Predict the 2023 Cal Football Season! [Submissions due Aug 20th!]
One final season in the Pac-12...
Image credit: @CalFootball
Eight months ago the Cal football marked its biggest change since Justin Wilcox took over in 2017. Out with Bill Musgrave’s ineffectual offense, in with Spavital and his excellent track record as an offensive coordinator (as head coach…not so much). Many new faces joined the team as Cal took full advantage of the transfer portal, although Cal also lost notable players like Jack Plummer and J. Michael Sturdivant. And all that change seems quite insignificant in the wake of extensive conference realignment that has rendered the college football landscape nearly unrecognizable. The Pac-12 has one final season before its near-certain demise—how will the Bears fare in the final season? Will they strike down upon their departing conference-mates with great vengeance and furious anger or will they affirm decisions from the Big 12 and Big Ten to allow Cal to be relegated down to the G5 level?
For the fifteenth (and hopefully not final) season across California Golden Blogs and Write for California, let’s predict how the Cal football season will unfold. For each game I’d like you to predict the Bears’ chances of winning on a 0-100 scale. If Cal has 60% chance of winning, enter “60” in the field. Do this for each game on the schedule (and if you’re feeling adventurous, add your predictions together and divide by 100 to get a projected number of wins).
Go here to submit your predictions. The deadline is August 20th, and I will post the results a few days later. Thanks for participating, and Go Bears!
I've got 5.75 wins for Cal this season. I only favor them in five games (and all those except Idaho are barely favored, around 60% or so): North Texas, Auburn, Idaho, Arizona State, and Big Game.
I expect the team to be better than last year, but the conference is absolutely stacked this year so moderate improvement will not necessarily translate into more wins.
5-7.
Schedule is just too tough to predict a bowl-caliber season with any confidence based on 6 years of data on Wilcox. I know it’s obvious, but 9/2 at North Texas will tell a lot…is it more of the same with silly penalties and stalled drives, or is there a spark to the squad we haven’t seen, other than for short stretches in 2019? If they show up and cover the 9 point spread in Denton, then maybe they have turned a corner…at least that’s the hope.
I am really hoping Spavital gets the O moving in the right direction…it’s just a lot of pieces to cobble together in an offseason…