Let’s face it. This is just is not sustainable. With presumably good intensions and the presumably honest recommendations of coaches Saban and Lanning, Cal has made a terrible mistake in hiring an untested, obviously inexperienced and, frankly, not very football smart head coach.
Apparently Lopoi was not able to absorb the experiences at Alabama and Oregon and brought absolutely nothing from those teams to the field of play at Cal. Worse still, instead of surrounding himself with an experienced and professional team of assistant coaches, he pretty much hired inexperienced people like himself.
This series of misjudgments has led us to the current situation which can charitably be described as a debacle beyond a train wreck in a dumpster fire.
There’s no sense throwing good money after bad as it’s obviously time to be thinking about cutting our losses. The problem is we are apparently going to have to depend on RR and Lyons, good and devoted Cal supporters that they are, to get us out of the mess that they had a major hand in creating.
Are the big money guys who enthusiastically supported the plan they were sold to revive the glory years of Cal football (which admittedly none of us remember because they were the post WWII years under Pappy) going to pony up yet more mountains of cash to support a rescue mission being sold by the same crew that has taken us down this debacle road?
The only possible way to have a possible shot at a positive answer is to start over by spending big bucks to hire away an experienced college coach who brings staff and players with him as the nucleus of a restarted program.
It’s only money, after all, but that’s where the college game has devolved to and I don’t see any other choice. There is no realistic choice but to cut our losses and get rid of these inexperienced people who obviously can’t make good decisions about much of anything having to do with a successful college football program.
The outcome of this season is effectively sealed and it is so awful that we dare not take a chance that it will be repeated next year and that very soon afterwards Cal ends up in the PAC12 — along with “the place that shall not be named” but that is also having a lousy year but may still be able to beat us on November 21! Which would be appropriate frosting on this shitty cake we’ve all been forced to eat this year!
Those who architected this are not qualified to have a hand in/on the fix-that is not a diss-just factual. They have to be willing to accept this and then bring in the people who actually specialize in this across the board so that we put a serious program in place with all the infrastructure necessary to not only replicate it as a blueprint for success but also have the necessary oversight to prevent this from ever happening again. As a program, you want to attract the money that is supportive of a blueprint for success, not gambling. Results, not hype & sustainable capital inflow will follow.
An almost inescapable challenge is that the people who pay for it also have a hand in architecting it. There is a strong correlation between having millions of disposable dollars and believing that you are the smartest person in the room, regardless of the subject matter. None of the guardrails worked in Round 1, even for something as elementary as preventing an inexperienced leader from surrounding himself with inexperienced assistants. (Or maybe the problem is that I am old, and something that seems elementary to me may look like exciting disrupt-and-break-things to our younger new money makers. I genuinely have no idea. How D1 football programs raise and spend tens of millions of dollars is so far outside my universe…)
Exactly. You’re describing the difference between vanity capital and disciplined capital. Vanity capital wants to hold the blueprints and pretend they’re the smartest person in the room—which results in the exact amateur hour we just witnessed. Disciplined capital acknowledges its blind spots, hires turnaround specialists, and demands structural oversight. Until Cal football transitions from attracting vanity money to attracting disciplined money, the cycle won't break.
Absolutely agree. One can only hope (emphasis on "hope") that having seen what a mess they have made of the program and realizing that time is of the essence to put a competitive program on the field in order to avoid the downgrade to the PAC12, that the money guys will agree to let people who may actually know what they are doing take the lead in recruitment of a coach and staff that may have a shot at bailing us out of the mess in which we now find ourselves. It is going to be very expensive.
Well, a smart person would point out the the rich people in the room who donated millions for this fiasco that they just pissed away millions for a failure.
Two things, though. One is positive. They can see the impact of their money and what it can do to the program. But also, the second part. They're not magically experts at this, so they should spend their money more intelligently while being informed by actual experts.
Excellent point. I too am baffled how an excellent DC from Oregon thought that hiring inexperienced OC/DC/ST ACs would work. He should be leaning on Rolovich for HC advice.
GoldenBear68: It is becoming clearer that we may have Desean Foster 2.0 as our coach. The baby bears pulled the plug on that experiment after 15 games. Will we do the same thing but much faster? RR had no hesitation when he shit-canned Wilcox after the disastrous 2025 Big Game. Will the same thing happen to Lupoi after another debacle? I guess we will find out soon enough. Football gods, why do you hate us so much? Sigh.....
