I follow Cal sports like buyers of lotto tickets. You mostly lose but the possibility of a big payoff (read upset win over Auburn, or Miami? ?) keeps you going. Irrational, it sure is, but aren’t all addictions?
Re: Marketing. With NO major Pro Teams in the East Bay and a pretty decent shuttle system from Downtown BART, you would think this is a great opportunity to sell Cal Sports. IIRC, there was such a push when the Raiders left Oakland the first time. And Cal baseball and softball have had decent seasons.
Market to families, especially with package ticket offers and youth sports teams. Entice families to get out of the house & away from screens. What has Cal got to lose?
This is a great suggestion. Cal Marketing used to market to families with family season tickets (2 adults and 3 kids) would have admission to all home games, excepting the Big Game, for one low price. It got families in the stadium, folks to visit the concession stands, hit up the vendors for food, etc.
Cal Marketing also had discount prices to get local public schools students interested in coming to the game by offering $1 admission (this was the 1970s). They're missing an opportunity now by not using a similar marketing strategy.
Hubs & I used the Family Plan during football season in the mid-1980’s-1990’s. We also brought the kids to the different “open houses” sponsored by academic departments. One of their favorites was hosted by Earth Sciences where they got to “dig” for fossils and use a binocular microscope to sort tiny bones in gravel.
Tie ticket offers in with local library summer reading programs. Use Patrick Laird as the voice & face of it.
Would also like to see other sports alumni join in. Lynch, Pawlawski (sp?), Jeff Kent, Jason Kidd, Tony Gonzalez, Aaron Rodgers, Jared Goff?Yeah, I’m old.
Nick, when it comes to writing about Cal sports you're damn near a poet. Thanks for this. I too can never give up my season tickets but I'm surprised to note how accepting I am of those who do. Much of the fire has gone out of my burning hot love of Cal football. A lot of it has to do with the general state of college football and much is related to this slow, steady dirge of Wilcoxian football and the resulting mediocrity. I've given up hoping that Knowlton or Wilcox will ever be gone or that we'll ever achieve football glory but going to Cal football is in my DNA so I'll make the trek to Memorial Stadium and cheer the lads on, even if the names keep changing at a dizzying speed.
I think stepping away from the two revenue sports and supporting the Cal programs that do bring me joy has been a great bridge through the void. I've found myself less and less interested in the football program under Wilcox's leadership; games are more stressful than entertaining and usually end in chaotic fashion where wins feel unearned and losses are gut wrenching.
I cancelled my trip to Boston and San Diego after this recent barrage of portal entries. Saving my money for WBB opening their season in Paris (news release to come I'm sure, Charmin announced it at the End of Year Banquet)
I do agree Rich Lyons has his hands full in the current climate, alumni staff and students won't look too kindly to him levying funds to balance the athletics finances. Though I do believe in severing ties by the end of this academic year with Knowlton and accepting the legal and financial battle that entails.
Cal Athletics is in a dire time. The current students that the department hopes to become the next crop of season ticket holders or donor have zero reason to do so post graduation. Current fans and alumni are jumping ship. Big money donors are withholding funds. All this on the heels of inflation and a major recession on the horizon.
All this to say: I've seen a group of online shitposters pull Gameday out of their hats and the outlook of the program losing to a crappy FSU team go from dour to euphoric in a week's time. And the entire athletic department move mountains to make it happen. So who really knows? Go bears!
Cal reminds me if the federal government had a football or a basketball team and was competing against the private sector. Cal would always lose.
The following are examples of losing:
The Post Office, Bart, AC Transit, High Speed Rail, and the Bay Area Bridge authority. They have huge budgets and are woefully managed wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
It amazes how much smaller schools like Boise State in football and St. Mary's in basketball every year have much better teams than Cal with less resources.
It's all about the people running the programs. Unfortunately seldom are people fired in the government who are underperforming.
Wilcox and Knowleton should have been fired long ago.
I dunno. Tough spot. Unfortunately the wheels likely need to come completely off the wagon for any substantive change to occur with the football program, at least from a leadership perspective.
