Cal football is so close, and that's why it hurts

The California Golden Bears know that they are on the edge of fulfilling their potential.

Before everyone starts yelling again, let’s go back in time, and paint a picture for you on the eve of the season.

• Jaydn Ott will get hurt early, and it will greatly limit his production for half the season.

• Cal will lose its projected top two wideouts, Tobias Merriweather and Kyion Grayes, who will not play at all for six games, and we lose our stretch vertical options.

• Cal has seen its three top offensive linemen (Will McDonald, Sioape Vatikani, Matthew Wykoff) all experience injuries that have forced a makeshift crew into innumerable offensive line rotations.

• Cal will see injuries during the season to its rotation tight end in Corey Dyches, its best pass rushers (David Reese is still playing through his recovery and Ryan McCulloch went down during Miami), and its two best nickel options in Matthew Littlejohn and Jasiah Wagoner.

• Cal will play two undefeated 6-0 football teams teams. Neither of them are Florida State and Auburn.

You’ll come back to me and probably say, “Getting to 3-3 would be quite an accomplishment!”

Then I respond with “What if I told you we did get to 3-3, but could easily have won all six of those games?”

You’d sag your shoulders and exclaim, “What did Cal do to us this time?”

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Cal Family, I cannot tell you how to feel or think or grieve or react. If you want to bring out pitchforks, I won’t stop you. I get that it’s been a tough three weeks, with Saturday being the punctuation mark.

Some of the decisions were beyond frustrating. It is hard not to understand going to the red zone over and over and barely throwing to the end zone against Florida State. It is very hard to not second-guess gambling on a big play on either side of the ball to finish the Miami upset. It is tough to understand the quarterback rotation decisions in Pitt, and whatever the culmination of THAT drive was. These should not be the mistakes that an eighth year head coach and his staff should be making.

All I can tell you is we are closer to where we want to be than where we have been in the past. The improvement is there. The effort is there. After a half decade in the wilderness, Cal is so close to being a ranked team with some signature wins.

But despite upgrading our roster, we didn’t fix everything, and the injuries point to a familiar script.

The Cal team going out and playing week-to-week is far different from the one we were dreaming of this entire offseason. The penalties, the sacks, the mental errors all indicate a team that is still learning to play with each other as they acclimate in the portal era. We are living on the margins, meaning losses can and will happen.

Cal lost three games in a row by several plays and eight points (two 6-0 teams!) with half the projected offensive starters injured and our star very limited all year. Even a year ago, had the Bears experienced this assortment of depth issues against the qualiy of opponent we faced, they get their doors blown off at least once or twice.

This is a team moving in the right direction. The finishing just hasn’t clicked yet.

It’s important to get behind the players. Fernando Mendoza, Jaivian Thomas, Nohl Williams, Jack Endries, Teddye Buchanan and so many more need to know that we have their back. They are the ones putting their bodies out there. They are the ones looking for that final step, that last moment that will put the Bears over the top.

They haven’t found it quite yet, but we all know it’s in them.

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Still, this is a results-driven business, and how we look matters.

• There were concerns about mismangement of the offensive staff, with Mike Bloesch handling both of the two most important assistant positions as offensive coordinator and O-line coach, likely taxing his abilities in one facet or the other. Those concerns have been borne out.

• With the offense sputtering, Peter Sirmon’s defenses essentially must play mistake-free football to give Cal a chance to win. That approach collapsed against Miami and it only took a few mistakes against Florida State and Pitt to have those ones slip by.

• Cal does not have a full time dedicated special teams coach on staff (Vic So’oto has the position, but he has other duties at outside linebackers that more suit his talents). That unit is making some incredibly memorable mistakes.

• And the turtling comment regarding Wilcox has never been more evident in the last three games. With a chance to win late, the Bears resort to running the ball a lot and opting for trusting the defense, a place where Wilcox always feels comfortable. It bit them the hardest in that final drive at Pitt, where arguably the worst decision of his tenure came back to bite him and the team.

In these three losses, we’ve gotten the full breadth of the Justin Wilcox experience at Cal. He can always get the Bears to compete hard against good opponents and give the Bears a chance to win these games, and you can see plenty of one-score games in his tenure against the better teams.

But in terms of making the right decisions at the right times to ensure victory, something seems to go wrong now more often than not.

This year, everyone knows the stakes, and how critical it is to start pulling this games out. The hope was the additions in talent would be enough to overcome these coaching processes, but the injuries have stripped us down where every decision does end up mattering, and frustratingly almost none of them have worked out.

The angry voices are louder than ever. He needs to reverse this situation again. To his credit, he has done it before. But this time it needs to be as decisive and emphatic as possible.

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The reason our community pushed hard for College GameDay in Berkeley is to show not just the world that Cal cared about football. It was to show ourselves. We needed to realize that there is a large group of us out there that is ready to support the Bears, and if we can keep showing that, we can survive the realignment wars to come.

But that can easily go away if the results aren’t borne out on the field. Which is why it is heartening to see the fanbase erupt in near unanimous anger on Saturday’s result. We’re in. We want this.

If the results this year don’t go a way we don’t like, it is important to keep caring. It is important to channel that energy and to make your voices heard. It’s important to be hurt rather than apathetic.

We know we are closer to our goals than we’ve been in a long time. The players know it too.

The most interesting part about being at the game Saturday is all the Pitt fans not for once believing they were going to win because these are the games they have blown over and over again. It just reminds you most college football teams and fanbases are like us. It’s unusual to be great.

Now Pitt is 6-0. It does not take much to reverse the narrative.

We’re hurting because we’re so close. So close to realizing all the potential our fanbase could unleash if we had a good team to root for. And we all know how quickly narratives can shift in college football if we just put it all in together.

The reset starts with these next six games, with Cal likely the favorites in the next five. The Bears need to channel their frustrations properly, take care of business, chalk up these last three losses as learnings, and start winning, now. If not, it’s time to start the real talk about the difficult decisions that have been dominating our discussions this weekend.

Hurting is part of life. But enough of that. It’s time for Cal to make room for other feelings too.