His failure of leadership has us with a losing coach on a long contract extension, an 0-10 basketball team, and an athletic department floundering in the changing landscape of college athletics. The athletic department is in a much worse spot than when he inherited it and it’s time to let the next guy or gal clean up his mess.
Knowlton doesn't make the HC hiring decision in a vacuum. There are a LOT of people involved that you would need to fire, including folks from the academic side of CAL and some very rich alums from the Grid Club. This is always a group decision at CAL. Everything has to be run by everyone. That's why after he interviewed with Oregon it took forever for his pay increases for assistants, recruiting department, and his salary to be approved.
No it was not. He had to go to all the peeps involved in the process for approval to get the money JW asked for. If any of them would have said no then it wouldn't have happened. Let me also say the biggest influence on hiring and firing, more that the academic side and more than the AD, are the big dawgs with the $$ in the Grid Club. Nothing happens without their approval.
Who approached all of them for the extension and had the idea of giving Wilcox the extension? I’m sure that was all Knowltons idea and then he went out and got the money.
Every program has their own version of the Grid Club that plays an oversized role in these decisions. The difference is that a strong AD is able to inspire those relationships to buy into their vision and agenda. I'm reasonably confident at this point to say Knowlton really just executes the will of others (Christ, Grid Club, etc.) and doesn't have a vision or agenda of his own besides keeping us in the black. He's support staff dressed up as an AD.
I don't disagree with you Mike, but I don't recall and AD at CAL that has ever had that enviable level or respect. I know some of the Grid Club guys. They aren't about to turn over more responsibility to the AD. It's their money that pays for salaries so its their hiring decision. And in fairness to those Grid Clubbers, they are very sharp people.
I didn't laugh and wouldn't have either. But it doesn't surprise me that Taylor would take the job. This is a big step up for him. Stanford will do what it has to. Shaw eluded to this in his last press conference. I think Taylor will be in a good position to make things happen there. As for Cal, FIRE KNOWLTON.
Shaw is a great coach who inherited a powerful program from Harbaugh... but in an era that no longer exists. Stanford Football has been in sharp decline the last 5 years due to the new college football landscape.
Shaw literally quit.
Academics, NIL, super-conferences, and the Portal will make it nearly impossible to replicate the Harbaugh/Shaw success today.
I’m actually relieved Furd didn’t just disband Football all together. That’s how tough it’s going to be. I wish Troy all the best, except for the 3rd Saturday in November.
California Football has some stability right now.
That is a blessing.
To all the haters out there, you must not understand what Coach Wilcox is dealing with.
And how tough this is to navigate.
Covid was nuisance for most of the Country... it was the Death Penalty for CAL Athletics. (Thank You City of Berkeley.)
Losing all that time and momentum was brutal. Recapturing it has been elusive. (We closed 2019 with a bright future)
But for the first time in my lifetime our Football Coach, AD, and Chancellor are all working together and have a healthy relationship. There is synergy.
That’s been unheard of at Cal since the 1950’s
Coach Wilcox is a leader.
He’s a great football coach with a great pedigree. He’s at a University that’s is uniquely challenging when it comes to academics.
He’s navigating this climate with passion and vision. He has the full support of the University. And he didn’t quit on us when other MUCH bigger programs came calling.
We have a good young team.
We’re getting some great guys back from injury.
And we’re embracing the #BearRaid again.
It’s all gonna be fine.
Best of Luck to Coach Taylor. Hope your winless streak in Big Games continues.
😂 Although I feel for Coach Fox (players were not allowed to PASS the BALL or PLAY INDOORS his first year... thanks Berkeley) I don’t feel like he gets the same grace.
And hoops is a much easier rebuild with the right hire. He should be terminated.
Cal football has stability? We’re coming off 5-7 and 4-8 seasons. We just had to fire our OC and Oline coach because they were abject failures. I’m actually very bullish on things with spavital on board, but for heavens sake, stability? COVID’s not at fault for repeated offensive failures and an inability to develop a homegrown qb. And I’m glad you think there’s synergy amongst the leadership, but I’m afraid this “synergy” is the result of a group of buffoons who all think alike. They have multiple dumpster fires on their hands, the revenue sports are somewhere between an embarrassment and a national joke, and we get mostly silence from them. It’s gotten to a point where anytime I hear the name jim knowlton, I just immediately picture the GOV from blazing saddles. But I suppose worthless ol Jim probably has AD on the back of his suit.
