Cal needed to fire the OC now in order to have enough time to get a new OC, ideally in Dec / Jan.
The main reason is to have the new OC try to convince the skill players to stay.
Now that only works if we hire a young, innovative, up and coming OC to peak their interest. Someone who constructively conflicts with Wilcox to push his conservative boundaries.
I'd bring in Troy Taylor as OC and Assistant HC, with a wink and a nod. "Gimme two years, Troy. If we do well, Wilcox will be hired by someone else adn you will be da' Man. If we don't improve, Wilcox will be gone, and you will be da' Man. If we get an invite from the BiG, Wilcox will be gone immediately adn you will be da' Man." Win-win."
I would love this - associate head coach and offensive coordinator. But I honestly think it would be tough enough to pry him away for the head coach gig. No chance he leaves sac state for a coordinator job.
You know there is a recent precedent for a successful FCS coach to leave their program to take an OC position at a P5 school...though it did not go so well.
Problem is Taylor is from sac, loves sac, and imo, would be difficult to pry from sac. He has never been driven by ego or money, and for a guy who’s coaching in his hometown, he has an awesome situation at sac state.
He is not leaving sac state for an fbs job elsewhere, I can guarantee you that. He from here, played at Cordova, his family’s here, kids are here. Look at all of his career moves; he doesn’t make moves for money. He may bleed blue and gold, but for a guy who’s not about money, the headaches that come with a moron AD and anti-football administration might be more than he wants to deal with when he’s got a sweet gig at home in sac. Just my $.02, and that’s coming from a guy who’d love nothing more than to see him coaching our bears. All this is a moot point though because Wilcox isn’t going anywhere given his insane extension.
The most important reason we had to fire them before the season ended is because we NEED TO KEEP OUR OFFENSIVE TALENT. They're talented, and we did them wrong. We need to convince them to stay.
^^^ Right here. My worst nightmare: Ott announces after the UCLA game he's entering the Transfer Portal. Hopefully, this sad decision will prevent a swinging gate culture among the offensive talent.
Bout fricking time. My wife, a Cal grad, who leads a state agency of 2,000+ employees, said to me this morning that Wilcox lacks either the willpower or ability to make hard choices. Well, one of the two got fixed today, but what hope do we have in the replacements. I'm just glad for the players.
We may never know and this is certainly possible. Knowlton may have given him that sort of ultimatum. They go or you go. Or major donors said to Knowlton, do something or you go. I honestly don't give a crap about the backroom conversations. I only care about results. We can have our damn cake and eat it too. We can have scholars and great human beings play outstanding football. None of us have questioned Wilcox being great for the former. His failure at the latter is the current topic.
Injuries are part of the story. But the question is why are we so thin in year six? You could understand being thin on Offense, but we should not have a problem attracting defensive talent.
I see a lot of comments regarding who knows the plays and thus might call the O this weekend. In case you haven't paid attention this year, we should opt for someone who does NOT know these plays and instead has the players' admiration and a whiteboard.
Won't matter much who the next OC is, it will matter much who the next OL coach is.
While tardy, this was a good time to fire these 2 jabronis. Now Cal can start reaching out to other schools for permission to speak with candidates for OC and OL. Good move by Wilcox albeit a year too late.
Musgrave’s system was antiquated and outdated, especially when compared to the modern college game. He lacked the personnel to implement and run it effectively, namely professional-caliber football players, as that is how you win with this style.
While he was never getting fired after just two seasons, one of them being the lost 2020, COVID nonetheless had nothing to do with his failure.
I'm not saying it had anything to do with his failure, I'm saying that you can't judge a man on a season like that. But that was a free year where he could have evaluated how much his offense would fail with Cal's level of talent, and instead he doubled down.
With the transfer portal, NIL and the ever-increasing premium placed on institutional commitment to football, the Bay Area teams are losing ground as rapidly as they are losing games. Yes, sure: The coaching has left much to be desired. But neither program has any chance to attain consistent success in the current environment without systemic changes that require approval at the highest levels."
Unfortunately, Wilner is right. I say, unfortunately, because I think the situation is far more serious than folks are letting on. Knowlton and Christ are asleep at the switch. They are letting the opportunity to remain in a P5 conference slip away.
Also, the Pac-12 will not remain a P5 conference, especially if it must take G5 schools (like SDSU) to round out the membership. The best hope for Cal to remain a P5 school is to make the jump to the B1G.
