There's another underrated part of this collapse: even after those two awful losses, Cal had recovered late in the season to beat a couple of ranked teams and seemingly salvage things: Arizona and Stanford back to back. Suddenly we sat at 8-3 and things were looking up again!
But then we went and lost in a baffling blowout at Washington and sleepwalked through a loss to Utah in the Poinsettia Bowl. That's what really made it feel like things were over.
Yeah, wins against Arizona and Stanford were some of the best games we'll always remember. I had forgotten we had 8 wins that season. It could have been 10.
But right now even 8 wins sound like an awfully good season
The infamous UW game where we kicked off to start both halves. That was not a good UW team and they completely destroyed us.
I was at the Poinsettia Bowl and it was such a complete let down. We had a fast start and just faded in the second half and couldn’t score or move the ball.
I liken Oregon's ascendancy to that of MTV or Google or Facebook - it was the right idea done well at the right time. Around the same time as Phil opening the wallet for UO, T Boone Pickens was throwing a similar amount of dough at the Oklahoma St program, and they made many of the same moves as the Ducks - uni's, lux locker room, etc, but with modest results. As brewer mentioned, Texas A&M has been throwing cash at its program, and they haven't risen accordingly. You do need a billionaire, but that's not all.
You also need to make entertainment that ESPN will want to showcase and profit from at a time when they're hungry for it. From the innovative fast paced offense to the Joey Harrington 10-story banner in Times Square, to the uniforms - it all made a great story for television, therefore ratings for ESPN.
Since we don't have a Phil Knight-like billionaire, or a few hundred-millionaires (like A&M's "Champions Council") to spread out the pain, it's very unlikely to happen here. As previously mentioned, we can aspire only to the levels of success attained by schools like WSU or OSU (and then only if our academics are lightened and NIL soars).
Oregon is a black swan, and as relevant an example in this discussion as asking "what does Shasta Cola need to do to achieve the success of Coke"? i.e. - barring raining frogs, it ain't gonna happen.
I find it hard to believe Cal doesn't have at least as many millionaires as A&M. It's more a matter of targeting them with the right messaging to get them to participate.
I also believe that the Athletic Dept's marketing has been atrocious. We need to get more butts in seats, and the Bear Growl just isn't the answer. With the promise of an exciting new basketball coach and upgraded talent on the roster, why didn't Cal offer something like a $20 Peet's gift card for every five games a student attends? Or if a student attends every game, they're entered into a raffle to win $1,000 off their tuition? You can't build a strong alumni base (who will attend games and contribute to the program) without first getting students interested. If it's part of their college experience, they'll want to come back as alumni.
Not just sports, Cal is terrible at alumni relations in general. I feel no incentive to ever donate to my alma mater for any cause, academic or athletic
Those millionaires never had a strong football or basketball attachment while they were in school, like you mentioned, should have been part of college experience. That's hurting now.
"Oregon is a black swan, and as relevant an example in this discussion as asking "what does Shasta Cola need to do to achieve the success of Coke"? i.e. - barring raining frogs, it ain't gonna happen."
This is the best, most complex sentence I've read in the comments in a while! Thanks for that. If I wasn't a native speaker of English, I'd be confused AF. 😆
Missing the forest for the trees. Texas A&M just dropped $75M to buyout/fire their coach, and despite this, money will not be an issue in their next coaching hire. The sport has officially jumped the shark. Anyone with half a brain cell (which would include most Cal grads) realizes that this is just a zero sum game where outside of the top few teams, donations are the equivalent to lighting money on fire. And meanwhile, the fan experience gets worse and worse, higher ticket prices, game times getting pushed around, hours of commercial timeouts, etc...
We missed a huge opportunity to reject the status quo. We could have stuck with our OSU/WSU brethren and tried to rebuild a conference that prioritizes our values. Maybe merge with the MWC and utilize a relegation system to keep things exciting. And implement salary caps for coaches and regulations around NIL to restore some sanity to the arms race. Instead we are stuck in the ACC until 2036 on a meager revenue share playing the same futile game as before.
