Justin Wilcox Retrospective: The man everybody wanted to succeed wasn't the solution

After nine years of exhaustive attempts to make it work, the Justin Wilcox era finally ends

photo via Calbears.com

The usual post-game-thoughts column has been pre-empted, for obvious reasons, by the news of the day, which came a week earlier than anticipated even if it was where this season was obviously headed back in August or October.

The most noteworthy feature of the Justin Wilcox era was just how many chances he was given. “Chances” can mean a few different things, so let’s be specific.

Justin Wilcox was given many different chances to build a capable offense. Here is a list of offensive coordinators hired at Cal under Wilcox:

• Beau Baldwin

• Bill Musgrave

• Jake Spavital

• Mike Bloesch

• Bryan Harsin

In nine years, by any statistical metric of success, Cal never had an above average national offense under Justin Wilcox.

Justin Wilcox was given many different chances to show that he could recruit a winning roster. When Wilcox began his tenure by struggling to recruit high school talent, Cal worked with him to make transfer recruiting possible. When NIL funding was legalized, Cal provided him with an effective, well-funded NIL operation. When roster management became increasingly complicated, Cal provided him with a GM with literal decades of NFL experience.

This is the most noteworthy feature of the Wilcox era because the football product on the field *wasn’t* noteworthy.

I mean this literally. ‘Not noteworthy’ as a description, not an insult. Justin Wilcox built one of the most consistently average programs in college football, in an era with constantly changing landscape. Through COVID, through the portal, through NIL, through player empowerment, through it all, Justin Wilcox delivered to you a Cal football team that was almost identical year to year. So much so that it became increasingly difficult for me to find anything interesting to say about Justin Wilcox’s teams, because they were always the same.

The typical Justin Wilcox offense was clearly a below average power conference offense. They would typically have 2 or 3 intriguing skill position players who could potentially form the nucleus of an interesting offense, but those rare players were generally hamstrung by a below average offensive line. Cal’s offensive lines were particularly hurt by struggles at both tackle positions, and Cal’s inability to recruit and develop tackles was probably the single biggest weakness of the Wilcox Era.

The typical Justin Wilcox defense was positionally sound and featured a strong secondary full of players who would eventually make an NFL roster. Unfortunately, the typical Wilcox defense ended up being just about average among power conference units, because of an inability to develop strong play in the trenches. For whatever advantage Cal gained from play at the MLB/DB level, they gave back most of that advantage with an inability to consistently bring pressure against QBs and stuff run plays.

The typical Justin Wilcox special teams unit was mostly unremarkable except for a maddening inability to find success when kicking field goals.

Add it all together and you had a team that was perpetually average nationally , but below average when compared to their power conference peers. The typical Justin Wilcox season saw two or three wins against non-power competition, and something like a 4-6 record against actual power teams, for a final record that always ended up roughly 6-6 in the end.

Take away the pointless COVID year, and take away irrelevant bowl games, and what are you left with? A coach that went 46-49. Almost exactly .500. Never terrible. Never good. Very rarely interesting, very rarely relevant. One of the single most forgettable programs playing power conference football.

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So why so many chances?

Because of an unusual pairing of circumstances in the world of major college football. Because until very recently, Cal was unambitious, and because Justin Wilcox is the rare college football coach who seems to genuinely be a good dude.

The first part is obvious. Is there a single power conference team that would offer a coach an extension after a 4-8 season? The timing of the decision, mere months before USC and UCLA announced their decision to leave and destroy the Pac-12, was particularly cruel. Cal financially saddled themselves with an average head coach at the exact same time that an average football program became not just unacceptable, but existentially dangerous.

I think Justin Wilcox received that extension not because of his record, but because he’s a good dude. Because he tried his best to do right by his players, because he never had anything close to a scandal, and because he accepted Cal’s structural limitations without complaint. He was open to change and willing to adapt. He earned the support of his staff and his players by acting with honesty and integrity. He was both a good employee and a good boss.

In short, he never gave Cal an off-field reason to move on from him, and for the first six years of his tenure his on-field record was mediocre enough to keep his utterly unambitious employers satisfied.

And finally, with a long contract extension locked into place, his final three years became a forced experiment. Since we’re stuck with him anyway, let’s find out if Wilcox’s .500 record was mostly Cal’s fault, or mostly Wilcox’s fault.

Over the last three years, Cal did what Wisconsin, Maryland, Florida State, and Baylor have already announced: an attempt to provide a struggling coach with more ‘resources’ in lieu of dismissal. This is otherwise known as ‘money to build a better roster,’ but at Cal it also meant increased resources outside of direct payer payment. Ron Rivera was specifically brought in both to assist with roster management but also to cut through bureaucratic red tape and get resources to the football team.

None of it helped upend the status quo. Cal and Justin Wilcox remained a .500 head coach through it all. I struggle to come up with an example of a football coach given more opportunities to prove he was more than what his record suggested he was.

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Saturday night was a miserable experience. A first half in which Cal outplayed Stanford but wasted it through a series of self-destructive mistakes, leading to a meek capitulation in the 2nd half that was basically 30 minutes of Stanford stunting on the Bears.

But it may serve a larger purpose: Full, 100% clarity. Nobody can credibly argue for anything but a new direction after a performance like that, in the midst of a season like this.

At every level of Cal’s administration, at every level of the fan base, everybody will be on board with the need for change. At a time when Cal cannot afford factions and disagreement, one truly miserable Big Game will have created unity.

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What now for Cal football?

Nine years of data says that Justin Wilcox, for all of his positive attributes, doesn’t have what it takes to be Cal’s head coach.

To fully prove that conclusion, Cal must do something else: find a coach to CAN succeed, and in the process prove that on-field success in Berkeley is in fact possible.

There are going to be doubters. We’re already seeing reactions from media people both nationally and locally who are questioning the decision to fire Wilcox mostly on the grounds that it’s dumb for Cal to think that they can do better than .500 football.

I understand their skepticism, because Cal hasn’t appeared to take football seriously for more than a decade. I don’t necessarily expect outsiders to pay attention to the inner workings of Cal’s athletics administration the way us die-hards do. But WE know that the conditions surrounding Cal football are very different right now than they were 10, 5, or even 2 years ago.

I am confident that Cal’s next head coach will succeed or fail based on their abilities and decision making as a coach, and not based on Cal’s (lack of) resources. If you’re going to look at me with a straight face and tell me that Cal cannot do what Virginia and Pitt and Georgia Tech are doing this season, that Cal cannot do what Syracuse or Arizona State did in 2024, I won’t believe you.

The good news is that Cal doesn’t need to convince a media talking head who only watches Big-10 games, or an AM radio blow hard. Cal just needs to convince one viable head coaching candidate that they are taking this football thing at least as seriously as their ACC peers.

There’s no guarantee that Cal makes the right hire. There’s no guarantee that Cal wins football games even with the kind of investment necessary to make wins possible.

But I’m excited. I’m excited because the resources and institutional will to succeed at football are in place. And that means that if Cal DOES make the right hire, Berkeley will see the best football it has seen in nearly two decades.

There’s hope for something more in Strawberry Canyon, and I’ll take all the hope I can get.