Look, if Christ and Knowlton want to take Cal to mid-major (G5) FCS status, they should be honest about that. The landscape is changing and Cal isn't well positioned for the future. We're even less well positioned if Cal's intent is to retain 30 sponsored sports.
What's going on with the football coaching staff is important, but it masks a much bigger and more consequential problem: we aren't positioned well to compete in FBS. Further, we have a crushing debt from renovating Cal Memorial (West Side Improvement Project). All of the progress made with the SAHPC and the stadium projects is at risk if we can't stay in a Power 5 (soon to be Power 4) conference.
P5 moniker isn't going to matter as much going forward with a 12 team playoffs with 6 champions guaranteed. Even grabbing some from the MWC, the Pac will be one of the 6 best conferences -- especially while we still have UO/UW/Utah. Add in that OSU/WSU are starting to peak again, and Arizona is a strong rebuild.
The real problem is that we'll make the playoffs, but generally just get left behind the Big 2.
It isn't the P5 moniker I'm thinking about here so much as the shift of acknowledged football powers into a smaller number of conferences. Losing USC and UCLA hurts the remaining Pac-12 schools in terms of prestige and perceived power as football programs. UO, UW, Cal, and Stanfurd all take a hit when USC and UCLA leave for the B1G in 2024. The best thing for Cal and Stanfurd as football programs is to move into the B1G; same thing for UO and UW. But that's not assured from the B1G's view nor, it appears, from the Cal campus view to say nothing of the UC system.
A 12 team playoff won't matter if the Pac-12 only gets one invitation for the CFP. I can easily imagine that the SEC will end up with 3 teams, maybe 4, in a 12-team playoff. The B1G could end up with 3 or 4 teams as well. Not much left for the remaining "Power" conferences or even the mid-majors.
That was always going to be the problem. USC screwed us when they vetoed the expansion after the OUT exodus. The Pac-12 needed to expand then, but we've essentially handed first mover's advantage to the Big12 with our inaction.
But even in a world where we expanded first and are in position to be the 3rd best conference, we would still fall behind the B1G/SEC. A lot of those schools are football first and foremost and can't understand a world where universities try to house 25-30 sports and be good at everything (and they're not wrong, if you mess it up you can end up being good at nothing).
Going back further, the moment Larry Scott didn't have a real Plan B to his UT/OU/aTm/OSU expansion we lost our vision as a conference and while we had some of our best years in the P12 North in the following years, we missed the train and have been playing catch up since.
On a third note, the Pac-12 is a conference in a region without eyeballs. 80% of Americans live on the eastern half of the country -- we're always fighting an uphill battle when it comes to media dollars.
The lack of any outward communication on this is frustrating. I'm guessing that Knowlton and Christ would say let's keep the focus right now on the season. Had the season been good, well, that wouldn't be as big a of a problem. But since the season is all but determined to be not a good look, it's something they should be addressing because it really does hang over this program.
In as much as this particular season is a spotlight on the worth of this program to belong to a potential group of teams in an athletic/entertainment conference, I gotta wonder how or if their communication will change given the outcome of the Stanfurd game. Should Cal lose, then I will really expect to hear something from them because it will really be the worst look possible. Should Cal win, the look is still bad, but perhaps the squeaky wheels will not be as loud and only slightly more appeased.
I really think this all comes down to Christ making a very hard decision about what UC is in the modern college athletics and entertainment landscape. Because of the very large numbers involved, I don't believe that UC can stick its head in the sand on this one, or even go conservative and small. This is a BIG institution and the only real choice is to go big. And by that, I mean make decisive money moves in the direction of participating in big time college athletics and entertainment at the highest level.
I doubt that there will be any communication from Knowlton or Christ on the future of Cal Athletics until they feel they must address the issue publicly or they have something to announce. Note that USC and UCLA didn't' announce they were moving to the B1G until there was something to announce. The B1G has made statements about expansion remaining a topic of importance since the USC/UCLA announcement, but we don't know more than that.
This. The background of this season as Willner mentions, and the sword of Damocles being the dissolution of the Pac-12 as we knew it, is why this isn't just about poor coaching.
Yes. For as agonizing as the Cal offense was this season, the firing of Herb Edwards at ASU, and the astonishing (relative) success of Arizona, the initial start of the NIL and the falling over the cliff of the PAC-12 occurring in slow-motion have had far more influence on the season. We always expect some intra-league cannibalism — witness Arizona over UC Los Angeles — but the whole football season has fragmented in ways unexpected.