Can't argue with lighting money on fire, but I'm at least excited to start competing in the ACC. I may not be so enthused in three or four years, but for now I'm excited to compete against these programs and learn about them. I can't imagine having that enthusiasm patching together schedules with the likes of SD State, UNLV, OSU, etc. You maybe right that it's more pragmatic and ethical, but as a fan I'd check out quick.
My monthly-very-well-informed view is that Tedford (who absolutely needed a break) crashed the program (including academics), and that Dykes was a fairly effective interim dealing with a difficult situation but was never a plausible long-term fit.
Yes but I wonder if we are thinking too small, trying to fit our situation to their facts. What we need is the money and the excitement / cultural cachet. We can generate that with a large group of people, doesn’t need to be from a single dude just because that is how Oregon did it
This is what I was thinking to. And you can’t tell me that we don’t have a large group of rich alums here in the very rich Bay Area…
Who would be responsible for finding this cache of rich donors? Is that under Crist or Knowlton? To me this should not be an impossible endeavor. Also, what about reaching out to all our pro/former pro football players to donate. Something like Riverboat Ron did. I continue to see that we have a large number of pro-bears even though our teams haven’t excelled.
I love football and am a long time loyal Bear alum. I did grow up in the South, so football is in my blood. I still enjoy going to our games for as we all know, you never really can predict the outcome of their games.
But back to putting together a strategy to get multiple donors to contribute. I think that having football program at Cal is critical. My daughter just started her freshman year at college and when she was looking at schools, I really wanted her to go where they had a football program as well as good academics. I feel having the student experience of attending football games is a rite of passage for college kids. My daughter ended up at university of Colorado - Boulder so has the football program, but she was unable to get a student athletic pass because of the hiring of Dion Sanders as coach. They sold out of the student allotment and couldn’t release any more as they also sold out season tix this year. I was so bummed she was going to miss out.
Can be done. But not yet. From what I understand the NIL fund for Cal football has been a big success (e.g. Ott and a few others did not transfer). At 1st I was surprised but it now makes sense to me. Cal alums are NOT willing to just throw money at the administration called Cal football. They are willing to throw money for a specific, earmarked person/purpose to build the program. When Knight did his thing he had the power to cut thru the Oregon red tape….and Oregon’s academics did not get in the way. Times have indeed changed.
Cool article Avi...and something that I have thought about for a long time.
We better get it right quickly because football mediocrity in the ACC will bankrupt us fast (given no regional rivalries, beyond Stanfurd, to keep people engaged). The alumni are going to have to play a major role in raising the ship, as I am not sure if we can depend on the admin to do it.
The article hits on many key points that I agree with. We need systemic change starting at the top. I would also like to add we need changes to our academic requirements for student-athlete acceptance.
Aren't we still dealing with the tighter academic standards we put in place in 2014? It is very stiffling to our recruiting and onfield success to have exceedingly different academic standards influencing the kids we can go after. Instead, I'm in favor of having the same standards as other schools and implementing more academic support for the kids once they are at Cal.
Does anyone think that Duke isn't a strong academic institution because a large % of their basketball players don't get degrees?
The changes we implemented a decade ago were another example of a knee-jerk, shortsighted response to a single data point that wasn't even suggesting a trend.
"The changes we implemented a decade ago were another example of a knee-jerk, shortsighted response to a single data point that wasn't even suggesting a trend."
Not only that, but the situation completely changed, and by 2018 or so, we had one of the highest APR scores of anyone. And we evidently did not consider changing anything.
Great point. It's so frustrating the way we handicap ourselves athletically and miss the big picture. Of course we're proud of our school's academics, but there's no reason we can't be strong academically and athletically. It's like we discount the hard work athletes have put into their craft as if it's somehow less significant or important than what other kids did acadmemically growing up. Isn't Cal about diversity? Doesn't it sound great to have a campus full of the most gifted students AND athletes? I think they could learn from each other and jointly create school pride. I'm not suggesting we lower our standards significantly, but they should be on par with similar schools (UCLA, UW, Oregon) as opposed to significantly more stringent. I could be very wrong, but I'm of the belief that it doesn't really matter who we hire to coach football until we make systemic changes such as these.