Mike White took Illinois to a Rose Bowl and Bruce Snyder took Arizona St to a Rose Bowl because of the gross disfunction and hostility of past administrations.
2021 would have been 7-5 if it weren’t for The City’s Covid hysterics.
2022 was brutal. We were poised to have the best defense in the conference week one. By week 4 we’d lost 1/3 of our two deep. Never started the same 5 o-linemen in consecutive games. Thats tough, but that’s football.
Hoops is a mess. No argument there.
I’m just saying I love Troy Taylor but still believe 100% sticking with Coach Wilcox and a new offense (that led the PAC 12 the year before Wilcox got here) is better for us.
90% of the fancy Portal Transfers don’t qualify to play at Cal.
Believe me, I appreciate your positivity, I just lost mine a long time ago. I hear you on the previous dysfunction, I’m just concerned that a few boneheads on the same page is its own special kind of dysfunction. The Jake Spavital hire may very well be what saves Wilcox’s ass - he desperately needs the offensive coaching and recruiting prowess. But if it doesn’t work, we’re in an even deeper hole than we would’ve been had we cut Wilcox loose previously. We shall see…
“90% of the fancy Portal Transfers don’t qualify to play at Cal.”
This, right here, unfortunately.
It also further illustrates how competent coaching is a necessity for an athletics program like Cal, an institution with a much higher academic bar than that required even by the NCAA.
Personally, I don’t share your optimism regarding Wilcox and the synergy with Knowlton and Christ (Carol, not the one that can’t hit a curveball), but would love to be surprised and I hope you’re right!
Coach don’t make any decisions at any big football schools anymore. The Boosters do. (That’s why a school like SC has cycled through so many expensive hires and just bought another Heisman with a team full of mercenaries)
Cal is a completely different situation… and a graveyard for a lot of coaching careers.
Dykes is playing for a National Title in a few weeks.
Tedford just won the MWC
Everywhere else is easy compared to CAL.
Love Troy, but he has zero D1 wins as a coach and no one has any idea if he can recruit to a place like Stanford now that the Andrew Lucks and Christian McCafferys will be paid $1-$10 Million to play elsewhere (and not have to worry about academics.)
OREGON wanted Wilcox because he represented Leadership and Stability. They were sick of coaches using them as a stepping stone for better jobs. And because everyone knows he’s good.
We should be so lucky to have a great coach who’s loyal to us.
He was the QB for much of my undergrad existence also, since I graduated in '88. Curiously, he never won the Big Game as a QB. His jaw was broken in the $C game in 1986, so Kevin Brown replaced him for the biggest upset ever in the Big Game, a 1-9 Cal over a 7-2 Stanford. Cal did not win again until 1993.
Let's keep Taylor's Big Game losing streak going for at least a dozen more years!!!
Damn, I just posted in the other thread, should've waited a cpl more minutes.
/
different take, same outcome. If Knowlton were a mole/a plant meant to destroy the dept. from within, he could hang the 'mission accomplished' banner right now. [Heck, how would he act any differently?] The sport was changed forever by the transfer portal, the org that oversees it is almost as corrupt and malevolent as FIFA, and there's not 1 damn thing we can do about it. Another tragedy on the long road of suffering = what it means to be a Golden Bear. Had I won the ~$2B lotto last month, I would've paid any & all buyouts to rid our beloved community of Knowlton, Fox, and maybe even Wilcox (esp. if it meant Taylor would be his replacement).
I still feel for the players, though, who've been abandoned by the "greatest" public university (same goes for MBB). Could write forever about the ills of this forsaken program, but trying to find the positive -- a tall order -- I no longer have to spend my fall Saturdays wondering or worrying about Cal football. Thankfully, we can all look forward to the sun exploding in about 5 billion more years; not the merciful ending we deserve but the one we need.