Harsin and Rolo are not here long term - say they cobble together an 8-win season against this dogschitt schedule in spite of Wilcox…both guys are likely gone next season after rehabilitating their images, yet Wilcox has now probably been extended yet again and then we’re in real trouble because he’s looking once again for an OC. You can’t change the culture that 8 years of offensive incompetence has built in one scorched-earth offseason, especially one that cost you both a couple of potential program icons and donor support.
And then if you even make a bowl, your milquetoast HC will likely treat it as a scrimmage? What player worth their salt wants that?
We’ll see. Reserving full judgment until we find out who they pull from the portal. I mean, if they land CharMar Brown, people are gonna forget Ott’s name pretty quickly.
Fairly sure risk-averse Wilcox is gonna roll with Devin Brown, tho, who is as blah as you can get. 6-6 is the leader in the clubhouse, as always.
I disagree on money as the root cause of the mediocrity of Cal athletics. Money (or the lack of it) is just a symptom of the malaise surrounding Cal athletics.
The root cause is that the administration doesn't really support revenue sports the way that other universities do. Taht Cal doesn't support football and basketball in a way that mirrors bluebloods like Ohio State, Alabama, Texas, Michigan, Notre Dame, Penn State, etc., is obvious. Hey, Cal doesn't even do it as well as our former Pac-12 colleagues UW, UO or USC.
This lack of administrative support is reflected in the bumbling administration that typifies the Knowlton regime. It's reflected in the placeholder administration of H. Mike Williams, and the sudden end to Sandy Barbour's regime. At least Barbour got done what she was hired to do: oversee the West Side Improvements Project (a.k.a. the renovation of Cal Memorial).
Lack of administrative support has placed Cal in a weird and precarious position - on the cusp of absolute irrelevance in the age of NIL while carrying a massive debt for the stadium renovation project. How will Cal pay off that debt given the current state of the football program, the current state of the ACC, and the competitive atmosphere in the NIL field?
Let's be honest about the current situation: Cal vastly prefers to excel in the non-revenue Olympic sports and to bring home Olympic gold, silver, and bronze. This keeps the anti-athletics folks in the faculty and within the alumni groups at bay.
Yeah, I don't think money is the main impediment. Certainly I realize that Cal can't throw around the same cash as the biggest programs mentioned above, but is there a reason we can't be as competitive as Utah? Arizona State? Colorado?
The problem is cultural. There's a lot of hostility to athletics and revenue sports in particular, from other faculty, from the city, from the local populace, etc., that probably doesn't exist in Salt Lake or Tempe or Boulder. That manifests in an administration that just hopes to muddle along while not being TOO bad in football to anger the donors/fans but also not making TOO many waves to anger everyone else. Unfortunately, college athletics has changed and that status quo isn't going to work anymore, so it's time to s*** or get off the pot.
"The problem is cultural." Until that is changed, and cultural issues are notoriously tough to tackle in any arena, the direct issues will remain hard to effectively address.
This has been the case for the extent of relevant recent and even not so recent times.
One sign of encouragement is that the donor base clearly feels more urgency now. Used to be (pre-Tedford) that people would kind of laugh at the sub-6 win seasons year after year and just enjoy their sunny afternoons at Memorial. Now everyone sees that things need to fundamentally change, even with a roughly .500 program, and are making noise about it.
But again, hard to turn this big tanker ship around. There's a lot of institutional inertia.
Sandy Barbour bankrupted the entire athletic program with her gross MIS management of the football stadium etc project. This fiasco is still a massive financial problem. I would certainly not give her any credit for anything, much less the lasting burden she created which continues to drag down the entire athletic program.
I suppose you would have thought that Cal Memorial shouldn't have been rebuilt. The rebuild was saddled with bad location from a bad decision made by the Regents in 1921. Cal Memorial should have been built where Edwards Stadium stands now, but it wasn't. We're stuck with it, so we're gonna have to suck it up.
Cal Memorial is sited poorly because it sits astride an earthquake fault that is literally pulling it apart. And yet, the design of the rebuilt portion is an innovative design that required three different sections to allow the structure to survive a Maximum Credible Event (MCE) on the Hayward Fault of 7.0 to ensure life safety.
You want a rebuilt stadium in Strawberry Canyon? You gotta pay for it and all the seismic requirements.