Right? The reality is most of these athletes deliver far more to the university--both in their time here and beyond it--than they take from it, and as often more than the many students who earned their way in academically deliver. And we are a public institution after all--one that at least claims to aspire to serve people of all backgrounds. I often think about the case of Russell White when this argument creeps up. A prop 48 case, Russell probably should never have gotten into Cal, and likely never otherwise would at any point in the program's history (sans for maybe the Mike White tenure). Of course, he not only succeeded and flourished athletically, but because of the strong academic support system at the time, he also became a beacon for what Cal aspires to deliver academically as well. He largely sacrificed a professional football career to earn his degree and came back to get his graduate degree as well. We surely need to evaluate athletes ability to survive and thrive here, but that potential doesn't only show up in the minimum requirements we make for them.
Agree in general. But remember that the stadium catastrophe alienated key constituencies who would hardly agree that Cal wasn’t spending enough on football. Also … a large part of what went wrong, imo, is that Tedford (especially) and Dykes were kept on for too long — is there a lesson for the future?
Dykes was fired after the new year for no reason other than to force us to hire from a depleted coaching pool, which led us to Wilcox, whom we inexplicably extended despite being a demonstrated loser
This happened with Wyking's dismissal as well. It took at least a couple of weeks after the season for the wheels to turn. I read that as a JK stare down to underwrite it, but he's probably not that cunning.
The bigger issue is that the stadium rebuild got tied up in frivolous lawsuits from the city and NIMBY neighborhood groups that took way too long to resolve. The university probably should have just steamrolled on past that stuff, but it's not their way. If that stadium had ACTUALLY been built in 2007 or 2008 then maybe the Tedford momentum is maintained. Instead it happened right at the start of his decline.
Hit the nail on the head. Building “buy-in” should be the top priority for the powers that be. If they can’t or won’t seek that, it’s time to stop wasting money on D1 athletics and go the way of UChicago.
Should be. Probably won’t be. What then? I’ve lived on both campuses. Only one is known for “where fun goes to die,” and it ain’t Berkeley. We deserve and can have better than this, but there is a middle and that’s likely our destiny if we’re willing to chase it. I’ve been tortured by Cal Athletics for 4 decades and will gladly continue to take the pain if that’s the alternative to a U of Chicago route.
I went to UChicago too! For grad school. Dude, so different from Cal in many ways, but the absence of sports really does impact student life. These sporting events give shape to the student experience in ways that are hard to notice until you experience their absence. For instance, at UofC, you pretty rarely see someone wearing a UofC shirt or hat, even on campus.
The U of Chicago is one of the world's best universities, yet it has never been any kid's dream to go to the U of Chicago for undergrad. I was always struck by how most of the undergrads I encountered there were there purely for the sake of learning.
Not intending to interrupt this debate, but I've seen UChicago get mentioned before. I honestly didn't know their story. Looked it up and found this not very recent article. Makes for some interesting light reading and contemplation. For those who may be interested to consider where the experiences of U of C and Cal line up and where they really don't, check out the article.
It's an easy arm chair hypothetical, but the reality is that was already nearly a century ago and this U of Chicago example has been an outlier ever since. If it was that easy to cast aside big time athletics for schools, I'm sure more would have followed suit. But the financial realities of major modern college athletics have made it harder to quit than when U of Chicago made that decision. The financial aspects of their decision I'm sure only needed to play a very small part of that decision. They only had to make an ethical decision, rather than also having to worry much about a financial one.
Santa Clara and UOP are more recent and probably better comparisons than U of Chicago. Both schools disbanded football in the 1990s. All three schools are private, so none had the luxury of state funds to bail them out.
If Cal doesn’t want to invest in its sports, then why should we (either financially or emotionally)? Feels more like a toxic relationship that we convince ourselves to stay in for *reasons*
You’re right. You don’t need to be. I’m not disagreeing that we can’t or shouldn’t be stellar. Just being realistic. But I disagree that the only outcomes are two extreme ones.
But doesn’t the middle path of remaining mediocre lead to the same outcome as shutting down the program (just after burning $Ms)?
Status quo means we will hemorrhage money for the next 7 years while in the ACC without meaningfully growing our revenue base. The ensuing growth in the budget deficit will lead to a Regents’ decision re: keeping Cal Athletics and I would wager ends our D1 participation to save on costs.
