Defeat with extra agony

Pain was the theme of the weekend for Cal basketball

photo via calbears.com

I have a love/hate relationship with the NCAA tournament.

I love the NCAA tournament because the basic format ramps the excitement, tension, and potential for chaos up to 11.

I hate the NCAA tournament because everything that happen for three weeks in spring (and really, in one weekend in mid-March) completely subsumes the rest of the season.

I love the NCAA tournament because it’s the perfect platform for incredibly talented players to make their mark on the national consciousness.

I hate the NCAA tournament because with a few notable exceptions it has been unrelentingly cruel to the California Golden Bears in my lifetime.

On Saturday, the Cal women lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament, and they lost in notably painful fashion. The Bears didn’t hit a field goal for the first six minutes of the game, turned the ball over on 31% of their possessions, and shot their lowest percentage of the entire season on both 2 point shots and 3 point shots.

It all added up to an offensive meltdown of epic proportions*, at the worst possible moment.

Every tournament loss is cruel in its own way. This particular loss felt cruel because all of the things that made this team fun - the shot making, the creativity, the offensive firepower - was completely absent. If you were a Cal fan who skipped the rest of the season and tuned in just for the tournament game, you’d wonder why exactly it was that we all fell in love this this team.

I have no doubt that, given time, I will remember this team for their high points rather than their low points. Sweeping Stanford for the first time in the living memory of most Cal fans, and that joyous home romp over their rivals. But there’s no getting around the fact that this one hurts.

I was preparing for that hurt. I thought about the hurt I’d feel if Cal was to lose a heartbreaker to Mississippi State, and I thought about how I’d feel if Cal’s season was ended at the hands of Lindsay Gottlieb and USC.

I just didn’t think I’d watch Cal’s season end with only 13 made shots.

*Ironically, by some measures Cal may have played their single best *defensive* game of the season, holding MSU to 0.77 points/possession, their lowest of the season by some margin. That the defensive effort wasn’t even enough to keep the game in single digits is flabbergasting.

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Part of the reason this game stings is because of the pain of the past and the uncertainty of the future.

The pain of the past is 12 years without advancing past the 2nd round and five years in the basketball wilderness, watching as our rivals ride the wave of increased attention that was long overdue for college women’s basketball.

The uncertainty of the future is the reality that next year’s team will look VERY different from this year’s team. Ioanna Krimili, Michelle Onyiah, Kayla Williams, and Jayda Noble are out of eligibility. Marta Suarez has another year of eligibility left, but participated in senior day and may likely leave as well. It’s entirely possible that Lulu Twidale will be the only key player from the 24-25 team on next year’s roster.

Cal will not be completely bereft of talent. This year’s freshmen class was a good class and will hopefully step up as sophomores. Cal has two high school signees including 5 star Aliyahna “Puff” Morris joining the team. Charmin Smith will undoubtedly look to add talent in the transfer portal.

But next year will almost certainly be a rebuilding year. The 2024-25 season was the culmination of a multi-year rebuilding cycle, and next year will begin another cycle. For at least the moment, Cal isn’t yet the kind of program that can bring in a level of talent such that a spot in the NCAA tournament is a baseline expectation.

And when the peak of a five year cycle is a demoralizing first round blowout loss . . . well, that hurts.

Was my general despair on Saturday evening influenced by the news that Jeremiah Wilkinson had entered his name in the transfer portal, thus dimming what little optimism remained in the prospects of a Mark Madsen rebuild of the men’s basketball team happening in the near term? Yes. Does this have anything to do with, or at all fair to the women’s team? No.

But Cal basketball is ultimately my first love, and from 2020 through 2024, I watched as the men’s and women’s basketball teams combined to go 107-186 across five seasons, without anything close to an NCAA tournament appearance. This is all part of the tapestry of the Cal (basketball) fan psyche, where success is a precious rock to cling to in a sea of uncertainty, and you might lose your grip at any moment.

Eventually the pain of this moment will recede and be replaced by images of Ioanna Krimili logo threes and Michelle Onyiah paint buckets.

But it’s been more than a decade since Cal basketball provided an indelible March moment. It’s a fan hunger I’ve had since I was a kid and did hand-made NCAA brackets with a piece of paper, a pencil, and a ruler and imagined being able to write in the name “California all the way until the center of the paper.

Thanks in no small part to Charmin Smith, I was able to do that once. But right now, doing so again feels very far away indeed.