Harsin coached with Wilcox at Boise State 2001–2002 and 2006–2009. Harsin is a QB coach at heart, has won championships, was a poor fit at Auburn, and I'm sure has buyout language that makes the financials work. Just gonna keep posting this till it's done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5230gFnFYU My reaction to this news. Lets go kick some Furd ass this weekend. Fire me up.
Had to happen and happen before the season ends.
Cal needed to fire the OC now in order to have enough time to get a new OC, ideally in Dec / Jan.
The main reason is to have the new OC try to convince the skill players to stay.
Now that only works if we hire a young, innovative, up and coming OC to peak their interest. Someone who constructively conflicts with Wilcox to push his conservative boundaries.
A little tension in the system is good.
I'd bring in Troy Taylor as OC and Assistant HC, with a wink and a nod. "Gimme two years, Troy. If we do well, Wilcox will be hired by someone else adn you will be da' Man. If we don't improve, Wilcox will be gone, and you will be da' Man. If we get an invite from the BiG, Wilcox will be gone immediately adn you will be da' Man." Win-win."
Big retention bonus/salary increase for Year 3.
Troy Taylor had no interest in being an OC for Cal or anyone else.
I would love this - associate head coach and offensive coordinator. But I honestly think it would be tough enough to pry him away for the head coach gig. No chance he leaves sac state for a coordinator job.
You know there is a recent precedent for a successful FCS coach to leave their program to take an OC position at a P5 school...though it did not go so well.
You do realize he was a successful OC at P5 school who took Sac State job to be HC right? He's next career move is P5 HC.
Good point. Just need to hope that maybe a Cal job would speak differently to him. Who know...
Problem is Taylor is from sac, loves sac, and imo, would be difficult to pry from sac. He has never been driven by ego or money, and for a guy who’s coaching in his hometown, he has an awesome situation at sac state.
He is not leaving sac state for an fbs job elsewhere, I can guarantee you that. He from here, played at Cordova, his family’s here, kids are here. Look at all of his career moves; he doesn’t make moves for money. He may bleed blue and gold, but for a guy who’s not about money, the headaches that come with a moron AD and anti-football administration might be more than he wants to deal with when he’s got a sweet gig at home in sac. Just my $.02, and that’s coming from a guy who’d love nothing more than to see him coaching our bears. All this is a moot point though because Wilcox isn’t going anywhere given his insane extension.
The most important reason we had to fire them before the season ended is because we NEED TO KEEP OUR OFFENSIVE TALENT. They're talented, and we did them wrong. We need to convince them to stay.
^^^ Right here. My worst nightmare: Ott announces after the UCLA game he's entering the Transfer Portal. Hopefully, this sad decision will prevent a swinging gate culture among the offensive talent.
Sorry, b/c I've posted this before: Garrett Riley from TCU for OC. That guy is gold. Prying him away from Sunny Dykes remains to be seen.
To me, that is young!
4 games too late but I’ll take it.
Good decision but this timing is so dumb. Should have fired him weeks ago now we have a new play caller for the big game.
Who will coach the offense/call the plays during the Big Game?
The writeforcalifornia game chat.
1. Flea flicker
2. Flea flicker
3. pitch to Ott
4. Flea flicker
They'll never see that 3rd flea-flicker coming!
I for one approve of drunk calling offensive plays during Big Game
The Play.
First play: victory formation, just to psych them out.
Every snap count will involve "Punch Twist"
In da mouf
LOL. Of course!
I will volunteer. Everybody go long!!!!!
… and get open!
Don’t need anyone to call them. Just run WR screens every time
I nominate Joe Stsrkey!
bring Paws down instead.
Crowd source it. Give any fans who show up a lecture iClicker to decide the next play.
The plays will be called by Bear Insider major $$ donators.
Well it’s a good thing you don’t make the decisions Bob
Hey now, if we had all listened to Bob, Troy Taylor would be head coach leading us to our best season this century.
True, he was pushing for TT before anyone else got on that train. Now most are onboard.
If we hire him I say he is made the "Bob: Gobears49 Coach Troy Taylor" in honor of Bob's visionary insistence.
The timing is so late, but maybe now because Wilcox finally found a replacement that can start midseason?
wait til we will be depressed when Wilcox elevates Greatwood from analyst to offensive coordinator.
Bout fricking time. My wife, a Cal grad, who leads a state agency of 2,000+ employees, said to me this morning that Wilcox lacks either the willpower or ability to make hard choices. Well, one of the two got fixed today, but what hope do we have in the replacements. I'm just glad for the players.