Even at $300 million, it looks like a bargain next to a rebuilt Ryan Field ($800 million) in Evanston, IL.
If rebuilding Cal Memorial was such a bad deal, what was the better deal? I've never heard of a better proposition that had a prayer of being executed.
There were some self-inflicted problems due to the ill-fated sighting, but at the time it was still absurdly high priced for what Cal got, and as importantly didn't get, compared to other stadium projects around the same time. And there was zero done to make the stadium district operable in terms of recovering costs, or ease of access/egress, in order to build revenue and support generating attendance.
Looking at it from the outside, and with no Cal rose/gold glasses on, no one spent more and got less on a stadium district build around the time it was done.
No where did I say that no renovation work was necessary, so don’t try to mischaracterize my point. I’m not going to repeat it for you. P.s. it’s apparent that you had some skin in that game.
If we get relegated like Oregon St or Wazzu in the next round of realignment, the nonrevenue sports will be cut back sharply and a lot of them will probably end up as club teams.
My feeling is that we probably still hang around in whatever "second tier" kind of conference remains after the B1G and SEC do more poaching. Some amalgam of the remainders from the ACC and Big 12 plus some upgraded G5 schools. I don't necessarily think Cal is "doomed forever" here, as I suspect there will be more realignment and more bites at the apple in the future.
But still, you have to get serious about running a real athletic program again if you want to move up. The Olympic sports will suffer too if you don't.
My wife is from Oklahoma and a die hard Sooners fan. She laughs at me every summer as I get excited about Cal football season, only to see me get disappointed year in and year out. Nothing has changed since I graduated in 1988. But, despite the years of futility, I remain a die hard fan!
Art: I'm in the same boat as you (I also graduated in 1988) except my wife is a Bruin! She could care less about FUCLA sports but she loves to give me shit when my Bears come up short, especially against the baby bears down south. By the way, UCLA is a perfect example of why athletics are important to many universities. In many ways, UCLA has surpassed Cal in terms of public perception as the #1 public university. There is no doubt in my mind that one of the reasons they have surpassed us in terms of numbers of applications received is because they have a major tv presence in the Big 10. Even when they were booted from the NCAA tournament this year in the early rounds, their brand was still being displayed on tv commercials associated with the tournament. Why Cal hasn't (or won't) figure this out is beyond me.
It’s hard, at least for me, to prioritize and justify giving to sports teams. It’s not that I think they’re worthless. They may make me and others happy. But I think there are so many much more important causes to give to. It’s people like me who doom Cal sports. We just need a couple of Phil Knights.
Good article. But your reference to the possiblilty of the Cal sports adminstrators being "overworked" sure doesn't fly. I don't know enough about the Knowlton issue to present a valid opinion. But the Cal "Marketing" Department? I have NO CLUE what these people even do, other than send out an email once in a while that in most cases is a waste of time,i.e. thinking football season ticket holders are going to show up for aWomen's basketball game with some half ass offer that isn't gonna accomplish anything. That's my take on this one.
I worked on campus for several years. Most admin departments on campus are woefully understaffed, a symptom of years and years of cuts. I don’t have sympathy for many of their leaders, many of whom just are no longer with the times and/operate largely to protect their rank. But most of these departments, including Cal Athletics, are mostly made up of very young, bright, energetic folks who are very often overmatched by more work than they can handle and stifling leadership.
I appreciate your comments and I have no doubt the issues you cover here are valid. But still, if there truly is a "Cal Sports Marketing Department", as an everyday Bay Area resident, I wouldn't have a clue as to what Cal sports is, or how I could benefit or enjoy myself from going to a game. I'm only aware because I'm ALREADY a Cal fan. The best example of this was this year's Women BB team that was REALLY entertaining. There should have been more out there to let people in on it. And ironically with the new WNBA team coming in, it would have been a perfect time to get the word out since Women's Basketball is becoming more popular. And yet, there was really nothing of significance that I noticed that ever came out. By midseason there should have been more people watching our women BB team play.
You're right to criticize. I'm just saying that the overworked part jibes from what I both witnessed and experienced first-hand across campus. It's not the totality of the problem--poor leadership and inertia is the bigger culprit--but it is a factor.