Excellent write up Nick. You always do a great job, but this one is at the top of my list. If in fact a realignment is coming sooner than later, then we do not have time to waste. We certainly can't wait for Tosh and his assistants to learn on the job and hope that someday soon they will magically turn us around. It's hard to envision any type of improvement at this point as we have gone backwards IMHO. Hell, if Mason Mini implied that the team never expected to win this game then this team is done for the season. I'll go back to what a good coach can do in a short period of time by reminding everyone of Kalen DeBoer at UW, Kirt Cignetti at Indiana and now Bob Chesney at UCLA.
Great leadership starts with admitting when a mistakes are made and rectifying them. But in our case from the top down or bottom up, no one is admitting their mistakes, as is common when people are protecting their jobs. Tosh would never admit that his hire, Somerville, was not prepared to be the OC of a P4 program. RR will not admit that his hire, Tosh, is a disaster. Rich Lyons has been mum on RR. Until we acknowledge the problem we won't fix it.
Time to nut up and get things on the right track. As Goose's wife said in the original Top Gun, "Goose, take me to bed or lose me forever." Well this is one of those times where CAL can do the right things or lose fans and maybe the team forever.
To be clear, we have all been patient as RR and Tosh made their way week by week, looking for improvement. We held out hope that after VT the we hit a turning point, however, everyone on this site now knows that instead of improving we have regressed...in every metric. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what we need to do to fix things. From my position it is very simple: clean house and start over by paying the price to bring in a top coach and staff or someone with a track record like DeBoer, Cignetti or Chesney had before they were hired. Anything short of this and we are fooling ourselves about out future.
Hopium is great to smoke but in the real world it gets you nowhere. Stop pretending and get real or lose me forever.
I think the time is already over. We needed this to work and unfortunately we needed it to work right away. I don’t think we get a second bite of the apple. This is Cal floating away without a life boat.
I think our choices are that this situation corrects itself or that it doesn’t. I don’t think we can realistically tap alumni and boosters twice in two years to fix a product that has been a large disappointment. I hope I’m wrong and I’m wildly underestimating the durability and generosity of Cal fans.
My 13yo son went the Cal youth football camp this summer. It was disorganized and mostly recess scrimmages with very little work on fundamentals.
The highlight was how approachable and kind JKS was to the kids. He told my son to always believe in himself and be himself, and my kiddo took that to heart.
JKS was loyal to Cal. For him to lose his spot bc of a concussion, with a line and OC this inept, screams lack of integrity.
Losses and poor football are one thing. Asking players to risk their health and long-term future for a program that demotes them while in concussion protocol?
I’ll be rooting for JKS to take his own advice and follow the footsteps of Fernando.
Comparing Tosh to Wyking Jones and Mark Fox is harsh, but sadly appropriate. The team looked utterly lost on Saturday night. WF looked like much better athletes, with more fire and much better coaching than Cal. We are coming up on game 8 and Tosh is having "an open QB competition" - WHAT??? If we get smashed by SMU, it is clear the coaching staff has lost the team. I think Cal raised almost 2x the NIL $$$ as WF, yet looked like half the team WF was. To minimize my pain, I'm only going to check the box score after the SMU game...
Actually, I was thinking it's even worse than Wyking Jones and Mark Fox because Coach Meathead has been given so much more support than anything Jones and Fox ever received. Considering the budget and massive increase in the coaching staff, these results are incredibly disappointing.
Mark Fox was 38-87 in 4 years at Cal, and his last year the GBs went an unbelievable 3-29. Let's hope either Tosh turns it around this year or next, or RR fires him after 1 or 2 bad years. At this point we are headed out of the P4 and into the Pac12 or MWC come realignment. CMS will be empty if this happens...
I typically hate people that rely on slogans rather than thoughtful analysis. Has meathead said anything insightful or thoughtful since he started? The only things I heard were: relentless effort, ball excellence, bla blah slogans/jargon. Oh, and his obsession with talent acquisition which he might have been good at, but let’s see how he does after the JKS benching debacle and this trainwreck of a season.
MBA students discussing a Harvard Business School case study of our Chancellor and GM hiring, with the stakes as high as they were, a coach without HC experience who would bring in two coordinators without coordinator experience might suggest our leaders should have acted otherwise or at least guided Lupoi into hiring proven coordinators.
