Five Cal decisions that have put Athletics on the brink of relegation

photo via wikicommons

Hey, did you know that Cal Athletics might be in deep, deep trouble? That as of writing, perhaps the best case scenario is accepting junior status of 60-70% revenue distribution in a deeply unstable conference with the word ‘Atlantic’ in its title? And that barring an unforeseen change, even this option seems unlikely to happen? Good times.

There are hundreds of factors that have led Cal to this terrifying precipice. Many of them are outside of Cal’s control. California CEQA regulation. Larry Scott turning out to be a real life Lyle Lanley. Texas pulling out of the Pac-16. TV executives and Big-10 admins conspiring to destroy the Pac-12, and USC and UCLA being all too willing to stab the conference in the back.

But there were things that were largely in Cal’s control. Things that Cal royally screwed up over the last decade. And if we don’t face up to our mistakes, we’re doomed to repeat them. So let’s take a look at the decisions Cal has made that has put them on the brink of fiscal and competitive athletics Armageddon:

1. The Memorial Stadium financing disaster

In 1915, Alfred Wegener published “The Origin of Continents and Oceans,” a book that for the first time described what would become the modern science of plate tectonics. Eight years later, California Memorial Stadium was built literally straddling the Hayward Fault.

Unfortunately for Cal, Wegener’s theory would not become widely accepted fact for decades to come, and thus nearly 100 years later campus administrators had little choice but to renovate a woefully out of date, dangerous structure.

It might be that there was no good solution. Renovating Memorial Stadium was going to be wildly expensive, but identifying and building on a new site would have been expensive as well. Renovating Memorial Stadium ran into countless expensive legal delays, but building a new stadium would surely have faced the same opposition from one NIMBY or another.

But critically, at the time of construction, Cal determined that this wasn’t going to be a project paid for by private donations or by campus funds, but instead debt that would be the responsibility of the athletic department to pay off. Worse, Cal identified a wildly optimistic premium seating plan to pay back the debt that probably didn’t have a chance in hell of succeeding even IF Cal maintained their historically unusual run of perennial top 25 performances in the early Tedford era.

The decision to saddle athletics with all debt has since been partially reversed, but that debt service has had a massive impact on how Cal views its own athletic program and the extent to which it has the financial ability to invest in on-field success.

It is worth noting that from 2002-03 through 2010-11, Cal sports finished in the top 10 of the Directors’ Cup, a measure of across-the-board athletic department success. Cal had not had a top 10 finish since, and has finished 20th or worse four of the last five non-COVID seasons despite offering more varsity sports than the vast majority of D1 schools. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Cal’s on-field success began a long decline at the same time that the athletic department suddenly had yearly debt repayments that surely led to underinvestment across the board.

2. The decision to raise academic entry requirements for recruits

I’m not here to discuss the moral value of this decision. If you think that it is only fair and right for football players to be subject to the same (or, at least, closer to the) academic qualifications expected of a general Cal admit, I’m not going to tell you that’s wrong*. But it has absolutely been a competitive disadvantage for Cal.

Stanford, to Jim Harbaugh and David Shaw’s credit, found a way to make their academic standards a recruiting plus. They have since recruited nationally, plucking the best recruits who meet their academic standards and value receiving a high end college education.

Cal has always relied almost entirely on California recruits, primarily in the East Bay and Los Angeles. And every coach who has found success on the football field has done so behind star California based athletes. But Cal football recruiting has undeniably fallen off since more stringent academic standards have been put in place, to the point where Cal brought in more players via the transfer portal last year than players coming out of high school.

This is of course a gross over-simplification - there are other reasons why Cal has struggled to recruit football players over the last decade. But I think it is broadly true that neither Sony Dykes nor Justin Wilcox have figured out how to successfully recruit to Cal, and that the academic requirements Cal put in place are a major factor in that decline.

3. The hiring of Mike Williams as athletic director

In 2014, long time athletic director Sandy Barbour announced that she would be leaving Cal. Barbour led Cal during what was, in retrospect, a golden era for Cal Athletics.

To replace her, Cal turned to debt trade and corporate financier Mike Williams, who came to the attention of Chancellor Nicholas Dirks via his role serving on various alumni boards, including the Chancellor’s Task Force on Athletics and Academics. It was that task force that was convened in response to declining graduation rates in some Cal sports programs, and it was that task force that produced a report that influenced Cal to raise entry requirements for recruits. Bizarrely, Williams started as an interim who claimed to not want the permanent job, before being hired permanently almost a year later.

Considering his professional background, my assumption was that Williams was hired to fix Cal’s budget, and that the Chancellor’s primary concern was that Cal athletics not spend more money than it earned. Meanwhile, I feared whether someone without a background in athletics administration (or, for that matter, the bureaucracy of public service) could run the non-financial aspects of Cal athletics.