Burning money would be abandoning the only plausible way to cut into a half billion $ in stadium debt that doesn’t otherwise fall to students and academic programs. I’d like Cal to have a top shelf athletics program like Oregon too, but I don’t also agree that’s the only alternative to a U of Chicago model.
I haven’t seen the covenants for the stadium financing, so take my following Q with a grain of salt: If cal abandons its football program, why couldn’t Cal just pass the debt refinancing to the state to eat? A sub-D1 team could play at Edward’s while the state took full possession of CMS. Not saying I like the idea but why can’t we get shed the stadium if we don’t need it
Uncle Phil is a key to not only funds for athletics, but also for the buy-in- by student-athletes/recruitment (the cool changing uni, facilities, etc) but also more importantly the academic portion of the university, since I believe he also donates there. The result of rising tides of the university with improved athletics is also huge for OR buy-in, and I find it difficult to believe the rising tides view will ever be held by the majority of Cal and current administration.
Uncle Phil has also donated millions to biomedical eng and cancer research in the state, in addition to the law school and library. The eng program is a joint one with Oregon State. Needless to say, whatever Uncle Phil wants in the State of Oregon, Uncle Phil gets.
The tree-sitters stopped key momentum as it pushed back the stadium renovations and program had lost considerable momentum when stadium opened in 2012
That 42-3 loss, followed by the 30-3 loss to USC broke Tedford and our program.
There's another underrated part of this collapse: even after those two awful losses, Cal had recovered late in the season to beat a couple of ranked teams and seemingly salvage things: Arizona and Stanford back to back. Suddenly we sat at 8-3 and things were looking up again!
But then we went and lost in a baffling blowout at Washington and sleepwalked through a loss to Utah in the Poinsettia Bowl. That's what really made it feel like things were over.
Yeah, wins against Arizona and Stanford were some of the best games we'll always remember. I had forgotten we had 8 wins that season. It could have been 10.
But right now even 8 wins sound like an awfully good season
The infamous UW game where we kicked off to start both halves. That was not a good UW team and they completely destroyed us.
I was at the Poinsettia Bowl and it was such a complete let down. We had a fast start and just faded in the second half and couldn’t score or move the ball.
Ed Dickson just scored another TD 14 years later.
And Tedford is lining up for another FG right before halftime.
I liken Oregon's ascendancy to that of MTV or Google or Facebook - it was the right idea done well at the right time. Around the same time as Phil opening the wallet for UO, T Boone Pickens was throwing a similar amount of dough at the Oklahoma St program, and they made many of the same moves as the Ducks - uni's, lux locker room, etc, but with modest results. As brewer mentioned, Texas A&M has been throwing cash at its program, and they haven't risen accordingly. You do need a billionaire, but that's not all.
You also need to make entertainment that ESPN will want to showcase and profit from at a time when they're hungry for it. From the innovative fast paced offense to the Joey Harrington 10-story banner in Times Square, to the uniforms - it all made a great story for television, therefore ratings for ESPN.
Since we don't have a Phil Knight-like billionaire, or a few hundred-millionaires (like A&M's "Champions Council") to spread out the pain, it's very unlikely to happen here. As previously mentioned, we can aspire only to the levels of success attained by schools like WSU or OSU (and then only if our academics are lightened and NIL soars).
Oregon is a black swan, and as relevant an example in this discussion as asking "what does Shasta Cola need to do to achieve the success of Coke"? i.e. - barring raining frogs, it ain't gonna happen.
I find it hard to believe Cal doesn't have at least as many millionaires as A&M. It's more a matter of targeting them with the right messaging to get them to participate.
I also believe that the Athletic Dept's marketing has been atrocious. We need to get more butts in seats, and the Bear Growl just isn't the answer. With the promise of an exciting new basketball coach and upgraded talent on the roster, why didn't Cal offer something like a $20 Peet's gift card for every five games a student attends? Or if a student attends every game, they're entered into a raffle to win $1,000 off their tuition? You can't build a strong alumni base (who will attend games and contribute to the program) without first getting students interested. If it's part of their college experience, they'll want to come back as alumni.