I will add to the chorus of folks who would like to see Knowlton gone. He’s a bad manager who doesn’t push and elevate the coaches under him to be better, which makes him more of a caretaker than leader.
Second, money is the big issue and Cal keeps going back to the same, dwindling set of donors. Cal graduates a lot of folks every year and some of them make a decent amount of money as they advance in their careers. However, Cal does a crappy job of keeping young alumni engaged to create that pipeline of new donors and that affects the entire university, not just the athletic department. I suspect that most of us here were committed fans while we were at Cal and that continued after we graduated despite whatever Cal attempted to keep us engaged.
And, money is a problem across the college landscape. I was at Auburn for a WBB game a couple of years ago and joined the football stadium tour. The Auburn fans were telling me all about the ways Auburn was adding more seats and making more seats premium in order to squeeze a lot more money out of them.
Also, NIL is decimating athletic departments across the country. If you have X dollars to give and give a lot of it to specific athletes via NIL, you’re not giving it to the athletic department to pay for non-revenue sports. There was a NYT article on this last year where they quoted various ADs.
Will Cal be innovative and come up with a novel way to work around this? Uh…
And don’t get me started on how hard the marketing/ticketing department makes it to get people to buy tickets to games…
College athletics used to be for the students and alumni. The televised Cal sporting events were few and far between. The Pac-12 network helped bring our beloved Bears to those of us who could only tune in via radio before. With cable cutting, the money to be made in live sports has created a dynamic where marquee programs who get nationwide eyeballs are consolidating due to pressure from broadcasters. This has effectively created a new division in college sports, one that Cal has not been invited to join. I expect Cal to be broadcast to progressively fewer screens. I expect revenues to revert to ticket sales and I expect a crisis moment to come where the University of California begins to debate whether its flagship university should be fielding a football team at all. I will remain a Cal fan for life. I will continue to support all of the athletes who choose to compete for the university. But I expect a radically different experience from what I have enjoyed for the last 25 years. I expect my fan experience to return to what it was like when I was a student in the 1990s, but perhaps, without a football team to root for.
LiffeyBear: Your crisis scenario is scary and all too possible. A "radically different experience" would absolutely suck. When I was at Cal in the 80s, the football team was mediocre at best and frequently bad. But going to games on Saturday with my friends and family was always a fantastic experience (we even beat U$C when I was there) and just reinforced my love of all things Cal. I know people who went to academically elite colleges and universities with small athletic programs but they often refer to their time in these institutions as simply four years of college that they completed and then they moved on to bigger and better things. There is a noticeable lack of passion/enthusiasm for their experiences. It's just something that they did. I hope that isn't something that happens to our alma mater. Whether people like it or not, athletics is the "front porch" of most universities and helps to drive student and alumni engagement. As one football coach whose name I can't remember (I think it was Bobby Bowden) put it: "You can't rally around the physics class." Academics at Cal absolutely changed my life for the better but reunions or conferences at the History Department just aren't the same as a game day experience at Memorial (or on tv) with friends and family. I pray that the people in charge really have a plan to turn things around because the window of realignment/expansion may not be open much longer.
Been going through all five stages this week. I will always support my Bears, but this week was a low point. As usual, the blow up was completely avoidable. As usual leadership responds with half measures. As usual leadership responds way past too late. As usual Cal fans are told to patiently stay the course and trust that the morons that have made this mess can get us out of it. We’re cooked, but go Bears.
Well said Nick.
I follow Cal sports like buyers of lotto tickets. You mostly lose but the possibility of a big payoff (read upset win over Auburn, or Miami? ?) keeps you going. Irrational, it sure is, but aren’t all addictions?
GO BEARS! (Whoever you are)
Old Bear: I never thought of myself as an addict. Thanks for setting me straight. Is there Cal version of AA for people like us? I need help, QUICK!
GB88, There is no cure and no help. Once infected you are toast. So just go all in and enjoy the Saturday experience.
I wish I could help, I really do, but as long as the Blue and Gold puts a team on the field I'll be there (in person or in spirit).
GO BEARS, FOREVER!!!!!!
Re: Marketing. With NO major Pro Teams in the East Bay and a pretty decent shuttle system from Downtown BART, you would think this is a great opportunity to sell Cal Sports. IIRC, there was such a push when the Raiders left Oakland the first time. And Cal baseball and softball have had decent seasons.
