Month one could not have started any worse for Tosh Lupoi at Cal.
There were hopes that after a disappointing UCLA result, the California Golden Bears were in the midsts of experiencing growing pains. There was wishcasting that this would eventually be fixed once the team learned to play with each other. Even if the metrics didn’t look good to start for this team, perhaps the Bears would eventually click into place with time and familiarity.
That has not happened.
One of the biggest concerns coming into this season was how green our leaders were on this football staff. A first-time head coach. A first-time offensive coordinator. A first-time defensive coordinator. A special teams coach with very limited special teams experience. Would they be able to adjust and adapt in new situations? Would this bet on youth and vigor in recruiting and talent acquisition result in a team that continues to improve week-by-week and develops?
Welp. We’re in trouble now.
After weeks of disappointing results, and essentially two weeks to prepare exclusively for one of Dabo Swinney’s weakest squads, the Cal offense bottomed out on Friday against Clemson, producing results devoid of scheme, rhythm, or coherence. A Clemson defense that got churned on the ground for 200+ rushing yards at home by the fighting Belichicks, all after being chunked to death by LSU, clamped Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele in irons.
Who knows which of the warning signs we’ve seen the first three weeks first went off Friday night.
Maybe it was the constant rollouts to the short side of the field that left small windows and hard throws to pull off.
Maybe it was the timing of the quarterbacks and the wide receivers still looking continuously off-sync, where good ideas turn into interceptions, near-interceptions, deflections, or drops.
Maybe it was the offensive line not able to hold their blocks on run plays, leading to running backs wading through contact and trash to pick up positive yards
Maybe it was the screens that seem to produce 1-2 yards with general consistency, taking the pressure off the defense and putting all the onus on us to execute.
Maybe it was the general confusion the offense seemed to play with when they had the ball, overwhelmed with information and processing as defenses felt comfortable adjusting and straight manning up our team.
What we’d seen for three weeks in bits and spurts was all on display Friday, for a live three and a half hour display of nothing. Nothing happened on offense on Friday. 40,000+ Cal fans showed up to Berkeley on a Friday night and got nothing for their efforts.
There were major questions about the Jordan Somerville hire. How would a first-time offensive coordinator handle these duties, particularly one who had been gameplanning with NFL talent the last two years? How would he develop his rising quarterback this offseason to mold his abilities for the next level within the confines of a competent offense? What type of offensive style and scheme would be used to mitigate weaknesses and accentuate strengths?
The answer to all of the above questions so far are variations of “No.”
The Cal offense has produced a horrifying total of 20 non-defensive assisted points of off-script (after the first 1-2 drives of offense in each half) in its three Power 4 games. Sagapolutele is hesitating, taking too long to make decisions, making poor reads, and often finding no one to throw to. That Cal upgraded their talent significantly at wideout but cannot gameplan their players open is exasperating.
From the wide perspective of what is going wrong, it appears the Cal offense is simultaneously being asked to do two things
Before the play: The offense is working so much pre-snap to adjust to the defensive look, constantly running the game clock down, allowing the defense to also re-adjust. There appears to be so much processing going in that players are constantly confused about how to go about the actual play.
During the play: The change-ups or tendencies of Somerville’s playcalling are simple enough for defenses to adjust and lock down with straight man coverage. This is putting players in positions where it's nearly impossible to succeed.
In the rush attack, nearly everything is being created by the running backs. The offensive line was horrendous last year in creating space for their ball-carriers, and it’s improved somewhat, but only because the running backs have more elusiveness to grind extra yards. Adam Mohammed’s injury will make things even more difficult in the coming weeks. Is it too many playcalls? Are the reads too simple for the defense to plug the gaps?
In the receiving game, Ian Strong simply is not on the same page with Sagapolutele, as both struggle to find one another and sutain drives. All of the other receivers—besides some nice Chase Hendricks moments—aren’t getting open in space. There is something missing in the geometry of the pass game concepts, where wideouts are either not making the right read to get open or the plays themselves aren’t providing optionality, or are overlapping in limited space, or the offense is producing too much confusion for these players to actually produce consistent offense, or all of the above...