Thank you Nick, and thank you for your write up as well Avi. Midway through the game, I felt bad for the players as the boos got louder and people were leaving. Wake Forrest is a very good team and they were focused and energized Saturday night. Cal was not, at all. This season has been a failure. The coaching, game preparation, and in game coaching is not good and I have no idea how long this is going to go on. I just wish it would end as soon as possible. Why in the world would you not start your best QB? Why were the DBs so far out of position almost every down? Why would you let the kick returner return kick offs over and over again? Why is everything so haphazard and confused during these games.? It is the coaching. It is the organization. Golden Bear is right, it is not sustainable. Too bad.
This is not the first game where our DBs were caught looking. Wake exploited this consistently, begging the Cal staff to adjust. Instead, we blitzed 8.
Everyone involved with decisionmaking responsibility in this rapidly devolving fiasco hasn't displayed anything but sheer and utter incompetence. Tosh, Ron, whale megadonors, perhaps even Lyons.
Stop throwing away good money after bad - sunk cost fallacy and all. Clean house completely and start over.
Excellent piece. I am actually an unrealistic optimist but this team reminds me so much of Tedford that I flash back to being 18 and having bad whiskey from a flask while we were losing by 4 touchdowns.
The focus seems to be on short-coming of the coaches. But coaches can only do much if we don't have the talent/depth of players to compete at a higher level in the ACC. For several years now our high school school recruiting has fallen of a cliff: 247 Sports High School recruiting rankings for Cal: 2026 - 50th in the country. 2025 a lowly 66th! 2024 ranked 53rd, etc. The result of which is a lack of depth built up over the years especially at the key positions of OL and DL. The portal has been hit and miss for Cal. Sure we picked up a highly ranked RB, WR and TE this year. But we also lost two of our best defensive players. A big blow in our best player, Cade Uluave, going to BYU, he had a huge game against Notre Dame. Luke Ferrelli is starting LB at U Miss. Until we can attract and retain better talent we are likely to remain a 500 team.
Lupoi either can't coach, or is trying some dumb experiment that Rivera is allowing. From the talk about conference realignment coming in a few years, I doubt Rivera/Lyons would allow for such experiment.
He has no clue on how to game plan and adjust to in game situations. It's clear from penalties, personal decisions, 4th down attempts, practice format, attendance of meetings and more that he has proven how to make all the wrong decisions, some of which all of us could make the correct decision (again is Lupoi experimenting or just making dumb calls?)
We all could literally write a 5 page essay on all the things he's done wrong, some of us have which is great.
But like Nick said, "you don’t need me to play captain obvious and tell you that Saturday night was one of the greatest no-show performances in the history of Cal football."
AND as Avinash said "And for some reason, Lupoi decided a healthy Sagapolutele should not be given the same opportunity with his new play called in our last home game of the season."
I can't think of any excuse to start Jackson over a healthy JKS, especially when you haven't given in a chance with McCann. JKS did pretty good when we changed coaches mid season last year (different scenarios but you get the idea)
You simply don't bench your best player without giving him an opportunity.
In the UNLV game using the McCann offense, JKS was 19 for 27, 195 yds, 1 TD, 1 Int. Half of his yards were on one play. Brousseau was 19 for 32, 200 yards 2 TDs, 0 INT. Cal scored 7 points in the JKS half and 24 in the Brousseau half. Then Brousseau led an upset victory of VaTech going 29 for 43, 321 yds 1 TD no INT. Hype is not reality, for coaches or players.
Yeah like justbearly said, first half was under Sommerville. Sommerville did not meet the ultimatum set and was demoted at halftime. JKS had his concussion with 37 seconds left in the first half of the UNLV game.
His only stats under McCann are 15 of 18, 110 yards, 1TD in the WF game. Jackson was 17 of 29, 81 yards and 0 TD in the WF game. Not sure what you mean about hype but stats don't tell the whole story especially if you don't know whose calling plays.
After days of reflection, I think this is what we should do: RR should shore up donor support now for a buyout. Give meathead two more games to prove that he can be a HC. After those two games, he needs to be replaced so that we can do a HC search from beginning of November until mid December and announce the selection mid December.
Of course, doing this will result in the following: losing our entire incoming class, and 80 pct of the players on the roster with a future will be lost to the portal. But that will happen anyway even if we retain meathead.
