I’m at a loss.
The California Golden Bears have talented football players. Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele will have his fair share of suitors in the transfer portal competing with Cal for his services. Kingston Lopa is climbing up NFL Draft boards. Cal has a talented duo of tight ends in Mason Mini and Taimane Purcell, and up-and-coming defenders all across the roster in AJ Tuitele and Daniel Harris. Chase Hendricks, Adam Mohammed (when healthy), and Ian Strong are all very capable weapons. There are guys who can play!
Yes, the Bears still have a very ineffective offensive line, an inability to generate pressure despite a defensive philosophy that demands aggression, horrid injury luck, and its fair share of disappointments and development projects. Still, I long gave up on dreamy expectations weeks ago, and just looked for a middling season of ups and downs.
This team should not be contending for worst team in Power 4 football. And yet.
Even after back-to-back astonishing drubbings against SMU and Wake Forest, I still had hopes that Cal could rally against the final third of that schedule and play competitive football. These were four games against very flawed to bad teams, all capable of turning the ship around.
That hope was extinguished Saturday morning.
With a chance to kickstart a late-season turnaround after a sickos first-half classic, first-time head coach Tosh Lupoi was thoroughly outcoached again. This time, it was by an interim first-time, first-week head coach, and I’m resigned to the fact that this pattern will generally happen the rest of the year.
Aside from a handful of second-quarter plays, a bottom-tier NC State defense that has conceded four touchdowns a game to every P4 opponent completely shut down a dysfunctional Cal offense. CJ Bailey broke open the early resistance of the Cal defense by finding our weaker links on a few deep throws. Then the NC State run game ground down a tiring Wolfpack defense to modest success in the 3rd/early 4th quarter to break it open.
This capped a 63-0 second-half run over two straight second halves, after Cal was outscored 104-0 over the three decisive periods in the past three weeks, culminating a series of stretches in which Cal has been outscored 209-6.
This was Cal’s easiest game left on its schedule, and against an interim coach, they completely flopped with variations of the same bad formulas.
It’s been unremitting, unrelenting, slasher football. It is fitting this game was on Halloween, because it was yet another sequel of an unending horror franchise. Same victims, same culprits, no reflection or autopsy, not even scares, just predictable, mindless gore.
Cal is not a serious football program right now. The terrifying part is I don’t know how long it will take for them to be serious again.
Where to begin with the horror that is this Cal offense.
Pat McCann, Cal’s second playcaller on the season, seemed to find a good rhythm against UNLV and Virginia Tech, and had a nice half of gadgetry against SMU. But with the tricks on tape, Cal looked just as lost as they ever have against the Wolfpack on offense. As the run game stalled, Sagapolutele struggled to execute the basics, and most of last week’s gadgets were sniffed out and locked up.
After spending god knows how much on skill weapons to give Sagapolutele the weaponry he needed to succeed, it was JUCO transfer quarterback Dominic Ingrassia who was again running designed keepers or zone reads yet again to pick up a few yards to set up 2nd and 5, except by the 3rd time they ran it, it was pretty clear what call was coming, and that JKS (who was also in the game for most of these snaps) would just stand on the outside while NC State crowded the box. All that for 18 yards!
There were designed JKS run reads, except he can’t really run, and struggles with reads, so his longest gain was a grand zero yards. There were non-stop checkdowns to the flats behind the line of scrimmage again (despite 29 completions, Sagapolutele had only 116 air yards, so about 4 yards in the air per pass completion). One of the best deep throwers in college football took four long shots all game, with Hendricks hauling in the only touchdown of the game. And there were multiple 3rd-and-long run plays.
These aren’t even concepts of a plan. This is desperate offense.
These performances are not all McCann’s fault. This Frankenstein was installed by supposed wunderkind Jordan Somerville, and even though he was part of the braintrust, there was only faint hope that McCann (who only has a handful of playcalling years on him) could rebuild our offense from scratch in a few weeks to get us through a full season.
By the second half, Cal felt like they were essentially back to running huge chunks of that playbook, with the audibles and variations of the same run play, because it’s really all this offense seemed to learn this offseason, and they have no changeup philosophy to fall back on to even come close to making this offense even look mediocre. The Bears came nowhere close to scoring or producing, of course, and the result became elementary.
Even then, it’s not all Somerville’s fault either. Tosh Lupoi hired a first-time offensive coordinator to install an offense that was simultaneously too complex to learn and too simple to diagnose. Its failure has materially damaged the stock of the top 2028 NFL Draft prospects.