Not just sports, Cal is terrible at alumni relations in general. I feel no incentive to ever donate to my alma mater for any cause, academic or athletic
Those millionaires never had a strong football or basketball attachment while they were in school, like you mentioned, should have been part of college experience. That's hurting now.
"Oregon is a black swan, and as relevant an example in this discussion as asking "what does Shasta Cola need to do to achieve the success of Coke"? i.e. - barring raining frogs, it ain't gonna happen."
This is the best, most complex sentence I've read in the comments in a while! Thanks for that. If I wasn't a native speaker of English, I'd be confused AF. 😆
Missing the forest for the trees. Texas A&M just dropped $75M to buyout/fire their coach, and despite this, money will not be an issue in their next coaching hire. The sport has officially jumped the shark. Anyone with half a brain cell (which would include most Cal grads) realizes that this is just a zero sum game where outside of the top few teams, donations are the equivalent to lighting money on fire. And meanwhile, the fan experience gets worse and worse, higher ticket prices, game times getting pushed around, hours of commercial timeouts, etc...
We missed a huge opportunity to reject the status quo. We could have stuck with our OSU/WSU brethren and tried to rebuild a conference that prioritizes our values. Maybe merge with the MWC and utilize a relegation system to keep things exciting. And implement salary caps for coaches and regulations around NIL to restore some sanity to the arms race. Instead we are stuck in the ACC until 2036 on a meager revenue share playing the same futile game as before.
Can't argue with lighting money on fire, but I'm at least excited to start competing in the ACC. I may not be so enthused in three or four years, but for now I'm excited to compete against these programs and learn about them. I can't imagine having that enthusiasm patching together schedules with the likes of SD State, UNLV, OSU, etc. You maybe right that it's more pragmatic and ethical, but as a fan I'd check out quick.
My monthly-very-well-informed view is that Tedford (who absolutely needed a break) crashed the program (including academics), and that Dykes was a fairly effective interim dealing with a difficult situation but was never a plausible long-term fit.
Phil Knight Phil Knight Phil Knight. Mega wealthy and his wealth came from a sports empire. There are no other Nike’s out there.
Yes but I wonder if we are thinking too small, trying to fit our situation to their facts. What we need is the money and the excitement / cultural cachet. We can generate that with a large group of people, doesn’t need to be from a single dude just because that is how Oregon did it
This is what I was thinking to. And you can’t tell me that we don’t have a large group of rich alums here in the very rich Bay Area…
Who would be responsible for finding this cache of rich donors? Is that under Crist or Knowlton? To me this should not be an impossible endeavor. Also, what about reaching out to all our pro/former pro football players to donate. Something like Riverboat Ron did. I continue to see that we have a large number of pro-bears even though our teams haven’t excelled.
I love football and am a long time loyal Bear alum. I did grow up in the South, so football is in my blood. I still enjoy going to our games for as we all know, you never really can predict the outcome of their games.
But back to putting together a strategy to get multiple donors to contribute. I think that having football program at Cal is critical. My daughter just started her freshman year at college and when she was looking at schools, I really wanted her to go where they had a football program as well as good academics. I feel having the student experience of attending football games is a rite of passage for college kids. My daughter ended up at university of Colorado - Boulder so has the football program, but she was unable to get a student athletic pass because of the hiring of Dion Sanders as coach. They sold out of the student allotment and couldn’t release any more as they also sold out season tix this year. I was so bummed she was going to miss out.
Can be done. But not yet. From what I understand the NIL fund for Cal football has been a big success (e.g. Ott and a few others did not transfer). At 1st I was surprised but it now makes sense to me. Cal alums are NOT willing to just throw money at the administration called Cal football. They are willing to throw money for a specific, earmarked person/purpose to build the program. When Knight did his thing he had the power to cut thru the Oregon red tape….and Oregon’s academics did not get in the way. Times have indeed changed.
Cool article Avi...and something that I have thought about for a long time.
We better get it right quickly because football mediocrity in the ACC will bankrupt us fast (given no regional rivalries, beyond Stanfurd, to keep people engaged). The alumni are going to have to play a major role in raising the ship, as I am not sure if we can depend on the admin to do it.
Thanks Avi…great article.
The article hits on many key points that I agree with. We need systemic change starting at the top. I would also like to add we need changes to our academic requirements for student-athlete acceptance.