But if we find the right HC at a winning G5 program, hopefully he will bring with him a serviceable roster, upon which we can supplement in the portal.
I think that’s our best hope if we are going to get back to respectability prior to the next alignment.
As of Oct 18, Cal is now ranked 88th in the FBS Football Power Index (FPI) at -3.9. There is only 1 other ACC team with an FPI ranking worse than Cal - and that is Stanford. Furd comes in at 108th and -11.4. I would not be surprised if the ACC moves to shed their two failing west coast teams after this season or next, and picks up some mid majors like James Madison, Memphis or North Texas as they build to 19 teams. Unless Cal gets moving, we are out of the P4 and into the Pac12 or MWC. Times are that dire (and that sad)...
Let’s face it. This is just is not sustainable. With presumably good intensions and the presumably honest recommendations of coaches Saban and Lanning, Cal has made a terrible mistake in hiring an untested, obviously inexperienced and, frankly, not very football smart head coach.
Apparently Lopoi was not able to absorb the experiences at Alabama and Oregon and brought absolutely nothing from those teams to the field of play at Cal. Worse still, instead of surrounding himself with an experienced and professional team of assistant coaches, he pretty much hired inexperienced people like himself.
This series of misjudgments has led us to the current situation which can charitably be described as a debacle beyond a train wreck in a dumpster fire.
There’s no sense throwing good money after bad as it’s obviously time to be thinking about cutting our losses. The problem is we are apparently going to have to depend on RR and Lyons, good and devoted Cal supporters that they are, to get us out of the mess that they had a major hand in creating.
Are the big money guys who enthusiastically supported the plan they were sold to revive the glory years of Cal football (which admittedly none of us remember because they were the post WWII years under Pappy) going to pony up yet more mountains of cash to support a rescue mission being sold by the same crew that has taken us down this debacle road?
The only possible way to have a possible shot at a positive answer is to start over by spending big bucks to hire away an experienced college coach who brings staff and players with him as the nucleus of a restarted program.
It’s only money, after all, but that’s where the college game has devolved to and I don’t see any other choice. There is no realistic choice but to cut our losses and get rid of these inexperienced people who obviously can’t make good decisions about much of anything having to do with a successful college football program.
The outcome of this season is effectively sealed and it is so awful that we dare not take a chance that it will be repeated next year and that very soon afterwards Cal ends up in the PAC12 — along with “the place that shall not be named” but that is also having a lousy year but may still be able to beat us on November 21! Which would be appropriate frosting on this shitty cake we’ve all been forced to eat this year!
100 pct agreed.
Except that he’s just not smart period.
Fire meathead.
Those who architected this are not qualified to have a hand in/on the fix-that is not a diss-just factual. They have to be willing to accept this and then bring in the people who actually specialize in this across the board so that we put a serious program in place with all the infrastructure necessary to not only replicate it as a blueprint for success but also have the necessary oversight to prevent this from ever happening again. As a program, you want to attract the money that is supportive of a blueprint for success, not gambling. Results, not hype & sustainable capital inflow will follow.
An almost inescapable challenge is that the people who pay for it also have a hand in architecting it. There is a strong correlation between having millions of disposable dollars and believing that you are the smartest person in the room, regardless of the subject matter. None of the guardrails worked in Round 1, even for something as elementary as preventing an inexperienced leader from surrounding himself with inexperienced assistants. (Or maybe the problem is that I am old, and something that seems elementary to me may look like exciting disrupt-and-break-things to our younger new money makers. I genuinely have no idea. How D1 football programs raise and spend tens of millions of dollars is so far outside my universe…)
Exactly. You’re describing the difference between vanity capital and disciplined capital. Vanity capital wants to hold the blueprints and pretend they’re the smartest person in the room—which results in the exact amateur hour we just witnessed. Disciplined capital acknowledges its blind spots, hires turnaround specialists, and demands structural oversight. Until Cal football transitions from attracting vanity money to attracting disciplined money, the cycle won't break.
Absolutely agree. One can only hope (emphasis on "hope") that having seen what a mess they have made of the program and realizing that time is of the essence to put a competitive program on the field in order to avoid the downgrade to the PAC12, that the money guys will agree to let people who may actually know what they are doing take the lead in recruitment of a coach and staff that may have a shot at bailing us out of the mess in which we now find ourselves. It is going to be very expensive.