Maybe he had no choice.
We may never know and this is certainly possible. Knowlton may have given him that sort of ultimatum. They go or you go. Or major donors said to Knowlton, do something or you go. I honestly don't give a crap about the backroom conversations. I only care about results. We can have our damn cake and eat it too. We can have scholars and great human beings play outstanding football. None of us have questioned Wilcox being great for the former. His failure at the latter is the current topic.
I agree, BUT this is not enough. Defense has regressed and must be corrected before it becomes as dysfunctional as the offense.
It's very possible a defense slowly gives up as they realize over the last...6 seasons that they will get ZERO help from the offense.
That I can believe.
And I forgot to mention our defense is crapping the pot these days too. Has Wilcox lost the team?
Injuries are part of the story. But the question is why are we so thin in year six? You could understand being thin on Offense, but we should not have a problem attracting defensive talent.
because Wilcox can't recruit depth?
And/or because he can't adapt/adjust in real time?
He's not the guy. We all knew that when he was hired.
Good question. I hope not.
When your defense plays the entire game its no wonder they "crap" out
Very late, too late, but hopefully not to late to keep some players from tansferring.
Recruiting also.
Let's win the next two games and end the season on a high note!
Yes, Pollyanna, such a lovely thought.
This is going to be a more interesting Big Game than I thought it would be about one hour ago.
I see a lot of comments regarding who knows the plays and thus might call the O this weekend. In case you haven't paid attention this year, we should opt for someone who does NOT know these plays and instead has the players' admiration and a whiteboard.
Thank you Avi!!
It’s a start!
Action is taken.
Won't matter much who the next OC is, it will matter much who the next OL coach is.
While tardy, this was a good time to fire these 2 jabronis. Now Cal can start reaching out to other schools for permission to speak with candidates for OC and OL. Good move by Wilcox albeit a year too late.
I don't agree with a year too late. Musgrave deserved another chance after starting during COVID. But he did NOT take advantage of said chance.
Musgrave’s system was antiquated and outdated, especially when compared to the modern college game. He lacked the personnel to implement and run it effectively, namely professional-caliber football players, as that is how you win with this style.
While he was never getting fired after just two seasons, one of them being the lost 2020, COVID nonetheless had nothing to do with his failure.
I'm not saying it had anything to do with his failure, I'm saying that you can't judge a man on a season like that. But that was a free year where he could have evaluated how much his offense would fail with Cal's level of talent, and instead he doubled down.
A new QB is probably needed as well, GEAT…
Jon Willner:
"Whiff of the decade: Stanford and Cal
With the transfer portal, NIL and the ever-increasing premium placed on institutional commitment to football, the Bay Area teams are losing ground as rapidly as they are losing games. Yes, sure: The coaching has left much to be desired. But neither program has any chance to attain consistent success in the current environment without systemic changes that require approval at the highest levels."
https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/11/13/pac-12-rewind-sifting-through-the-wild-weekend-as-oregon-and-ucla-fall-arizona-rises-and-usc-stands-alone/
He’s not wrong.
He’s 100% correct. We’ve been saying Cal can’t compete as it is in the NIL era.
Unfortunately, Wilner is right. I say, unfortunately, because I think the situation is far more serious than folks are letting on. Knowlton and Christ are asleep at the switch. They are letting the opportunity to remain in a P5 conference slip away.
Also, the Pac-12 will not remain a P5 conference, especially if it must take G5 schools (like SDSU) to round out the membership. The best hope for Cal to remain a P5 school is to make the jump to the B1G.
Look, if Christ and Knowlton want to take Cal to mid-major (G5) FCS status, they should be honest about that. The landscape is changing and Cal isn't well positioned for the future. We're even less well positioned if Cal's intent is to retain 30 sponsored sports.
What's going on with the football coaching staff is important, but it masks a much bigger and more consequential problem: we aren't positioned well to compete in FBS. Further, we have a crushing debt from renovating Cal Memorial (West Side Improvement Project). All of the progress made with the SAHPC and the stadium projects is at risk if we can't stay in a Power 5 (soon to be Power 4) conference.
P5 moniker isn't going to matter as much going forward with a 12 team playoffs with 6 champions guaranteed. Even grabbing some from the MWC, the Pac will be one of the 6 best conferences -- especially while we still have UO/UW/Utah. Add in that OSU/WSU are starting to peak again, and Arizona is a strong rebuild.