Any 1 of the Mckeever debacle, the Fox hiring (now 0-10 in what year?!), or extending a sub-500 coach who can't recruit depth or hire an OC to save his life -- 1 of those might be enough to label Knowlton as among the worst AD's in Cal history. But all 3?! The dude has made revenue sports irrelevant, a punchline on a national scale. By any objective measure, a complete failure, and that's the most disgusting part for me. Love your cautious optimism though I can't see where it comes from. I'm in the camp from T2: "it's in our nature to destroy ourselves".
This. And he completely conned Carol Chryst into his own extension by threatening to leave for the northwestern job. Is it possible she’s the chief clueless buffoon in charge of the whole army of clueless buffoons?
Seeing how her speciality is being a celebrated scholar of Victoria literature, maybe she’s trying to take the football program back to our Victorian Era beginnings in 1886 - the glory years.
Cal is able to put together leading worldwide programs in Physics, Chemistry, etc. There simply is not the commitment to attain the same level of excellence in football & basketball. Sad imho.
Taylor’s not perfect - the game last night looked like every nightmarish cal-wazzu game from the dykes area. But he’s a program builder and he’s not Justin Wilcox. How much longer we gonna wallow in mediocrity with Wilcox? I mean I’m actually hopeful about what spavital can do, but good god, Wilcox has had his chances. Dude is stealing money from the donors at this point.
Yeah, I like Taylor, and he did an amazing job at sac state, but that doesn’t make him the second coming of Saban. Paul Wulff was a big success at eastern Washington and was a historic failure at WSU.
Our donors seem to love tough, grind it out losses with real hard nosed, “football guy” answers in the post game presser. Four years from now we’ll still be hearing about how everyone, players coaches everyone need to be better, and how we’re close, it’s just a matter of executing on game days.
My hatred of knowlton is going to boil over. What an absolute buffoon. Disappointed Taylor took this job, but life changing generational wealth is what is. What an embarrassment to our university this asshat AD is.
Troy Taylor is a good hire for Stanfurd. He will give them some new energy and confidence, but he has a team that has been beat down (like CAL) and needs to rally his players (like CAL). He will replace David Shaw's pro style ball control offensive system (like CAL) with a spread system (like CAL). His problem is that he is losing some good players in the portal (like CAL) and he has an over rated QB (like CAL). It's going to come down to recruiting and it will be interesting to see how successfully he and his new staff recruit. The good news for him is that Stanfurd has a national brand, albeit a bit tarnished as of late, but the reputation of the academic institution should give him a head start. I'm happy for Coach Taylor, happy for the PAC12 and actually happy for CAL. (Why you ask? Because we got Spav and now we just need to get back to where we were prior to Covid with our recruiting). It's good to have another good coach and hopefully good PAC12 team; it makes the PAC12 more relevant in the national picture.
Even if the Pac-12 becomes more relevant w/ Furd's resurgence, how does that help Cal's integration into the Ivy League? More of a hindrance than anything.
Alas, I donated my last few fcks at some point last year. Keep the faith, brother, for all of us.
It probably would have worked out if TT was hired by Cal, but the timing of the extension and "all-in" gesture on Wilcox prevented a serious discussion other than Taylor for OC which obviously was too much of a lateral move for him even with a 4x salary bump. He went for the big $$. But who can blame him. Maybe Stanford will have an ex-Cal braintrust just like ours is purely Oregon.
This just in: Tosh Lupoi leaving Oregon to take over as DC at Stanfurd because, as he put it, "As a former player and alum, I know that Cal fans just can't experience enough pain. There is always another level that can be found. GO BEARS!!!!". Yes, this is a gut punch but we won't really know anything until next season. If he leads a Lincoln Riley style turnaround at the farm, then yes, LOTS of people will be even more pissed off than they are now and demanding Knowlton's head on a platter. But if Spavital turns out to be the missing ingredient that can get us back on the road to respectability, then this will turn out to be an awkward moment that people will forget about (we hope).
This just in: NCAA rules that Marshawn Lynch has one more year of eligibility and Lupoi has negotiated the largest NIL deal in history for him at Stanford.
GoBears49, can you just give us one big “I told you so” right now and then never again? Because you did, you DID tell us so and I suspect this hire is gonna bite us in the ass. Good for Taylor!
He’ll get Stanford turned around offensively, though the D will likely be a work in progress. Fear the days of Wilcox handling incompetent, boring Shaw teams are over…and if Wilcox stops beating Furd, he’s pretty much useless.