Market to families, especially with package ticket offers and youth sports teams. Entice families to get out of the house & away from screens. What has Cal got to lose?
This is a great suggestion. Cal Marketing used to market to families with family season tickets (2 adults and 3 kids) would have admission to all home games, excepting the Big Game, for one low price. It got families in the stadium, folks to visit the concession stands, hit up the vendors for food, etc.
Cal Marketing also had discount prices to get local public schools students interested in coming to the game by offering $1 admission (this was the 1970s). They're missing an opportunity now by not using a similar marketing strategy.
Hubs & I used the Family Plan during football season in the mid-1980’s-1990’s. We also brought the kids to the different “open houses” sponsored by academic departments. One of their favorites was hosted by Earth Sciences where they got to “dig” for fossils and use a binocular microscope to sort tiny bones in gravel.
I had friends whose parents had Family Plan season tickets. I went to a few games as the 3rd kid.
Tie ticket offers in with local library summer reading programs. Use Patrick Laird as the voice & face of it.
Would also like to see other sports alumni join in. Lynch, Pawlawski (sp?), Jeff Kent, Jason Kidd, Tony Gonzalez, Aaron Rodgers, Jared Goff?Yeah, I’m old.
From what I've heard on BearInsider this kind of thing has been suggested to Cal Marketing many times, but they are resistant.
And we have the perfect guy who can do that. Connect Cal and Oakland/East Bay community.
Nick, when it comes to writing about Cal sports you're damn near a poet. Thanks for this. I too can never give up my season tickets but I'm surprised to note how accepting I am of those who do. Much of the fire has gone out of my burning hot love of Cal football. A lot of it has to do with the general state of college football and much is related to this slow, steady dirge of Wilcoxian football and the resulting mediocrity. I've given up hoping that Knowlton or Wilcox will ever be gone or that we'll ever achieve football glory but going to Cal football is in my DNA so I'll make the trek to Memorial Stadium and cheer the lads on, even if the names keep changing at a dizzying speed.
I think stepping away from the two revenue sports and supporting the Cal programs that do bring me joy has been a great bridge through the void. I've found myself less and less interested in the football program under Wilcox's leadership; games are more stressful than entertaining and usually end in chaotic fashion where wins feel unearned and losses are gut wrenching.
I cancelled my trip to Boston and San Diego after this recent barrage of portal entries. Saving my money for WBB opening their season in Paris (news release to come I'm sure, Charmin announced it at the End of Year Banquet)
I do agree Rich Lyons has his hands full in the current climate, alumni staff and students won't look too kindly to him levying funds to balance the athletics finances. Though I do believe in severing ties by the end of this academic year with Knowlton and accepting the legal and financial battle that entails.
Cal Athletics is in a dire time. The current students that the department hopes to become the next crop of season ticket holders or donor have zero reason to do so post graduation. Current fans and alumni are jumping ship. Big money donors are withholding funds. All this on the heels of inflation and a major recession on the horizon.
All this to say: I've seen a group of online shitposters pull Gameday out of their hats and the outlook of the program losing to a crappy FSU team go from dour to euphoric in a week's time. And the entire athletic department move mountains to make it happen. So who really knows? Go bears!
Excellent summary.
Cal reminds me if the federal government had a football or a basketball team and was competing against the private sector. Cal would always lose.
The following are examples of losing:
The Post Office, Bart, AC Transit, High Speed Rail, and the Bay Area Bridge authority. They have huge budgets and are woefully managed wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
It amazes how much smaller schools like Boise State in football and St. Mary's in basketball every year have much better teams than Cal with less resources.
It's all about the people running the programs. Unfortunately seldom are people fired in the government who are underperforming.
Wilcox and Knowleton should have been fired long ago.
I dunno. Tough spot. Unfortunately the wheels likely need to come completely off the wagon for any substantive change to occur with the football program, at least from a leadership perspective.
Harsin and Rolo are not here long term - say they cobble together an 8-win season against this dogschitt schedule in spite of Wilcox…both guys are likely gone next season after rehabilitating their images, yet Wilcox has now probably been extended yet again and then we’re in real trouble because he’s looking once again for an OC. You can’t change the culture that 8 years of offensive incompetence has built in one scorched-earth offseason, especially one that cost you both a couple of potential program icons and donor support.