The real problem is that we'll make the playoffs, but generally just get left behind the Big 2.
It isn't the P5 moniker I'm thinking about here so much as the shift of acknowledged football powers into a smaller number of conferences. Losing USC and UCLA hurts the remaining Pac-12 schools in terms of prestige and perceived power as football programs. UO, UW, Cal, and Stanfurd all take a hit when USC and UCLA leave for the B1G in 2024. The best thing for Cal and Stanfurd as football programs is to move into the B1G; same thing for UO and UW. But that's not assured from the B1G's view nor, it appears, from the Cal campus view to say nothing of the UC system.
A 12 team playoff won't matter if the Pac-12 only gets one invitation for the CFP. I can easily imagine that the SEC will end up with 3 teams, maybe 4, in a 12-team playoff. The B1G could end up with 3 or 4 teams as well. Not much left for the remaining "Power" conferences or even the mid-majors.
That was always going to be the problem. USC screwed us when they vetoed the expansion after the OUT exodus. The Pac-12 needed to expand then, but we've essentially handed first mover's advantage to the Big12 with our inaction.
But even in a world where we expanded first and are in position to be the 3rd best conference, we would still fall behind the B1G/SEC. A lot of those schools are football first and foremost and can't understand a world where universities try to house 25-30 sports and be good at everything (and they're not wrong, if you mess it up you can end up being good at nothing).
Going back further, the moment Larry Scott didn't have a real Plan B to his UT/OU/aTm/OSU expansion we lost our vision as a conference and while we had some of our best years in the P12 North in the following years, we missed the train and have been playing catch up since.
On a third note, the Pac-12 is a conference in a region without eyeballs. 80% of Americans live on the eastern half of the country -- we're always fighting an uphill battle when it comes to media dollars.
The lack of any outward communication on this is frustrating. I'm guessing that Knowlton and Christ would say let's keep the focus right now on the season. Had the season been good, well, that wouldn't be as big a of a problem. But since the season is all but determined to be not a good look, it's something they should be addressing because it really does hang over this program.
In as much as this particular season is a spotlight on the worth of this program to belong to a potential group of teams in an athletic/entertainment conference, I gotta wonder how or if their communication will change given the outcome of the Stanfurd game. Should Cal lose, then I will really expect to hear something from them because it will really be the worst look possible. Should Cal win, the look is still bad, but perhaps the squeaky wheels will not be as loud and only slightly more appeased.
I really think this all comes down to Christ making a very hard decision about what UC is in the modern college athletics and entertainment landscape. Because of the very large numbers involved, I don't believe that UC can stick its head in the sand on this one, or even go conservative and small. This is a BIG institution and the only real choice is to go big. And by that, I mean make decisive money moves in the direction of participating in big time college athletics and entertainment at the highest level.
I doubt that there will be any communication from Knowlton or Christ on the future of Cal Athletics until they feel they must address the issue publicly or they have something to announce. Note that USC and UCLA didn't' announce they were moving to the B1G until there was something to announce. The B1G has made statements about expansion remaining a topic of importance since the USC/UCLA announcement, but we don't know more than that.
This. The background of this season as Willner mentions, and the sword of Damocles being the dissolution of the Pac-12 as we knew it, is why this isn't just about poor coaching.
Yes. For as agonizing as the Cal offense was this season, the firing of Herb Edwards at ASU, and the astonishing (relative) success of Arizona, the initial start of the NIL and the falling over the cliff of the PAC-12 occurring in slow-motion have had far more influence on the season. We always expect some intra-league cannibalism — witness Arizona over UC Los Angeles — but the whole football season has fragmented in ways unexpected.
Yep, shit or get off the pot.
Hire Bryan Harsin for OC.
Harsin coached with Wilcox at Boise State 2001–2002 and 2006–2009. Harsin is a QB coach at heart, has won championships, was a poor fit at Auburn, and I'm sure has buyout language that makes the financials work. Just gonna keep posting this till it's done.
And Clesi Crochet is already in the Bay Area…this could totally work…
;-)
Uncle ak, were you around when the Wilcox's team sea-change happened? Was it that double OT win over UCLA at the end of the 22 season?
Well, not exactly nephew ack. It was a bit earlier, about a week before we beat Furd.
Arizona showed us how to beat UCLA.
I didn't watch it. How do you beat UCLA?
Fear we don’t have the O….definitely not the QB.
Thank you!! Should’ve done that long time ago. Need to start Kai at QB.
Mark helfrich?