3 P12 teams got new HC’s this year….I fear Cal finishes behind all 3 in the standings.
This is true. I was not quite yet born but my parents remember this, because they went to that Rose Bowl.
I heard stories about how the Athletic Dept sent a car to pick up and drop back off my mother-who worked for the Director of Public Relations in the Cal athletic dept. at the time. They stayed at my grandparents' house in Inglewood, so the car would drive her to Huntington Beach where the Athletic Dept was holed up working in preparation for game day and take her back at the end of the day.
Great point. I think the real question is who he gets to run his D.... his team just got LIT UP by Incarnate Word in the FCS tournament. If Spav remembers even half of what he did under Dykes, our streak against the farm might extend itself after all...
Fire Jim Knowlton immediately.
His failure of leadership has us with a losing coach on a long contract extension, an 0-10 basketball team, and an athletic department floundering in the changing landscape of college athletics. The athletic department is in a much worse spot than when he inherited it and it’s time to let the next guy or gal clean up his mess.
Now 0-11. Hapless at best
Can't disagree with any of the above.
Knowlton doesn't make the HC hiring decision in a vacuum. There are a LOT of people involved that you would need to fire, including folks from the academic side of CAL and some very rich alums from the Grid Club. This is always a group decision at CAL. Everything has to be run by everyone. That's why after he interviewed with Oregon it took forever for his pay increases for assistants, recruiting department, and his salary to be approved.
Hiring Wilcox was a group decision but that extension was all Knowlton on his own.
Wilcox wasn’t a bad hire 6 years ago but that extension was malpractice, not deserved at all and is an anchor around the football program.
No it was not. He had to go to all the peeps involved in the process for approval to get the money JW asked for. If any of them would have said no then it wouldn't have happened. Let me also say the biggest influence on hiring and firing, more that the academic side and more than the AD, are the big dawgs with the $$ in the Grid Club. Nothing happens without their approval.
Who approached all of them for the extension and had the idea of giving Wilcox the extension? I’m sure that was all Knowltons idea and then he went out and got the money.
And they all had to agree, so he was obviously not the only decision-maker.
Every program has their own version of the Grid Club that plays an oversized role in these decisions. The difference is that a strong AD is able to inspire those relationships to buy into their vision and agenda. I'm reasonably confident at this point to say Knowlton really just executes the will of others (Christ, Grid Club, etc.) and doesn't have a vision or agenda of his own besides keeping us in the black. He's support staff dressed up as an AD.
I don't disagree with you Mike, but I don't recall and AD at CAL that has ever had that enviable level or respect. I know some of the Grid Club guys. They aren't about to turn over more responsibility to the AD. It's their money that pays for salaries so its their hiring decision. And in fairness to those Grid Clubbers, they are very sharp people.
Okay, but who on the "academic side" of Cal has anything to say about athletic hires?
Or extensions.
Christ, and I'm sure there is a rubber stamp academic oversight committee that gives their blessings.
I think people more laughed at the Wikipedia links than they did at Troy Taylor himself
This is by far the strangest argument I have ever been in on the internet
There was nothing wrong with Troy Taylor or Wikipedia. It was all about you trolling us with numerous same posts. Which you still continue to do.
Until you realize you are trolling, nothing will change.
I didn't laugh and wouldn't have either. But it doesn't surprise me that Taylor would take the job. This is a big step up for him. Stanford will do what it has to. Shaw eluded to this in his last press conference. I think Taylor will be in a good position to make things happen there. As for Cal, FIRE KNOWLTON.
I’m a huge Troy Taylor fan.
He was “my QB” when I was at Cal.
I’ve loved watching his career trajectory.
This is a hard road for him.
Shaw is a great coach who inherited a powerful program from Harbaugh... but in an era that no longer exists. Stanford Football has been in sharp decline the last 5 years due to the new college football landscape.
Shaw literally quit.
Academics, NIL, super-conferences, and the Portal will make it nearly impossible to replicate the Harbaugh/Shaw success today.
I’m actually relieved Furd didn’t just disband Football all together. That’s how tough it’s going to be. I wish Troy all the best, except for the 3rd Saturday in November.
