Cal Men's Basketball: Coach Mark Madsen's Recruiting Profile

Can the transfer-heavy approach that worked at Utah Valley adapt to Berkeley?

Last week, we took a deep dive into what Mark Madsen’s Utah Valley team statistically produced on the court to get a sense of both his style as a basketball coach, as well as his relative strengths and weaknesses. This week? Recruiting.

When Madsen was introduced last week, he had this to say regarding recruiting:

I want to put up a chain link fence around the state of California, and keep the best California players at Cal. We will be aggressive in the transfer portal. When players enter that portal that are great players and great students, we are going to be all over them. We will recruit nationally and internationally, and have great success doing that.

That first sentence is almost obligatory. The foundation of Cal basketball success has come from California based recruits, particularly from the Bay Area. Bay Area guys like Leon Powe, Jason Kidd, Lamont Murray, and Ivan Rabb. Greater California players like Kevin Johnson, Allen Crabbe, or Patrick Christopher. Regardless, the high points in Cal MBB history always starts with securing California high school talent, and then augmenting that with a smattering of out-of-state talent intrigued by Cal’s academic reputation.

The challenge? High school recruiting hasn’t been a significant part of Mark Madsen’s coaching career.

Prior to his time as Utah Valley head coach, Madsen spent exactly one year as an assistant coach at Stanford, so we know he does have one year of power conference level recruiting experience, though I have no particular knowledge of Madsen’s specific role on that Stanford staff.

What we CAN look at is where Madsen found his players at Utah Valley. I looked up the history of 24 different players who saw court time at Utah Valley and who arrived under Madsen. Of those 24 players:

• 16 transferred in from another D1 program

• 6 transferred in from the JC level

• 2 committed as high schoolers

Those two high schoolers included a 2 star player from Utah and an unranked player out of Virginia, neither of whom has yet secured a consistent spot in Utah Valley’s rotation. I don’t think it would be unfair to say that Mark Madsen’s Utah Valley competitive rotation was entirely built via the transfer portal.

Those transfers came from everywhere. There were power conference guys, small conference guys, nearby dudes from BYU and Weber St., far flung dudes from Akron and Fordham and Mercer and Coastal Carolina. Which leads me to one huge pro, and one huge (potential?) con:

Huge pro: Mark Madsen understands and embraces the modern world of college basketball, and uses the tools available to him to creatively build a roster. For much of the recent history of Cal MBB, the Bears have lost more talent than they have gained. Perhaps for the first time ever, this will shift behind a coach who understands the power of the portal and knows how to navigate it successfully.

Potential huge con: Has Cal’s transfer deficit been a failure of Cal’s previous coaches, or a failure of Cal’s administration making admission either as an undergraduate transfer or as a grad student so cumbersome that Cal can only take the occasional academically minded/Ivy league kinda dude? Like, I’m pretty confident that Monty was an old-fashioned guy, but I suspect Cuonzo Martin would have taken more transfers if it had been possible at the time. On the other hand, my concerns might be overblown - after all, Cal brought in 8 total transfer recruits under Mark Fox.

During the intro press conference Q&A, our own Don asked Madsen regarding some of the institutional barriers, including admissions standards, and you can hear Madsen’s answer here:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Madsen didn’t get into specifics other than to say that he received a general reassurance from Cal’s administration that they will work to provide him with what he needs. Maybe the very fact that a transfer-centric coach like Madsen was willing to come to Cal is an indication that admissions/academics won’t be a barrier in the way that I fear.

Ultimately, I think both of the following things are true:

1. If Mark Madsen is going to succeed long term at Cal, he will need to recruit much more heavily at the high school level, and it’s not unreasonable to have some doubts about his ability to do so without prior high school recruiting success on his resume.

2. Cal’s administration is going to have to find ways to help Madsen get his transfers through the admissions process, or risk continuing to fall further and further behind structurally in a vicious, zero-sum industry.

The speedy commitment from Fardaws Aimaq and positive rumors regarding other targets is an early sign that item two won’t be an issue. As for item one? Check back in a year or two, as Mark Madsen and his staff tour California and start shaking hands with a bunch of high school and AAU coaches.