Well, a smart person would point out the the rich people in the room who donated millions for this fiasco that they just pissed away millions for a failure.
They just financed an expensive lesson in basic corporate governance. Sigh.
Two things, though. One is positive. They can see the impact of their money and what it can do to the program. But also, the second part. They're not magically experts at this, so they should spend their money more intelligently while being informed by actual experts.
Excellent point. I too am baffled how an excellent DC from Oregon thought that hiring inexperienced OC/DC/ST ACs would work. He should be leaning on Rolovich for HC advice.
I disagree with the characterization that he’s an excellent DC.
Yeah, where did “excellent DC” come from?
Look up Oregon’s rankings from 2023-25 when Tosh was there . Ranked nationally in the top 5 one year and tops in the Conference another.
Hubris!! Never underestimate a young millionaire believing they know everything there is to know
GoldenBear68: It is becoming clearer that we may have Desean Foster 2.0 as our coach. The baby bears pulled the plug on that experiment after 15 games. Will we do the same thing but much faster? RR had no hesitation when he shit-canned Wilcox after the disastrous 2025 Big Game. Will the same thing happen to Lupoi after another debacle? I guess we will find out soon enough. Football gods, why do you hate us so much? Sigh.....
Excellent write up Nick. You always do a great job, but this one is at the top of my list. If in fact a realignment is coming sooner than later, then we do not have time to waste. We certainly can't wait for Tosh and his assistants to learn on the job and hope that someday soon they will magically turn us around. It's hard to envision any type of improvement at this point as we have gone backwards IMHO. Hell, if Mason Mini implied that the team never expected to win this game then this team is done for the season. I'll go back to what a good coach can do in a short period of time by reminding everyone of Kalen DeBoer at UW, Kirt Cignetti at Indiana and now Bob Chesney at UCLA.
Great leadership starts with admitting when a mistakes are made and rectifying them. But in our case from the top down or bottom up, no one is admitting their mistakes, as is common when people are protecting their jobs. Tosh would never admit that his hire, Somerville, was not prepared to be the OC of a P4 program. RR will not admit that his hire, Tosh, is a disaster. Rich Lyons has been mum on RR. Until we acknowledge the problem we won't fix it.
Time to nut up and get things on the right track. As Goose's wife said in the original Top Gun, "Goose, take me to bed or lose me forever." Well this is one of those times where CAL can do the right things or lose fans and maybe the team forever.
To be clear, we have all been patient as RR and Tosh made their way week by week, looking for improvement. We held out hope that after VT the we hit a turning point, however, everyone on this site now knows that instead of improving we have regressed...in every metric. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what we need to do to fix things. From my position it is very simple: clean house and start over by paying the price to bring in a top coach and staff or someone with a track record like DeBoer, Cignetti or Chesney had before they were hired. Anything short of this and we are fooling ourselves about out future.
Hopium is great to smoke but in the real world it gets you nowhere. Stop pretending and get real or lose me forever.
I think the time is already over. We needed this to work and unfortunately we needed it to work right away. I don’t think we get a second bite of the apple. This is Cal floating away without a life boat.
I am afraid you might be right although we don’t know what the future holds. But we need to do something. Giving up isn’t an option.
I think our choices are that this situation corrects itself or that it doesn’t. I don’t think we can realistically tap alumni and boosters twice in two years to fix a product that has been a large disappointment. I hope I’m wrong and I’m wildly underestimating the durability and generosity of Cal fans.
We are staring into the abyss so donor wallets might open up.
My 13yo son went the Cal youth football camp this summer. It was disorganized and mostly recess scrimmages with very little work on fundamentals.
The highlight was how approachable and kind JKS was to the kids. He told my son to always believe in himself and be himself, and my kiddo took that to heart.
JKS was loyal to Cal. For him to lose his spot bc of a concussion, with a line and OC this inept, screams lack of integrity.
Losses and poor football are one thing. Asking players to risk their health and long-term future for a program that demotes them while in concussion protocol?
I’ll be rooting for JKS to take his own advice and follow the footsteps of Fernando.
