since the BCS and then the playoffs established some kind of on-the-field determination of a national champion, 15 teams (of 138 now in the FBS) have won a national title. 12 of those teams currently play in the SEC or the Big 10. In the 12 year existence of the college football playoffs, 64 bids have been handed out. 44 have gone to teams currently playing in the SEC or the Big 10, 20 to the rest of the country. If you remove Notre Dame and Clemson from the tally, 20 goes down to 10.
If you’re not an elite program and/or in an elite conference, your path to relevance is very narrow and requires excellence at every level in support of the football program.
For the last 15 years, Cal has only occasionally shown basic competence, let alone excellent. Trying to subsist on irrational hope was burning me out*.
For nine long years, we watched the same season on repeat each fall. The plot points, the characters, the arc, the climax, all the same.
Every defense had a strong secondary, a middle linebacker who would rack up tackles, and a pass rush that rarely got home. Every offense struggled with roster holes at tackle and a lack of pass catching depth. There was the pre-season new offensive coordinator creating false optimism. The early season false dawn win over a non-conference opponent. The early season conference loss that brought reality crashing down, and the October fade to below .500 in conference play, before an empty-calorie win over Stanford, a ~6-6 record, and a bowl loss.
And that’s ON the field. During this nine year stretch, Cal’s athletic department leadership ranged from quietly incompetent (Mike Williams) to very loudly incompetent (Jim Knowlton), and you couldn’t help but fear that whatever on-field success Justin Wilcox found was in spite of campus leadership.
Over the last few years, when it came time to write a best-case-scenario preview article and imagine the top 1% season outcome, the best I could do was to envision a world where Cal goes 9-4. Even when I squinted and imagined that every unknown from the off-season got a positive answer, the best I could see was being a second tier conference contender with a mid range bowl reward. And that was when Justin Wilcox began operating with a decent haul of transfers during the latency period of Cal’s more mature fundraising operation.
So what does Tosh Lupoi and the modern support structure of Cal football mean to me?
Real hope.
Real hope has historically been a fleeting thing for a program like Cal.
Not any more. The college football world has watched Indiana, Texas Tech, SMU, Ole Miss and Miami all adapt quickly to the new rules of engagement to make the playoffs and end droughts of irrelevancy that ranged from decades to basically all of modern college football history.
Cal is pretty explicitly trying to use the same playbook, and the fruits are obvious. Cal’s most recent transfer portal class ranked in the teens nationally and was 3rd in the ACC. Cal’s 2027 recruiting class is comfortably in the top 25 nationally and in competition to rank 2nd in the ACC. In short, Miami is the only ACC program pulling in clearly better talent than Tosh Lupoi and the University of California.
For the last nine years, hope was a bit more . . . subjective. You allowed yourself to imagine that every transfer was going to seamlessly fit in, that every redshirt freshman just needed a season of strength and conditioning to realize their promise, that every new coach was the teaching savant Cal’s players needed, that every close game would swing Cal’s way.
Now, hope is much more objective. Recruiting rankings are real and measurable. Dollars are real and measurable. Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele is real and measurable.
To be clear, I have no idea what Cal football will achieve this year, or in the next few years. As noted above, the ceiling college football places on non-elite programs has historically been incredibly difficult to break through. Oregon had to bang their head against the barrier for a decade plus before the sheer weight of Uncle Phil’s millions broke through. Competent non-power programs like Boise State and Tulane have to maintain that competence for years for the hope of a power conference golden ticket.
And while Lupoi and company have done as good a job as could be hoped to revamp a roster, the jump from where Cal has been to where Cal wants to be is significant. Without falling into the “this is how long since Cal achieved [good thing]” trope, the main thing to remember is that last year’s roster finished 7-6 against a remarkably weak schedule despite enjoying the services of the best freshman quarterback in the country.
Between now and September 5, this blog will attempt to answer a wide range of unknowable questions. How much better can JKS get in year two? Will Cal be able to find answers at offensive tackle? How will a bevy of coaches who are largely unproven at the college level adapt? What will a defense that is long on upside but short on proven production end up producing? How many wins does Tosh need in year one to keep the money train rolling?
Some of those questions thrill me. Others terrify me. All of them energize me.
Because they’re different questions, uncertain questions. For nearly a decade August brought the same questions and the same answers, few of them good and none of them all that meaningful.
Indeed, there’s something new under the sun. Right now, it looks pretty golden.
*On that note: apologies for my multi-month absence from the website, while I took some time to recharge and/or focus on my actual 9-5 job. Now that the off-season is over, normal service will resume.
Great to have you back. NOW the season can begin!
Great to have you back Nick, and like you I hope RR and Tosh's great recruiting will turn into winning X's and O's at CMS. The ACC needs more than just Miami to compete with the SEC and Big10. Why not Cal? Go Bears!