UPDATE: Davis has updated his post to indicate he is still committed, but his recruitment is open.
A tough weekend got tougher for the California Golden Bears as they lost their best offensive recruit. Westlake wide receiver Charles Davis, a consensus top-15 wide receiver and top-10 California recruit in this class, will be seeking new opportunities.
Davis was in attendance in Berkeley on Friday night and decided to make the call to reevaluate his options after a 24-10 loss to Clemson. It was a tough night in Memorial Stadium for the Davis family, as Charles’s brother Niles committed an offside penalty on a 4th and 4, which led to Clemson’s first touchdown.
Among Cal WR commits, Demare Dezeurn, Zion White and Blake Gunter remain committed to Cal, but with Dezeurn being Davis’s teammate and the Cal offense still struggling to produce, it’ll now become a priority to retain these players and find another option before signing day.
Update: Davis updated his post to indicate he is still committed, but his recruitment is open.
Back in March, I purchased two season tickets and contributed to the NIL fund. I had never bought season tickets as an alum (I live in Los Angeles) and I do not like the idea of NIL money buying players, but I bought into the hype. That Cal – consistently mediocre at 5-7/6-6/7-5 – just needed a talent upgrade and a good recruiter. Wilcox was an ok coach and had coached up barely recruited defensive players, but could never break through with what he had, and thus would never attract top level talent across the board to make us competitive for a successful season. Talent attracts talent and money is needed to keep talent. Wilcox had a potential breakthrough QB and took a gamble starting him as true freshman, which was unusual and yet welcome. We had some really great wins but an equal number of horrible losses last year, and the inability to recruit a decent o-line, wide receivers (DeJesus being an exception but he was not a deep threat WR), and a kicking game meant it would never get any better.
I totally bought in, especially when not only did Tosh retain JKS, but nabbed wide receivers and tight ends in transfer portal high demand and brought with him several highly regarded (albeit raw) defensive players from Oregon. To me, given the schedule and the talent, an 8-4 season was the floor. Anything equal to last season was, by definition, a failed season.
And I liked that he was calling at the fan base to show up for the marquee games – both in terms of money invested and butts in the seats for the opening game.
This was exceedingly high risk because if Cal failed to win early on – the nationally televised UCLA and Clemson games - he could lose the fan base. And risk losing quality players would be poached. And recruits who had signed on would start dropping. If you crank up the hype machine but it does not deliver, it is even more glaring. It took less than 18 hours for the first recruit to react.
Given this, I would have thought the effort to scheme out the game plans for both of these games would have been top priority and the players would get it. Like, under no circumstances would sloppy play, poor tackling, and idiotic coaching decisions determine why we would lose.
Boy, was I completely fooled. After the first drive of the UCLA game, it was obvious to me that the team was hopelessly ill-prepared on both sides of the ball. I could at least somewhat understand the defense – true turnover from last season and UCLA was way better than advertised (though we should have freaking planned for it) – but the offense was pathetic and special teams continued to be an embarrassment. What made it worse is that even when the running game was working – like in the first drive against UCLA – the coaching staff went away from it and it became apparent JKS was not comfortable. I could not believe that this coaching staff, in its first time on the field, at home, on national television, against an important rival, could have been done so little with so much.
If possible, the Syracuse game was worse because it took a superhuman effort by a single defensive player and Syracuse doing everything possible to lose that game for us to win, barely.
But the offense was actually worse than the UCLA game.
And Wagner. Sure, beat up on a terrible FCS team. But even that game was weak. We were favored by 58.5 points. We won by 42. We had dumb penalties. Our kicking game remained awful. And JKS could not hit downfield throws and there was almost nothing creative in the passing game. Throwing a bubble screen (a 15 yard throw down the line is itself very risky) so that the WR can run throw high-school level defenders for 80 yards gives me little comfort the offense was fixed.
Which brings me to last night. I stopped watching at the half because I knew it was over even though it was 10-7. Our defense had done reasonably well (other than not great tackling on broken player QB runs but still, well enough because Clemson rarely got first downs on first or second down). But the defense was obviously getting tired. And it was getting tired because (a) the offense was designed to do three and outs without regard to the effect on the defense and (b) special teams had an even worse game (if that is possible). The coaching went out of its way to make the one decent part of the team be in the worst possible position.
For what it is worth, Mohammed is a good running back. He runs hard and has decent vision. He rarely gets hit and goes down in the backfield. If he is gaining 4+ yards a carry, by definition we will win because if you just hand him the ball every time, every drive will carry forward. Is this simplistic thinking? Maybe, except that handing him the ball (i) by definition bleeds their defense so that by the second half they are gassed, not us; (ii) takes pressure off of JKS to make plays he for whatever reason cannot make this season; and (iii) helps our defense.
What summed it for me was the second drive, when it was 3 and 2 after a solid run and a short pass to Mini on second down. We empty set, which means we have absolutely limited our options to only a pass (unless a designe QB run, which this offense will not do with JKS) against a team that has NFL caliber defensive backs (just read Know the Enemy columns this week) but is not great against the run and had injuries to their d-line. So if course it fails. So we go for it on 4th down and it too fails. If we were always going to go for it on 4th down, why not run on the 3rd down?
The next drive (after we scored the defensive TD and then Clemson drove for the FG where special teams killed us on the offsides, which may have been the single most important play of the game because of the time suck on defense), we did a 1-yard pass (the long down the line out that does nothing against really good defensive backs), a 7-yard run (again, Mohammed being solid), and then, of course, another pass play on 3 and 2 and took a sack. So, after not having the ball for 7+ minutes, we go three and out with two pass plays.
All season long, JS has looked terrible. He has massively hurt his NFL stock. So, I guarantee you he is going to go to a school like Mendoza, Beck, Mensah, and others to improve his stock. Why wouldn’t he?
I wonder if a major reason why JKS has regressed so badly is that Somerville idiotically wants to run a pro-style offense when virtually no high school or college teams run it and are not prepared to run it. The top QBs drafted either spent a year on the bench learning the pro-style offense or are thrown in and go 1-15 (Aikman, Manning, for example) and then figure it out or become draft busts. But for a college player to learn a pro-style system in less than six months, with brand new players who each come from different teams, is insanity. Add to the very obvious fact Somerville is so far out of his element, I already know that this season is lost. If we got 6-6 now, I’d be shocked (and that is 6-6 including Wagner, a terrible Stanford team, and a fairly easy schedule).
Ron Rivera needs to take a long and hard look in the mirror and own this.