Aren't we still dealing with the tighter academic standards we put in place in 2014? It is very stiffling to our recruiting and onfield success to have exceedingly different academic standards influencing the kids we can go after. Instead, I'm in favor of having the same standards as other schools and implementing more academic support for the kids once they are at Cal.
Does anyone think that Duke isn't a strong academic institution because a large % of their basketball players don't get degrees?
The changes we implemented a decade ago were another example of a knee-jerk, shortsighted response to a single data point that wasn't even suggesting a trend.
"The changes we implemented a decade ago were another example of a knee-jerk, shortsighted response to a single data point that wasn't even suggesting a trend."
Not only that, but the situation completely changed, and by 2018 or so, we had one of the highest APR scores of anyone. And we evidently did not consider changing anything.
Great point. It's so frustrating the way we handicap ourselves athletically and miss the big picture. Of course we're proud of our school's academics, but there's no reason we can't be strong academically and athletically. It's like we discount the hard work athletes have put into their craft as if it's somehow less significant or important than what other kids did acadmemically growing up. Isn't Cal about diversity? Doesn't it sound great to have a campus full of the most gifted students AND athletes? I think they could learn from each other and jointly create school pride. I'm not suggesting we lower our standards significantly, but they should be on par with similar schools (UCLA, UW, Oregon) as opposed to significantly more stringent. I could be very wrong, but I'm of the belief that it doesn't really matter who we hire to coach football until we make systemic changes such as these.
Right? The reality is most of these athletes deliver far more to the university--both in their time here and beyond it--than they take from it, and as often more than the many students who earned their way in academically deliver. And we are a public institution after all--one that at least claims to aspire to serve people of all backgrounds. I often think about the case of Russell White when this argument creeps up. A prop 48 case, Russell probably should never have gotten into Cal, and likely never otherwise would at any point in the program's history (sans for maybe the Mike White tenure). Of course, he not only succeeded and flourished athletically, but because of the strong academic support system at the time, he also became a beacon for what Cal aspires to deliver academically as well. He largely sacrificed a professional football career to earn his degree and came back to get his graduate degree as well. We surely need to evaluate athletes ability to survive and thrive here, but that potential doesn't only show up in the minimum requirements we make for them.
^^^^this!!
Yeah, the puritanical arguments over academics standards and athletics are as infuriating as they are exclusionary.
Agree in general. But remember that the stadium catastrophe alienated key constituencies who would hardly agree that Cal wasn’t spending enough on football. Also … a large part of what went wrong, imo, is that Tedford (especially) and Dykes were kept on for too long — is there a lesson for the future?
If anyone has been kept on too long is Wilcox.
At least Tedford had success and winning seasons.
Dykes had a great offense and the number 1 pick in the NFL draft.
Wilcox hasn’t done anything of substance on the field to merit his longevity or that ridiculous extension.
Dykes don’t recruit Goff.
Tedford did.
Goff still came to CAL bc he is truly a Bear for life.
But yeah, Wilcox has def been here too long.
I didn’t say Dykes recruited him.
Dykes coached him and helped develop him into the number 1 pick.
sorry i misunderstood your comment.
but i guess we have to agree to disagree on the role of dykes in goff’s development.
have a good one !
Well Wilcox has been kept too long too. No lesson was learned.
Dykes was fired after the new year for no reason other than to force us to hire from a depleted coaching pool, which led us to Wilcox, whom we inexplicably extended despite being a demonstrated loser
This happened with Wyking's dismissal as well. It took at least a couple of weeks after the season for the wheels to turn. I read that as a JK stare down to underwrite it, but he's probably not that cunning.
I think the argument can now be made that Tedford didn’t stay here long enough. In reality though, dude probably needed a gap year.
The bigger issue is that the stadium rebuild got tied up in frivolous lawsuits from the city and NIMBY neighborhood groups that took way too long to resolve. The university probably should have just steamrolled on past that stuff, but it's not their way. If that stadium had ACTUALLY been built in 2007 or 2008 then maybe the Tedford momentum is maintained. Instead it happened right at the start of his decline.