And then if you even make a bowl, your milquetoast HC will likely treat it as a scrimmage? What player worth their salt wants that?
And then JKS will transfer at end of this year, for either being successful on the field, or for being on the bench.
He should start from day 1.
A 2-3 win season is far more likely than 8 wins.
Unless our new qb is one of the better true freshman quarterbacks literally ever, i suspect the wheels are fully coming off the program this year.
Hope I’m wrong.
We’ll see. Reserving full judgment until we find out who they pull from the portal. I mean, if they land CharMar Brown, people are gonna forget Ott’s name pretty quickly.
Fairly sure risk-averse Wilcox is gonna roll with Devin Brown, tho, who is as blah as you can get. 6-6 is the leader in the clubhouse, as always.
I disagree on money as the root cause of the mediocrity of Cal athletics. Money (or the lack of it) is just a symptom of the malaise surrounding Cal athletics.
The root cause is that the administration doesn't really support revenue sports the way that other universities do. Taht Cal doesn't support football and basketball in a way that mirrors bluebloods like Ohio State, Alabama, Texas, Michigan, Notre Dame, Penn State, etc., is obvious. Hey, Cal doesn't even do it as well as our former Pac-12 colleagues UW, UO or USC.
This lack of administrative support is reflected in the bumbling administration that typifies the Knowlton regime. It's reflected in the placeholder administration of H. Mike Williams, and the sudden end to Sandy Barbour's regime. At least Barbour got done what she was hired to do: oversee the West Side Improvements Project (a.k.a. the renovation of Cal Memorial).
Lack of administrative support has placed Cal in a weird and precarious position - on the cusp of absolute irrelevance in the age of NIL while carrying a massive debt for the stadium renovation project. How will Cal pay off that debt given the current state of the football program, the current state of the ACC, and the competitive atmosphere in the NIL field?
Let's be honest about the current situation: Cal vastly prefers to excel in the non-revenue Olympic sports and to bring home Olympic gold, silver, and bronze. This keeps the anti-athletics folks in the faculty and within the alumni groups at bay.
Yeah, I don't think money is the main impediment. Certainly I realize that Cal can't throw around the same cash as the biggest programs mentioned above, but is there a reason we can't be as competitive as Utah? Arizona State? Colorado?
The problem is cultural. There's a lot of hostility to athletics and revenue sports in particular, from other faculty, from the city, from the local populace, etc., that probably doesn't exist in Salt Lake or Tempe or Boulder. That manifests in an administration that just hopes to muddle along while not being TOO bad in football to anger the donors/fans but also not making TOO many waves to anger everyone else. Unfortunately, college athletics has changed and that status quo isn't going to work anymore, so it's time to s*** or get off the pot.
"The problem is cultural." Until that is changed, and cultural issues are notoriously tough to tackle in any arena, the direct issues will remain hard to effectively address.
This has been the case for the extent of relevant recent and even not so recent times.
One sign of encouragement is that the donor base clearly feels more urgency now. Used to be (pre-Tedford) that people would kind of laugh at the sub-6 win seasons year after year and just enjoy their sunny afternoons at Memorial. Now everyone sees that things need to fundamentally change, even with a roughly .500 program, and are making noise about it.
But again, hard to turn this big tanker ship around. There's a lot of institutional inertia.
Sandy Barbour bankrupted the entire athletic program with her gross MIS management of the football stadium etc project. This fiasco is still a massive financial problem. I would certainly not give her any credit for anything, much less the lasting burden she created which continues to drag down the entire athletic program.
I suppose you would have thought that Cal Memorial shouldn't have been rebuilt. The rebuild was saddled with bad location from a bad decision made by the Regents in 1921. Cal Memorial should have been built where Edwards Stadium stands now, but it wasn't. We're stuck with it, so we're gonna have to suck it up.
Cal Memorial is sited poorly because it sits astride an earthquake fault that is literally pulling it apart. And yet, the design of the rebuilt portion is an innovative design that required three different sections to allow the structure to survive a Maximum Credible Event (MCE) on the Hayward Fault of 7.0 to ensure life safety.