California Football has some stability right now.
That is a blessing.
To all the haters out there, you must not understand what Coach Wilcox is dealing with.
And how tough this is to navigate.
Covid was nuisance for most of the Country... it was the Death Penalty for CAL Athletics. (Thank You City of Berkeley.)
Losing all that time and momentum was brutal. Recapturing it has been elusive. (We closed 2019 with a bright future)
But for the first time in my lifetime our Football Coach, AD, and Chancellor are all working together and have a healthy relationship. There is synergy.
That’s been unheard of at Cal since the 1950’s
Coach Wilcox is a leader.
He’s a great football coach with a great pedigree. He’s at a University that’s is uniquely challenging when it comes to academics.
He’s navigating this climate with passion and vision. He has the full support of the University. And he didn’t quit on us when other MUCH bigger programs came calling.
We have a good young team.
We’re getting some great guys back from injury.
And we’re embracing the #BearRaid again.
It’s all gonna be fine.
Best of Luck to Coach Taylor. Hope your winless streak in Big Games continues.
And Go Bears
Jim, get off your burner account and go fire Fox
😂 Although I feel for Coach Fox (players were not allowed to PASS the BALL or PLAY INDOORS his first year... thanks Berkeley) I don’t feel like he gets the same grace.
And hoops is a much easier rebuild with the right hire. He should be terminated.
Cal football has stability? We’re coming off 5-7 and 4-8 seasons. We just had to fire our OC and Oline coach because they were abject failures. I’m actually very bullish on things with spavital on board, but for heavens sake, stability? COVID’s not at fault for repeated offensive failures and an inability to develop a homegrown qb. And I’m glad you think there’s synergy amongst the leadership, but I’m afraid this “synergy” is the result of a group of buffoons who all think alike. They have multiple dumpster fires on their hands, the revenue sports are somewhere between an embarrassment and a national joke, and we get mostly silence from them. It’s gotten to a point where anytime I hear the name jim knowlton, I just immediately picture the GOV from blazing saddles. But I suppose worthless ol Jim probably has AD on the back of his suit.
Institutionally, it’s the best it’s ever been.
Mike White took Illinois to a Rose Bowl and Bruce Snyder took Arizona St to a Rose Bowl because of the gross disfunction and hostility of past administrations.
2021 would have been 7-5 if it weren’t for The City’s Covid hysterics.
2022 was brutal. We were poised to have the best defense in the conference week one. By week 4 we’d lost 1/3 of our two deep. Never started the same 5 o-linemen in consecutive games. Thats tough, but that’s football.
Hoops is a mess. No argument there.
I’m just saying I love Troy Taylor but still believe 100% sticking with Coach Wilcox and a new offense (that led the PAC 12 the year before Wilcox got here) is better for us.
90% of the fancy Portal Transfers don’t qualify to play at Cal.
We need to build a locker room.
Go Bears
Believe me, I appreciate your positivity, I just lost mine a long time ago. I hear you on the previous dysfunction, I’m just concerned that a few boneheads on the same page is its own special kind of dysfunction. The Jake Spavital hire may very well be what saves Wilcox’s ass - he desperately needs the offensive coaching and recruiting prowess. But if it doesn’t work, we’re in an even deeper hole than we would’ve been had we cut Wilcox loose previously. We shall see…
Justin tried to keep Jake. That was his first choice for OC, but Jake went to West Virginia. Maybe it’ll all work out.
And I hear you... I spent decades without much positivity. Made seasons like ‘91 ‘04 ‘06-‘08 that much worse. So now I just hope for the best.
The Bear will not quit...
“90% of the fancy Portal Transfers don’t qualify to play at Cal.”
This, right here, unfortunately.
It also further illustrates how competent coaching is a necessity for an athletics program like Cal, an institution with a much higher academic bar than that required even by the NCAA.
Personally, I don’t share your optimism regarding Wilcox and the synergy with Knowlton and Christ (Carol, not the one that can’t hit a curveball), but would love to be surprised and I hope you’re right!
Go Bears! Those Troy Taylor years were fun!
Coach don’t make any decisions at any big football schools anymore. The Boosters do. (That’s why a school like SC has cycled through so many expensive hires and just bought another Heisman with a team full of mercenaries)
Cal is a completely different situation… and a graveyard for a lot of coaching careers.