Hit the nail on the head. Building “buy-in” should be the top priority for the powers that be. If they can’t or won’t seek that, it’s time to stop wasting money on D1 athletics and go the way of UChicago.
Should be. Probably won’t be. What then? I’ve lived on both campuses. Only one is known for “where fun goes to die,” and it ain’t Berkeley. We deserve and can have better than this, but there is a middle and that’s likely our destiny if we’re willing to chase it. I’ve been tortured by Cal Athletics for 4 decades and will gladly continue to take the pain if that’s the alternative to a U of Chicago route.
I went to UChicago too! For grad school. Dude, so different from Cal in many ways, but the absence of sports really does impact student life. These sporting events give shape to the student experience in ways that are hard to notice until you experience their absence. For instance, at UofC, you pretty rarely see someone wearing a UofC shirt or hat, even on campus.
The U of Chicago is one of the world's best universities, yet it has never been any kid's dream to go to the U of Chicago for undergrad. I was always struck by how most of the undergrads I encountered there were there purely for the sake of learning.
Not intending to interrupt this debate, but I've seen UChicago get mentioned before. I honestly didn't know their story. Looked it up and found this not very recent article. Makes for some interesting light reading and contemplation. For those who may be interested to consider where the experiences of U of C and Cal line up and where they really don't, check out the article.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/sports/ncaafootball/at-the-university-of-chicago-football-and-higher-education-mix.html
Ok, back to the big time college football stuff...
It's an easy arm chair hypothetical, but the reality is that was already nearly a century ago and this U of Chicago example has been an outlier ever since. If it was that easy to cast aside big time athletics for schools, I'm sure more would have followed suit. But the financial realities of major modern college athletics have made it harder to quit than when U of Chicago made that decision. The financial aspects of their decision I'm sure only needed to play a very small part of that decision. They only had to make an ethical decision, rather than also having to worry much about a financial one.
Santa Clara and UOP are more recent and probably better comparisons than U of Chicago. Both schools disbanded football in the 1990s. All three schools are private, so none had the luxury of state funds to bail them out.
Did St Mary's have a football program at some point?
As a younger blue, I don’t understand why.
If Cal doesn’t want to invest in its sports, then why should we (either financially or emotionally)? Feels more like a toxic relationship that we convince ourselves to stay in for *reasons*
You’re right. You don’t need to be. I’m not disagreeing that we can’t or shouldn’t be stellar. Just being realistic. But I disagree that the only outcomes are two extreme ones.
But doesn’t the middle path of remaining mediocre lead to the same outcome as shutting down the program (just after burning $Ms)?
Status quo means we will hemorrhage money for the next 7 years while in the ACC without meaningfully growing our revenue base. The ensuing growth in the budget deficit will lead to a Regents’ decision re: keeping Cal Athletics and I would wager ends our D1 participation to save on costs.
Burning money would be abandoning the only plausible way to cut into a half billion $ in stadium debt that doesn’t otherwise fall to students and academic programs. I’d like Cal to have a top shelf athletics program like Oregon too, but I don’t also agree that’s the only alternative to a U of Chicago model.
I haven’t seen the covenants for the stadium financing, so take my following Q with a grain of salt: If cal abandons its football program, why couldn’t Cal just pass the debt refinancing to the state to eat? A sub-D1 team could play at Edward’s while the state took full possession of CMS. Not saying I like the idea but why can’t we get shed the stadium if we don’t need it
Uncle Phil is a key to not only funds for athletics, but also for the buy-in- by student-athletes/recruitment (the cool changing uni, facilities, etc) but also more importantly the academic portion of the university, since I believe he also donates there. The result of rising tides of the university with improved athletics is also huge for OR buy-in, and I find it difficult to believe the rising tides view will ever be held by the majority of Cal and current administration.
Uncle Phil has also donated millions to biomedical eng and cancer research in the state, in addition to the law school and library. The eng program is a joint one with Oregon State. Needless to say, whatever Uncle Phil wants in the State of Oregon, Uncle Phil gets.
https://lincolncityhomepage.com/phil-penny-knight-will-give-500-million-university-oregon-science-complex/
My Aunt lives in Seattle and says UW has a bunch of rich alums that support them. So they may have a successful example that Cal could emulate?