Whether he hasn’t progressed as far as we’d have liked is irrelevant; it’s on the staff to build an offense that fits their best talent, and hide weaknesses like a very limited offensive line. Right now, it is producing utterly deficient outcomes.
This is a systemic failure, and we are now far past the expiration date for fixing this in an acceptable manner.
Go up and down the staff, and you see staffers (some in their first major college coaching position) making mistakes, week after week.
Defensive coordinator Michael Hutchings has capability, as he has shown the last couple of weeks. There have also been a half-dozen stretches this year where the defense gets blown off the field. I know this is a young unit with a lot of unproven talent, but there haven’t been real signs of improvement in the critical stretches.
The constant defensive sub patterns seem to be the biggest strategic issue, as offenses wait for the proper vulnerable matchup to expose. Backups are often in on critical plays, and they are getting relentlessly targeted and burned in key moments.
Whether this is on Lupoi or Hutchings isn’t something I know; all I know is NFL defenses don’t frequently sub, and Lupoi’s Oregon squads often did. Oregon also had four and five-star talents stacking their roster; Cal has backups with a combined snap count in the double digits coming into this year.
Much of the young Oregon staffers Lupoi brought down are now defensive assistants, and the results are checkered. For a team Lupoi wants to have an aggressive profile, Cal is not creating sacks (two in the last three games) or tackles for loss (bottom 40 in the nation), and are instead surrendering explosives every single game to offenses good, mid, and bad. Against an NC State team playing four backup offensive linemen, they managed near zero pressure.
Special teams coach Zach Tinker has fixed the punts and has executed a few nice fakes in the past few weeks. Play-by-play though, the Bears do not have good fundamentals in either return or coverage. They rarely kick a field goal past 40 yards, and cannot boot the football into the end zone on kickoffs. Somehow, on a team with bottom-5 P4 offense and defensive metrics, the special teams grade out worst for Cal.
Offensive line coach Famika Anae was retained, yet for the second straight year he cannot get his unit to run block or pass protect. Although the drops have been somewhat cleaned up, wide receiver coach Ike Hilliard has struggled to get his players to run the right routes in critical situations. And yet even I’m not certain how much I can blame the offensive staff, given the hire that was supposed to architect this entire unit completely washed out by week 5, and no unit can survive a bad offensive install.
While there are some seasoned staffers like Keith Bhonapha, Bob Gregory and Nick Rolovich on the sidelines, one has seen his entire corps get injured, one is nearing retirement, and the other has very little relation to the existing offensive scheme, so it’s unclear how much their feedback will resonate with a younger group of coaches ready to prove themselves to the world.
There was deep inherent risk this program was facing in hiring so many young coaches at so many staff positions. Namely, that when any of them faced adversity, they’d have to learn on the fly, could make wrong decisions, and if enough of them made the wrong decisions, disaster would be next.
It’s Code Red time in Berkeley.
Ron Rivera was tasked last year by Rich Lyons with finding the best possible replacement for Justin Wilcox. There were likely a host of potential candidates on the list that included coaches who are now thriving, like Will Stein and Bob Chesney, but Stein was always going home to Kentucky when it opened up and Chesney was still burdened by the appearance of being Curt Cignetti’s follow-up.
Tosh Lupoi felt on paper like the right hire for the moment, given his experience with playoff-contending programs, his ability to recruit talent, his ability to help sell the program from a financial perspective, and his time at Cal giving him familiarity with winning in this environment. On paper, the resume seemed fitting.
But the biggest question seems to have not been given enough credit: Could Lupoi manage the larger strategic aspects of building a winning program? Could he actually coach a program as the number one?
Things have gone so badly in the first nine weeks of his tenure that Cal fans are now very much in the second-guessing phase.
Instead of opting for experience to augment his weaker bona fides, Lupoi hired two first-time assistants as his offensive and defensive coordinator. One has already been iced out, the other presides over the most penalized unit in college football.
Instead of building an offense designed to highlight the strengths of one of the most physically talented quarterbacks in all of college football and a fairly talented portal group, Lupoi signed off on his OC installing an offense so complex that offenses are unable to execute it, and defenses have been able to play their base and pretty easily shut it down. Additionally, offensive players have been injury-prone because the defense is correctly anticipating the play and the read and are crashing in harder than they normally would!
