Is there a path forward for Cal MBB?

What roster building strategy can work for Cal and Mark Madsen in the current NIL landscape?

In 2023-24, Mark Madsen had no choice but to recruit nearly an entirely new roster. In the subsequent season a shallow roster showed occasional flashes but struggled to gel for half a season and ended up below .500.

In 2024-25, Mark Madsen had no choice but to recruit nearly an entirely new roster. In the subsequent season a mismatched roster showed occasional flashes but never gelled defensively and ended up below .500.

In the off-season prior to the 2025-26 season, Mark Madsen has no choice but to recruit nearly an entirely new roster.

When Madsen arrived, he inherited a team that was broken by four years under Mark Fox, and nobody was surprised by the amount of roster churn. Still, it was frustrating when three rotational players with eligibility remaining (Jalen Celestine, Grant Newell, and Rodney Brown) all elected to leave after one year.

The 2025 tear-down won’t be quite as extensive - Cal has retained rotational contributors Rytis Petraitis, DeJuan Campbell, and Lee Dort. Still, the painful departures of Andrej Stojakovic and Jeremiah Wilkinson (along with BJ Omot, Joshua Ola-Joseph, and other eligibility departures) means that Cal will have to replace 74% of their scoring and 66% of their rebounding.

This was supposed to be the off-season where some form of stability returned to Cal basketball, before Cal’s roster got pillaged by the likes of Oregon, Georgia, and richer-team-to-be-named later.

With the prospect of a 3rd straight near-total rebuild under Madsen staring us in the face, I have an open-ended question for everybody: What is the best roster building strategy for Cal during this uncertain period in college basketball?

I ask, because when Madsen was brought on I was initially excited by one particular strength that Madsen brought to the table. He knew how to operate in the portal era. His Utah Valley teams got better every single year because he was able to identify and recruit portal transfers to augment and improve his roster.

That task is proving much more difficult at Cal.

Losing both Stojakovic AND Wilkinson is deeply discouraging. Wilkinson was given a ton of playing time and allowed to show case his skills as a freshman from a coaching staff that believed in him, and yet he still transferred. Stojakovic was given the keys to the offense and seemed happy to be able to play close to home, and was evidently planning to stay until the last minute of the portal period, and still left. Both players were top 10 in the ACC in usage rating, given every opportunity to impress, and both are now gone.

Why has portal rebuilding been so difficult at Cal for Madsen when it worked so well at Utah Valley? I have a number of theories. For one, I suspect that the WAC schedule Utah Valley faced was much more forgiving for a roster of players learning how to play together. For another, using the transfer portal aggressively is no longer a market inefficiency, as every coach in the country outside of, like, Tom Izzo, does it.

Most of all, I suspect that Utah Valley was a relatively big fish in the WAC, whereas Madsen is now coaching for a relatively small fish at the power conference level, meaning his players are more likely to get picked off by richer, more established programs.

It’s that last point that leaves me grasping at straws. Madsen’s transfer-portal-heavy strategy isn’t working because he hasn’t been able to retain players. But what strategy (other than Cal mega-donors stepping up in a way that is pretty unlikely) WOULD result in him retaining his players? Cal could theoretically go developmental heavy with high school recruits, and maybe Cal would retain individual players for 2-3 years rather than just one, but the risk that those players get offered a massive pay increase at another school is still there.

I don’t know what the right answer is. I don’t know if there IS a right answer. Maybe college basketball stabilizes if/when the House settlement goes into effect, and Cal won’t see every player on the roster get heavily recruited every year? Maybe Cal will have to radically change recruiting tactics and try to emulate Stanford by only recruiting players who truly value a Cal degree? Maybe I’m overreacting to a couple of unfortunate cycles, and Madsen will be able to build something more stable with a couple of intriguing freshmen recruits?

What say you, Cal fans? If you’re Mark Madsen, how do you build a stable roster to win games in Berkeley?