As it turned out, his tenure saw no meaningful improvement in Cal’s financial outlook, the implosion of Cal basketball (more on that below) and the slow alienation of Sonny Dykes to the point where he was all but openly begging anybody else to hire him out of Berkeley. At the time, Cal fans turned on Dykes for his open desire to leave. Now, in retrospect it’s not hard to wonder if Cal’s inability to support Dykes was less a negative reflection on Dykes having unreasonable demands and more a reflection of Cal and Mike Williams’ inability or refusal to even try to compete with their nominal football peers.

4. The hiring, extension, and continued employment of Jim Knowlton as athletic director

Hindsight is 20/20, and Jim Knowlton’s pre-Cal resume (AD at Air Force) wouldn’t necessarily preclude him from being a successful athletic director at Cal. One could (and I would!) argue that service academy athletics is sufficiently different from a power conference job, but at least this was an in-industry hire.

Instead, I want to focus on the decision to hand Knowlton a massive eight year extension in August of 2021, and Cal’s continued employment of Knowlton following well documented reports of his failure to properly report and respond to abuse allegations within Cal women’s swimming despite a year long investigation into the problem.

At the time of Knowlton’s extension, it was clear that his chosen basketball hire was a failure (more on that below). Since that point faith in Knowlton’s ability to steward Cal athletics has only sunk further, and many fans find his conduct in response to complaints from Cal’s swimmers utterly disqualifying.

Knowlton by himself isn’t to blame for the disintegration of the Pac-12 or Cal’s lack of a major conference home, but it is also true that this possibility was distinctly clear more than a year ago. And yet somehow it appears that Cal’s campus administration has been caught flatfooted by the sudden collapse of the Pac-12. It is possible that it is too late for anybody to salvage Cal athletics; but I am sure that Jim Knowlton is not the best person for that job.

5. Multiple decisions that destroyed the Cal MBB program

It is correct to point out that conference realignment has been driven almost entirely based upon football and football revenue, and so from a certain perspective, the administrative malfeasance and neglect that has destroyed Cal MBB might not matter much.

But perception does matter. And right now, the perception is that Cal doesn’t care about athletic success. Hiring Wyking Jones and Mark Fox (and letting the latter stay in charge for four years), two coaches who were obviously not qualified on the day their hires were announced, reinforces the perception that Cal does not take revenue sports seriously.

And honestly, how you fail matters. UCLA hasn’t really found their mojo under Chip Kelly, but hiring him indicates that you’re willing to invest in winning. ASU hasn’t found much success under Bobby Hurley, but he’s a big name who had mid-major success. And all of the teams who got a major conference invite run programs that haven’t recently put a major program through a historic run of futility.

Mark Madsen appears to be an inspired choice to save Cal basketball. It’s a shame Cal spent six years being deeply unserious about their 2nd most important athletic program.

Is there one lesson we can learn from these mistakes?

Cal Athletics’ strategic plan lists the following priorities:

• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging 

• Departmental Culture

• Student-Athlete Experience

• Academic Success

• Competitive Success

• Financial Resources

• Campus Integration

All good, critical goals, though I might quibble with whether Cal can reach these goals while continuing to employ Jim Knowlton as athletic director. It is hard, however, not to face up to the reality that, over the last 10 years, Cal has been prioritizing financial resources ahead of competitive success**. Until very recently, Cal was utterly unwilling to consider that the larger campus might benefit from athletics in any way, and thus fund athletics both to ensure future revenue, and also for its own sake.

The result has been nearly a decade of penny-wise, pound foolish decision making prioritizing the illusion of upright stewardship of athletics that was actually laying the foundation for the current crisis.

Cal is now faced with a clear choice: decide that major athletics provides more value to campus than it detracts***, and actually attempt to succeed accordingly. Or, alternatively, decide that competitive success is not as high a priority as every other item on the list above, and voluntarily go the route of the Ivy League.

Because the tight rope that Cal was previously attempting to walk is being cut. No more half measures, no more equivocating. Either get serious, or quit.

*My personal belief that blaming the entry qualifications of prior recruits for Cal football’s poor graduation rates is blaming the victim; the real failure was Cal’s prior indifference to the academic success of their football players. Thus, the correct solution was to provide academic support to those players, not to prevent them from coming to Cal in the first place.

**I’ve seen some argument that campus administration, spurred by prominent donors, has made a subtle shift over the last couple of years to re-prioritize revenue sports success. Signs include the reassignment of stadium debt and the clear success of Cal’s NIL program. If so, this subtle shift will have to become significantly less subtle.

***Or decide that revenue athletics is utterly necessary in order to defray Memorial Stadium debt servicing to the fullest extent possible