Instead of opting to bring in some experienced portal contributors on defense, Lupoi aimed for upside talent with limited snaps across the board. Given the sub patterns, this unit has predictably been exposed, and there is limited defensive leadership that can coach up these greener players.
Instead of focusing on discipline and preparation, Lupoi’s message continues to be aggressive in play-making, leading to a defense that commits the most personal fouls and has had noticeable targeting ejections to half their team. Tackling technique remains poor, with defenders overrunning, biting on fakes and counters, and losing the fundamentals at the worst time.
Instead of focusing heavily on high-level strategic decision-making that could lead to better outcomes in-game, Lupoi appears focused on the micro, with some strange offensive formations and playcalls just to try and generate any offense. So when these plays fail (as they mostly did Saturday), the offense looks even worse.
Instead of improving communication in his pressers to the Cal fanbase about what’s going wrong, Lupoi’s press conferences have been a confusing mix of subterfuge and transparency. Another such quote came out post NC State about the team not needing to make many halftime adjustments when tied/leading, which (1) why would you admit that, and (2) how bad does that look after conceding 63 unanswered in the two straight games that happened?
Instead of showing game-to-game improvement in tactics or gameplanning, the Bears have crumbled at one point or another, leading to three straight weeks of unwatchable football and six losses on the season where the other side just coached better. It didn’t matter if the opponent was a playoff contender or scrapping for bowl eligibility. Execution-wise, Cal has looked like the worse team on the field in nearly every game they’ve played.
So here Cal sits at the bottom of Power 4. This team sits solidly in the bottom 30 in advanced metrics among all college football teams, right along with Stanford. Cal is 3-6, but stands much closer to being 1-8, with two of those wins requiring miracles in the final minutes. Cal will hope to win of the most disgusting Big Games we will ever witness, and then we will incinerate this season from our memories.
The pulse of the Cal fanbase is very bleak. Anger has given way to depression, which has given way to apathy. And much of the remaining frustration has turned its way toward Rivera. What exactly was the hiring process regarding Lupoi? Was it really just about sales and recruiting ability? Did coaching a winning program ever come to the forefront? Was it the only palatable decision on the table? Or is Rivera just too removed from the college game to understand how different it is from winning in the NFL?
There were hopes that this wasn’t the same Lupoi who was stripped of playcalling duties by Nick Saban at Alabama as defensive coordinator. There were hopes that this wasn’t the same Lupoi that was left behind by Steve Sarkisian at Washington due to money in a coffee cup. And above all, there were hopes that this wasn’t the same Lupoi who left Jeff Tedford in the lurch in the eleventh hour. There were hopes that time and distance had matured him, made him smarter and better, and he had found his best form in Oregon.
These hopes now feel like wishes. The same coach I saw talk about his prized recruiting class at Cal a decade and a half ago doesn’t look very different from the same coach I see quipping about “Dominator’s mindset” at the weekly pressers. This is a prideful, self-driven coach who seems to struggle with the basics of day-to-day football. If fans were conducting a performance review, the number of boxes we’d need to log Lupoi as “needing drastic improvement” for would be substantial.
And now we are here, nearing the end of the first year of a five-year contract, praying Lupoi gets his second set of hires right this offseason, that he can hold onto his recruiting class to rebuild the team from the ground up, and that his stars on this team can be retained.
Because with regards to all of the above, he has so much to learn, and not a ton of time to do it.
The serial killer that is realignment is hovering, and right now Cal football is running around the abandoned house, screaming for salvation.
Bad hires of coordinators, JKS doesn't seem to fit McCann offense very well which is not either of them fault. The inability of Wilcox to recruit well did leave the cupboard pretty empty so I will give Tosh somewhat of a pass on that. Which you could point to as the biggest weakness being the O-line. Ultimately this is the ship we are on. Have to ride it out.
Just watched on tape. Cal should have had at least 4 interceptions thru 10 minutes in 3rd quarter: Lopa missed catching a pick 6 in 3rd just before NCS hit a long TD to go ahead 17-10. He also just missed a pick 6 in 2nd Q. Im not excusing poor coachng, all the poor execution on offense, or Lupoi’s dumb decision to go for it at midfield on 4th and 3 (handing NCS a field goal and giving up a favorable field position battle in 1st Q) etc. Players play better when they have confidence in coaching staff. The entire team/coaches are in free fall. I predicted 3 games ago that Cal would not win another game....they have the talent to do so but they won’t.