Against Clemson, Cal looked so thoroughly overwhelmed in the first half. The Golden Bears only managed a sustained scoring drive when they took the football out of JKS’s hands and gave Mason Mini and Dominic Ingrassia QB opportunities, with Mini throwing the football 10 yards short of where it needed to go and Ingrassia pirouetting out of the grasp of two Clemson defenders. To add insult to injury, Somerville decided to run variants of these same tricks that BARELY WORKED the first time, and both ended drives at critical junctures.
All the above failings culminated in a systemic collapse. Through one month of the season, Cal is now near the bottom of every P4 offensive category.
I do not see a well-coached unit. Somerville has neutered Cal’s future NFL Draft quarterback prospect, who has now been coached into throwing checkdowns and 50-50 balls and running five-step drops with a hard-working but fragile pass protection unit and wide receivers with limited skill sets. This offense is too much for this group, and Sagapolutele looks completely out of his element.
Given the two year window with this talent, this is unacceptable. There needs to be a fix, soon, before the fears of the transfer portal become fully realized.
Tosh Lupoi had two opportunities to win over the Cal fanbase and kickstart his head coaching career with a bang. Against UCLA, he was dressed down by Bob Chesney, who is admittedly looking like a National Head Coach of the Year candidate. Against Clemson, the sly fox Dabo Swinney seemed to be several steps ahead of his Cal counterparts. Only Kingston Lopa saved Lupoi from a truly calamitous beginning in the Carrier Dome.
Somerville was Lupoi’s first major hire. In a situation where we all knew Lupoi might have some learning curves as a first-time coach, particularly with regard to in-game strategy and tactics, it was a puzzling hire. Somerville had not called plays anywhere, and really hadn’t even come close to touching playcalling duties at any previous location.
There were dreams that Somerville was a wunderkind who would lift the offense to better places, but it’s looking like he is out of his element. Seasoned college defensive coordinators at Syracuse and Clemson have locked him down, and an up-and-comer at UCLA essentially figured him out in-game. And it won’t get any easier: Five of Cal’s last seven ACC opponents sport defensive coordinators with 10+ years of experience at this position.
There is one internal option to consider. Nick Rolovich is on staff, has plenty of offensive coaching acumen, and has a relationship with Sagapolutele that is very strong. Bringing him deeper into the offensive braintrust and assisting with playcalling feels like a quick fix. He already partly did this last year after the termination of Justin Wilcox and coached one of Cal’s best offensive efforts in an upset of SMU.
Lupoi has stated public confidence in Somerville, but how much longer can this go on? Sagapolutele is grading out currently as one of the least efficient P4 quarterbacks in college football, and you have to imagine the wolves are out from other programs offering opportunity elsewhere. A few more bad results and those dissenting voices will become drumbeats, and a second rebuild might be on the horizon for 2027.
Four weeks in, the honeymoon is over. It’s time for Tosh Lupoi to find fixes, before the 2026 season is truly lost.
I would definitely encourage people to go back and watch that SMU game last year. Went up and down the field against a good conference opponent with the same QB, same line, and worse receivers. There's no excuse for them to look like THIS after four games (and if anything, they look worse now than in game one). The offensive design is bad.
To me a lot of the hope around this new era was not so much Tosh himself but more that we had people in place and able to drive decisions who actually cared about winning, not so much the moribund school administration that just cared about running a mediocre program on the cheap. Well, it's time for that group to make their voices heard again. The current state of affairs is untenable.
UCLA is the new Indiana. Was Cal ever in the running for Bob Chesney? Why are we holding a training program for first time head coaches and coordinators?
I really like RR, but these hires have me questioning his judgement for the first time.
Was Rolovich kept on staff for this kind of emergency? If so, it's time to break the glass.