I guess Tosh also forgot why he "slept on a bench" in Hawaii that time
Comparing Tosh to Wyking Jones and Mark Fox is harsh, but sadly appropriate. The team looked utterly lost on Saturday night. WF looked like much better athletes, with more fire and much better coaching than Cal. We are coming up on game 8 and Tosh is having "an open QB competition" - WHAT??? If we get smashed by SMU, it is clear the coaching staff has lost the team. I think Cal raised almost 2x the NIL $$$ as WF, yet looked like half the team WF was. To minimize my pain, I'm only going to check the box score after the SMU game...
Actually, I was thinking it's even worse than Wyking Jones and Mark Fox because Coach Meathead has been given so much more support than anything Jones and Fox ever received. Considering the budget and massive increase in the coaching staff, these results are incredibly disappointing.
Mark Fox was 38-87 in 4 years at Cal, and his last year the GBs went an unbelievable 3-29. Let's hope either Tosh turns it around this year or next, or RR fires him after 1 or 2 bad years. At this point we are headed out of the P4 and into the Pac12 or MWC come realignment. CMS will be empty if this happens...
How in the world did we keep Fox for 4 years!!!!?
2 words, Sandy Barbour! Ugh!
Meathead must be gone
Thanks Nick!
Read this piece in a small town in Southern Italy….a time for thoughtful reflection on all things Cal football.
If you are not already there check out Maratea!
Currently 2 hours from Maratea!
How far south? I was just in Calabria.
Not that far. We did 6 days in Tuscany/Rome and then ventured south to Avellino to research Chitwood family lineage in the mountains.
Poor town never knew what hit them! ;-)
Spent 2 months in Italy this past Spring. Favorite Tuscany town: Montepulciano!
Sounds amazing! My favorite day was a visit to the town of Vinci and then dinner at a small family-owned olive farm in Cerreto Guidi. Epic!
Yes, Montepulciano was captivating. Loved all the hill towns, but that one was my favorite.
I typically hate people that rely on slogans rather than thoughtful analysis. Has meathead said anything insightful or thoughtful since he started? The only things I heard were: relentless effort, ball excellence, bla blah slogans/jargon. Oh, and his obsession with talent acquisition which he might have been good at, but let’s see how he does after the JKS benching debacle and this trainwreck of a season.
He has no substance.
He needs to go.
Fire meathead.
MBA students discussing a Harvard Business School case study of our Chancellor and GM hiring, with the stakes as high as they were, a coach without HC experience who would bring in two coordinators without coordinator experience might suggest our leaders should have acted otherwise or at least guided Lupoi into hiring proven coordinators.
YES! I am not a huge fan of Tosh, but he has energy, players love him, and he can recruit, so hire proven college coaches to support him.
Wow Nick, thanks for bringing up Wyking Jones. I had actually erased him from my memory.
And Mark Fox
Fuuuuuuu.....
Stormy Monday.
"They call it stormy Monday, but Tuesday is just as bad. Oh, Wednesday is worst. And Thursday, oh, so sad."
You get the picture. What will this week bring to Cal fans? Hope or Hopelessness?
Thank you, B.B. King.
Go Bears!!
if it wasnt for bad luck, i'd have no luck at all
Rodney Dangerfield?
Ha sounds like it could be. But bluesman Albert King's Born Under a Bad Sign
Thank you Nick, and thank you for your write up as well Avi. Midway through the game, I felt bad for the players as the boos got louder and people were leaving. Wake Forrest is a very good team and they were focused and energized Saturday night. Cal was not, at all. This season has been a failure. The coaching, game preparation, and in game coaching is not good and I have no idea how long this is going to go on. I just wish it would end as soon as possible. Why in the world would you not start your best QB? Why were the DBs so far out of position almost every down? Why would you let the kick returner return kick offs over and over again? Why is everything so haphazard and confused during these games.? It is the coaching. It is the organization. Golden Bear is right, it is not sustainable. Too bad.
This is not the first game where our DBs were caught looking. Wake exploited this consistently, begging the Cal staff to adjust. Instead, we blitzed 8.
I’ve been vocal that our defense is broken. Hutchins or Hutchinson or whatever his name is should be canned along with Meathead.
Yes, some of the basic things we are doing are consistently wrong, sad.
Everyone involved with decisionmaking responsibility in this rapidly devolving fiasco hasn't displayed anything but sheer and utter incompetence. Tosh, Ron, whale megadonors, perhaps even Lyons.
Stop throwing away good money after bad - sunk cost fallacy and all. Clean house completely and start over.