You want a rebuilt stadium in Strawberry Canyon? You gotta pay for it and all the seismic requirements.
Even at $300 million, it looks like a bargain next to a rebuilt Ryan Field ($800 million) in Evanston, IL.
If rebuilding Cal Memorial was such a bad deal, what was the better deal? I've never heard of a better proposition that had a prayer of being executed.
There were some self-inflicted problems due to the ill-fated sighting, but at the time it was still absurdly high priced for what Cal got, and as importantly didn't get, compared to other stadium projects around the same time. And there was zero done to make the stadium district operable in terms of recovering costs, or ease of access/egress, in order to build revenue and support generating attendance.
Looking at it from the outside, and with no Cal rose/gold glasses on, no one spent more and got less on a stadium district build around the time it was done.
No where did I say that no renovation work was necessary, so don’t try to mischaracterize my point. I’m not going to repeat it for you. P.s. it’s apparent that you had some skin in that game.
It wasn't a statement, it was an entree to elaborating your position, which you not only declined to take, you chose to be insulting.
I had no skin in that game. I also have no skin in it now.
Thanks for playing.
Playing what? You know zero about what a terrible AD Barbour was. Educate yourself…
If we get relegated like Oregon St or Wazzu in the next round of realignment, the nonrevenue sports will be cut back sharply and a lot of them will probably end up as club teams.
My feeling is that we probably still hang around in whatever "second tier" kind of conference remains after the B1G and SEC do more poaching. Some amalgam of the remainders from the ACC and Big 12 plus some upgraded G5 schools. I don't necessarily think Cal is "doomed forever" here, as I suspect there will be more realignment and more bites at the apple in the future.
But still, you have to get serious about running a real athletic program again if you want to move up. The Olympic sports will suffer too if you don't.
💙
Thanks Nick.
Great article.
I’m simply in too deep. All my chips have been and always will be in the center.
Well said.
My wife is from Oklahoma and a die hard Sooners fan. She laughs at me every summer as I get excited about Cal football season, only to see me get disappointed year in and year out. Nothing has changed since I graduated in 1988. But, despite the years of futility, I remain a die hard fan!
So, I am in! Go Bears!!
Art: I'm in the same boat as you (I also graduated in 1988) except my wife is a Bruin! She could care less about FUCLA sports but she loves to give me shit when my Bears come up short, especially against the baby bears down south. By the way, UCLA is a perfect example of why athletics are important to many universities. In many ways, UCLA has surpassed Cal in terms of public perception as the #1 public university. There is no doubt in my mind that one of the reasons they have surpassed us in terms of numbers of applications received is because they have a major tv presence in the Big 10. Even when they were booted from the NCAA tournament this year in the early rounds, their brand was still being displayed on tv commercials associated with the tournament. Why Cal hasn't (or won't) figure this out is beyond me.
We’ve had soon good years between 88 and now. They weren’t as good as they could have been but still there was a time when we were relevant.
It’s hard, at least for me, to prioritize and justify giving to sports teams. It’s not that I think they’re worthless. They may make me and others happy. But I think there are so many much more important causes to give to. It’s people like me who doom Cal sports. We just need a couple of Phil Knights.
Good article. But your reference to the possiblilty of the Cal sports adminstrators being "overworked" sure doesn't fly. I don't know enough about the Knowlton issue to present a valid opinion. But the Cal "Marketing" Department? I have NO CLUE what these people even do, other than send out an email once in a while that in most cases is a waste of time,i.e. thinking football season ticket holders are going to show up for aWomen's basketball game with some half ass offer that isn't gonna accomplish anything. That's my take on this one.
More and better marketing staff may or may not bring in enough money. But underfunding and understaffing is a good way to guarantee failure.
Where does all the money go?
Doea anyone have a link to the finances?
I worked on campus for several years. Most admin departments on campus are woefully understaffed, a symptom of years and years of cuts. I don’t have sympathy for many of their leaders, many of whom just are no longer with the times and/operate largely to protect their rank. But most of these departments, including Cal Athletics, are mostly made up of very young, bright, energetic folks who are very often overmatched by more work than they can handle and stifling leadership.
