Cal Men's Basketball Season Preview: The Six-Year Sabbatical Ends

On Mark Madsen's one year turnaround attempt

Cal’s decision six years ago to voluntarily end their Cal men’s basketball program was controversial, but men’s basketball is back in Berkeley after a self-imposed 72 month exile. Wyking Jones and Mark Fox did an admirable job taking inventory of the assets the program had accumulated since it was founded in 1907, and selling them off in an effort to shore up Cal’s athletic department budget.

But after a thorough review of the plusses and minuses of operating a major basketball program, Cal reversed the decision made back in the summer of 2017, electing to reestablish the men’s basketball program once again.

The history of teams starting from scratch is ugly – just look at SMU football post-death penalty. Heck, the history of teams that were successful at the DII level and then made the transition is littered with years of on-court struggle. But Cal thinks they have found their program architect in Mark Madsen, and they think he’s the man to build the roster from zero players to thirteen, and they think he just might be able to compete even in year one.

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Was that too mean? I don’t mean to demean the efforts of the players who wore blue and gold over the last six years, who tried their best and were let down at each and every step by their head coaches and the administrators to hired and ‘supported’ the program over the last six years. A good investigative reporter could write a book about how NOT to run a revenue athletics program if they were embedded with Cal men’s basketball over the last six years.

So no, Mark Madsen is not literally stating a program from scratch. His roster does have five scholarship players who were on the roster last year, and some if not all of those players will be contributors on a team that most people expect to belong in the Pac-12 this year.

But this is still year one in what is a MASSIVE rebuilding project. One of the biggest in the history of power conference basketball; which is to say that I am here to temper your fan expectations.

Don’t get me wrong – you SHOULD get excited. I don’t know exactly how much better Cal basketball will be this year, exactly how many more wins the Bears will manage this year. But when a plausible expectation is that your program will quadruple or quintuple the number of wins from one season to the next, I think it’s reasonable to be pretty freakin’ jazzed.

The leap from ‘worst season in program history’ to competent is big but manageable. The leap from ‘worst team in program history’ to, I don’t know, dark horse NCAA at-large candidate is gigantic. It’s probably not possible. As fans, I think it’s probably for the best to internalize that reality.

Except Mark Madsen and his players refuse to put any kind of ceiling on what they can achieve, and Madsen’s relentless energy and positivity are enough that even a bitter realist like me starts dreaming. When a coach is taking over a team coming off the worst season in program history and yet makes oblique references to the Sweet 16 while talking about ‘lofty’ goals, you experience a very happy kind of cognitive dissonance.

Most other coaches would probably be trying to manage expectations. God knows that’s what Mark Fox did. I guess a cynic could say that Madsen’s relentless optimism is a public relations gimmick or a recruiting ploy, but this only works as a public relations gimmick for as long as he can deliver on the good vibes with wins. It only works as a recruiting pitch for as long as the on-court reality matches with what he’s selling.

I think there are two reasons Madsen’s optimism is compelling to us fans:

1. It’s the first time anybody involved in Cal basketball has tried to tell us that we can dream for six years.

2. I think he actually believes what he’s saying.

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So what ARE reasonable expectations? The pre-season media poll places Cal 11th, solidly behind Wazzu and UW and solidly ahead of last place Oregon State. This is unsurprising, the media will make Cal prove it first. Kenpom also puts Cal 11th in the Pac-12, 146th nationally, and predicts an 11-19 record. Bart Torvik’s system also has Cal 11th in the Pac-12, but 96th nationally, and predicts a final record of 13-17.

I think the gap between Cal’s national ranking in Kenpom’s system vs. Torvik is a good illustration of just how challenging it is to project a team like Cal. Consider the following facts:

1. Cal was the worst power conference team in the country by a wide margin and one of the worst power conference teams in modern college basketball history.

2. Cal is replacing an awful head coach with a generally successful head coach with a very different play style.

3. Cal is returning exactly four scholarship players who contributed last year, two of whom missed most of the season due to injury and two of whom were true freshmen.

4. Cal has added EIGHT new scholarship players, many of whom were already contributors at the power conference level, or featured players on successful mid-majors.

That combination of circumstances is not normal, and there are few historical parallels to point to if you want to try to project on court performance.

Right now, I have no clue who Madsen’s preferred starting 5 will be, no clue what his likely rotation will be, and no clue what to expect in terms of team strengths and weaknesses. It’s as close to a blank canvas as you will ever get in college basketball.

So I have two sets of expectations. Let’s get the boring one out of the way first:

Goal 1: Finish the season .500 or better

Is that a particularly lofty goal? For most teams, no, but it would require Cal to win 16 games, which would represent a 533% increase in the win column for our Bears. More importantly, it would give Mark Madsen something to recruit off of, and perhaps set Cal up for the chance at post-season basketball in the NIT.

Goal 2: Learn to love Cal basketball again

Over the last two years I’ve written esoteric season previews that were more about the exercise of choosing to follow Cal MBB than the actual on-court product, because that on-court product was guaranteed to be unpleasant. I turned off my fan mind at some point in January of 2021, and never particularly considered turning it back on again. I watched game after game with barely any kind of reaction to anything that happened, positive or negative.

You, person reading this, probably just didn’t bother watching, and if you did, you did something similar.

Well, it’s time to turn the switch. Maybe it will take some time to find it, maybe you’re going to have to dig around in your heart to turn on the pilot light. Maybe it will take a few games.

But at some point early in the season something thrilling will happen. Maybe Jalen Cone hits Fardaws Aimaq for a thunderous transition alley oop. Maybe Jaylon Tyson cans his fourth three of the game to expand Cal’s lead as the opposing coach calls a time out in frustration. Maybe ND Okafor blocks a shot into the 10th row.

And you’ll feel something again, something you haven’t felt since Ivan and Ty and Jorge and Leon made you feel that way.

And it will feel so goddamn good.