Excellent piece. I am actually an unrealistic optimist but this team reminds me so much of Tedford that I flash back to being 18 and having bad whiskey from a flask while we were losing by 4 touchdowns.
Tedford was a good coach. Probably the best in my cal fandom.
What he didn’t have is institutional support. And towards the end of his tenure, a healthy body.
Also, if Meathead didn’t stab him in the back on his way out t Washinton, things might have been different.
The focus seems to be on short-coming of the coaches. But coaches can only do much if we don't have the talent/depth of players to compete at a higher level in the ACC. For several years now our high school school recruiting has fallen of a cliff: 247 Sports High School recruiting rankings for Cal: 2026 - 50th in the country. 2025 a lowly 66th! 2024 ranked 53rd, etc. The result of which is a lack of depth built up over the years especially at the key positions of OL and DL. The portal has been hit and miss for Cal. Sure we picked up a highly ranked RB, WR and TE this year. But we also lost two of our best defensive players. A big blow in our best player, Cade Uluave, going to BYU, he had a huge game against Notre Dame. Luke Ferrelli is starting LB at U Miss. Until we can attract and retain better talent we are likely to remain a 500 team.
50 isn't bad. What is bad is being in the 130s in penalties and yards per play.
Lupoi either can't coach, or is trying some dumb experiment that Rivera is allowing. From the talk about conference realignment coming in a few years, I doubt Rivera/Lyons would allow for such experiment.
He has no clue on how to game plan and adjust to in game situations. It's clear from penalties, personal decisions, 4th down attempts, practice format, attendance of meetings and more that he has proven how to make all the wrong decisions, some of which all of us could make the correct decision (again is Lupoi experimenting or just making dumb calls?)
We all could literally write a 5 page essay on all the things he's done wrong, some of us have which is great.
But like Nick said, "you don’t need me to play captain obvious and tell you that Saturday night was one of the greatest no-show performances in the history of Cal football."
AND as Avinash said "And for some reason, Lupoi decided a healthy Sagapolutele should not be given the same opportunity with his new play called in our last home game of the season."
I can't think of any excuse to start Jackson over a healthy JKS, especially when you haven't given in a chance with McCann. JKS did pretty good when we changed coaches mid season last year (different scenarios but you get the idea)
You simply don't bench your best player without giving him an opportunity.
In the UNLV game using the McCann offense, JKS was 19 for 27, 195 yds, 1 TD, 1 Int. Half of his yards were on one play. Brousseau was 19 for 32, 200 yards 2 TDs, 0 INT. Cal scored 7 points in the JKS half and 24 in the Brousseau half. Then Brousseau led an upset victory of VaTech going 29 for 43, 321 yds 1 TD no INT. Hype is not reality, for coaches or players.
The first half of that game was not the McCann offense. But, I do get your point.
Yeah like justbearly said, first half was under Sommerville. Sommerville did not meet the ultimatum set and was demoted at halftime. JKS had his concussion with 37 seconds left in the first half of the UNLV game.
His only stats under McCann are 15 of 18, 110 yards, 1TD in the WF game. Jackson was 17 of 29, 81 yards and 0 TD in the WF game. Not sure what you mean about hype but stats don't tell the whole story especially if you don't know whose calling plays.
After days of reflection, I think this is what we should do: RR should shore up donor support now for a buyout. Give meathead two more games to prove that he can be a HC. After those two games, he needs to be replaced so that we can do a HC search from beginning of November until mid December and announce the selection mid December.
Of course, doing this will result in the following: losing our entire incoming class, and 80 pct of the players on the roster with a future will be lost to the portal. But that will happen anyway even if we retain meathead.
But if we find the right HC at a winning G5 program, hopefully he will bring with him a serviceable roster, upon which we can supplement in the portal.
I think that’s our best hope if we are going to get back to respectability prior to the next alignment.
As of Oct 18, Cal is now ranked 88th in the FBS Football Power Index (FPI) at -3.9. There is only 1 other ACC team with an FPI ranking worse than Cal - and that is Stanford. Furd comes in at 108th and -11.4. I would not be surprised if the ACC moves to shed their two failing west coast teams after this season or next, and picks up some mid majors like James Madison, Memphis or North Texas as they build to 19 teams. Unless Cal gets moving, we are out of the P4 and into the Pac12 or MWC. Times are that dire (and that sad)...