I appreciate your comments and I have no doubt the issues you cover here are valid. But still, if there truly is a "Cal Sports Marketing Department", as an everyday Bay Area resident, I wouldn't have a clue as to what Cal sports is, or how I could benefit or enjoy myself from going to a game. I'm only aware because I'm ALREADY a Cal fan. The best example of this was this year's Women BB team that was REALLY entertaining. There should have been more out there to let people in on it. And ironically with the new WNBA team coming in, it would have been a perfect time to get the word out since Women's Basketball is becoming more popular. And yet, there was really nothing of significance that I noticed that ever came out. By midseason there should have been more people watching our women BB team play.
You're right to criticize. I'm just saying that the overworked part jibes from what I both witnessed and experienced first-hand across campus. It's not the totality of the problem--poor leadership and inertia is the bigger culprit--but it is a factor.
I will add to the chorus of folks who would like to see Knowlton gone. He’s a bad manager who doesn’t push and elevate the coaches under him to be better, which makes him more of a caretaker than leader.
Second, money is the big issue and Cal keeps going back to the same, dwindling set of donors. Cal graduates a lot of folks every year and some of them make a decent amount of money as they advance in their careers. However, Cal does a crappy job of keeping young alumni engaged to create that pipeline of new donors and that affects the entire university, not just the athletic department. I suspect that most of us here were committed fans while we were at Cal and that continued after we graduated despite whatever Cal attempted to keep us engaged.
And, money is a problem across the college landscape. I was at Auburn for a WBB game a couple of years ago and joined the football stadium tour. The Auburn fans were telling me all about the ways Auburn was adding more seats and making more seats premium in order to squeeze a lot more money out of them.
Also, NIL is decimating athletic departments across the country. If you have X dollars to give and give a lot of it to specific athletes via NIL, you’re not giving it to the athletic department to pay for non-revenue sports. There was a NYT article on this last year where they quoted various ADs.
Will Cal be innovative and come up with a novel way to work around this? Uh…
And don’t get me started on how hard the marketing/ticketing department makes it to get people to buy tickets to games…
College athletics used to be for the students and alumni. The televised Cal sporting events were few and far between. The Pac-12 network helped bring our beloved Bears to those of us who could only tune in via radio before. With cable cutting, the money to be made in live sports has created a dynamic where marquee programs who get nationwide eyeballs are consolidating due to pressure from broadcasters. This has effectively created a new division in college sports, one that Cal has not been invited to join. I expect Cal to be broadcast to progressively fewer screens. I expect revenues to revert to ticket sales and I expect a crisis moment to come where the University of California begins to debate whether its flagship university should be fielding a football team at all. I will remain a Cal fan for life. I will continue to support all of the athletes who choose to compete for the university. But I expect a radically different experience from what I have enjoyed for the last 25 years. I expect my fan experience to return to what it was like when I was a student in the 1990s, but perhaps, without a football team to root for.
LiffeyBear: Your crisis scenario is scary and all too possible. A "radically different experience" would absolutely suck. When I was at Cal in the 80s, the football team was mediocre at best and frequently bad. But going to games on Saturday with my friends and family was always a fantastic experience (we even beat U$C when I was there) and just reinforced my love of all things Cal. I know people who went to academically elite colleges and universities with small athletic programs but they often refer to their time in these institutions as simply four years of college that they completed and then they moved on to bigger and better things. There is a noticeable lack of passion/enthusiasm for their experiences. It's just something that they did. I hope that isn't something that happens to our alma mater. Whether people like it or not, athletics is the "front porch" of most universities and helps to drive student and alumni engagement. As one football coach whose name I can't remember (I think it was Bobby Bowden) put it: "You can't rally around the physics class." Academics at Cal absolutely changed my life for the better but reunions or conferences at the History Department just aren't the same as a game day experience at Memorial (or on tv) with friends and family. I pray that the people in charge really have a plan to turn things around because the window of realignment/expansion may not be open much longer.
Been going through all five stages this week. I will always support my Bears, but this week was a low point. As usual, the blow up was completely avoidable. As usual leadership responds with half measures. As usual leadership responds way past too late. As usual Cal fans are told to patiently stay the course and trust that the morons that have made this mess can get us out of it. We’re cooked, but go Bears.