Cal Football Season Preview, Part 1: Zombie or Phoenix?

Will the 2023 Bears be remembered on their own terms, or by outside circumstances?

Happy August! Cal football fall practice will begin shortly, and in 33 days, the new season will officially begin in [checks notes] DENTON TEXAS? Who did that?! Anyway, we’re furiously at work on season preview material for you to enjoy over the next month to distract you from Cal’s current existential crisis. I’m going to try my best to NOT let Cal’s conference affiliation seep into anything and everything I write about this year’s team, because that would be a disservice to Jadyn Ott and company.

But this is a narrative introduction to the story of the 2023 season, and you absolutely cannot tell that story without addressing the elephant in the room. 2023 may see the death of Cal football as we know it.

I doubt that how Cal performs on the field will have a significant impact on the fate of Cal athletics at large. But I can’t dismiss the possibility that an unexpected great year could move the needle, or that another year of national irrelevance might help move up the funeral date.

Regardless of Cal’s fate, this will be the final year of USC, UCLA, and Colorado in the Pac-12, and thus an era will end regardless. By the time you read this, it wouldn’t surprise me if news has dropped about further departures. Cal’s best case scenario (I guess, sigh) is getting a Big-10 bailout and abandoning our conference mates just like UCLA and USC have done. Cal’s worst case scenario is falling into a G5 conference with a resulting loss of revenue that leads to a gutting of Cal’s non-revenue sports.

And stepping into this bizarre situation is a Cal football team who has not had a winning conference record since 2009, and owes something in the range of 24 million dollars across 5 more years to a coach with a career record of 30-36 (17-32).

Justin Wilcox, to his credit, recognizes that what he has been doing hasn’t worked well enough. He’s said that with words, and he’s acknowledged that with his actions. As a result, the 2023 bears are starting something of a new Wilcox sub-era this year amidst the end of the Pac-12 era around them.

It’s a new era because Wilcox (belatedly) handed the reigns of his offense over to Jake Spavital, who will presumably be granted a level of control over how he runs that side of the ball. But more than that, this is a new era because Justin Wilcox has radically changed how he has built this team.

Cal added just 9 freshmen recruits on signing day, an unprecedentedly small number that easily ranked last in the Pac-12. But Cal has added *nearly 30* transfers, including players that will likely start at nearly every position group. It’s a radically different method of roster building that many (myself included) weren’t sure was even possible at a place like Cal.

We can have a debate about how much this shift was an explicit reaction to the changing landscape of college sports, the specific short term roster needs of this year’s team, or a reaction to Cal’s inability to compete for highly valued freshmen recruits. But regardless of the exact explanation, the shift has been made and the 2023 Bears will look radically different than 2022.

This can perhaps also be looked at as a coaching staff trying to shake up a program that just can’t seem to break through beyond the year to year struggle for bowl eligibility. Justin Wilcox almost certainly has no need to fear for his job; thanks to his most recent contract extension and Cal’s short and long term fiscal uncertainty, Cal almost certainly cannot afford to move on from him regardless of whether they want to or not. So I see this shift as less a save-my-job Hail Mary, and more a this-is-what-we-need-to-do-to-win move.

Which is different from saying it will work. This level of staff and personnel turnover is a lot, and there’s no guarantee that it will work. There are still massive questions at quarterback, offensive line, and defensive line/outside linebacker. But if you’re trying to turn things around over the course of one off-season, bringing in a bunch of transfers is almost certainly a more likely path to improvement than a bunch of freshmen who will need a year or two to develop. Cal’s transfer portal splurge has shaken up the baseline expectations for a Cal football team under Justin Wilcox, and when the baseline expectations are 5-7, that’s very much a good thing.

Will it work? The problem Cal faces is that it could work and also not matter much. Cal plays 5 teams who will be ranked in the pre-season top 25. That doesn’t include Auburn or a road game at UCLA. That means that this team could make a pretty big step forward and still go a largely unexciting 7-5 thanks to, ironically, a high level of expected play from this stupid, beautiful, dying conference.

But the Bears return enough talent, have added enough talent and experience, and have added enough reasonably proven offensive coaches, to intrigue me. This is a team that has the potential to surprise.

Will it matter? Will this season, in retrospect, be seen as the death rattle of a once proud program before it is consigned to whatever version of the Mountain West exists in 2024? Or will it be seen as the beginning of a rebirth that nobody anticipated, a new era in which the flagship public university of the nation’s biggest, most populous, richest state maintains continued relevance in college football (and college sports) at the highest level?

It’s not particularly fair to saddle this group of players with responsibility at any level to the larger status of Cal athletics. Fault for this situation falls upon a long lineage of incompetent, overpaid, short sighted administrators within Cal and within the Pac-10/12.

But the reality of the situation, the consequences of what comes next, cannot be avoided. All season long I’ll try not to think about it when I watch Cal (or USC, or Colorado, or UCLA) play, but it won’t ever actually leave my mind

So, if we lose out and college football leaves us behind, we may as well go down swinging. If this is the end of Cal football, let’s make it a multi-month Wake-slash-Viking funeral worth remembering.

We’ll win the game or know the reason why.