Dykes is playing for a National Title in a few weeks.
Tedford just won the MWC
Everywhere else is easy compared to CAL.
Love Troy, but he has zero D1 wins as a coach and no one has any idea if he can recruit to a place like Stanford now that the Andrew Lucks and Christian McCafferys will be paid $1-$10 Million to play elsewhere (and not have to worry about academics.)
OREGON wanted Wilcox because he represented Leadership and Stability. They were sick of coaches using them as a stepping stone for better jobs. And because everyone knows he’s good.
We should be so lucky to have a great coach who’s loyal to us.
Go Bears
I'll have what you're having :')
He was the QB for much of my undergrad existence also, since I graduated in '88. Curiously, he never won the Big Game as a QB. His jaw was broken in the $C game in 1986, so Kevin Brown replaced him for the biggest upset ever in the Big Game, a 1-9 Cal over a 7-2 Stanford. Cal did not win again until 1993.
Let's keep Taylor's Big Game losing streak going for at least a dozen more years!!!
I love this
Gonna need names…
Bob R. just became GoTree49
Damn, I just posted in the other thread, should've waited a cpl more minutes.
/
different take, same outcome. If Knowlton were a mole/a plant meant to destroy the dept. from within, he could hang the 'mission accomplished' banner right now. [Heck, how would he act any differently?] The sport was changed forever by the transfer portal, the org that oversees it is almost as corrupt and malevolent as FIFA, and there's not 1 damn thing we can do about it. Another tragedy on the long road of suffering = what it means to be a Golden Bear. Had I won the ~$2B lotto last month, I would've paid any & all buyouts to rid our beloved community of Knowlton, Fox, and maybe even Wilcox (esp. if it meant Taylor would be his replacement).
I still feel for the players, though, who've been abandoned by the "greatest" public university (same goes for MBB). Could write forever about the ills of this forsaken program, but trying to find the positive -- a tall order -- I no longer have to spend my fall Saturdays wondering or worrying about Cal football. Thankfully, we can all look forward to the sun exploding in about 5 billion more years; not the merciful ending we deserve but the one we need.
/
Again, let's see where we are in four years. I'm just not that enthralled as you all are with Taylor.
Any 1 of the Mckeever debacle, the Fox hiring (now 0-10 in what year?!), or extending a sub-500 coach who can't recruit depth or hire an OC to save his life -- 1 of those might be enough to label Knowlton as among the worst AD's in Cal history. But all 3?! The dude has made revenue sports irrelevant, a punchline on a national scale. By any objective measure, a complete failure, and that's the most disgusting part for me. Love your cautious optimism though I can't see where it comes from. I'm in the camp from T2: "it's in our nature to destroy ourselves".
This. And he completely conned Carol Chryst into his own extension by threatening to leave for the northwestern job. Is it possible she’s the chief clueless buffoon in charge of the whole army of clueless buffoons?
possible, plausible, feasible. take your pick.
Seeing how her speciality is being a celebrated scholar of Victoria literature, maybe she’s trying to take the football program back to our Victorian Era beginnings in 1886 - the glory years.
Cal is able to put together leading worldwide programs in Physics, Chemistry, etc. There simply is not the commitment to attain the same level of excellence in football & basketball. Sad imho.
You have identified the key reason Cal is a perpetually losing football team.
Taylor’s not perfect - the game last night looked like every nightmarish cal-wazzu game from the dykes area. But he’s a program builder and he’s not Justin Wilcox. How much longer we gonna wallow in mediocrity with Wilcox? I mean I’m actually hopeful about what spavital can do, but good god, Wilcox has had his chances. Dude is stealing money from the donors at this point.
Vagabond Spavital vs. Troy Taylor? Is that meant to be some sort of sick joke?
Yeah, I like Taylor, and he did an amazing job at sac state, but that doesn’t make him the second coming of Saban. Paul Wulff was a big success at eastern Washington and was a historic failure at WSU.
Good point. The older I get, the more frustrating Cal’s inability to put together a winning program becomes.
Hmmm... There's hope in that analogy.
If he tanks Stanfurd, isn't that really a monumental contribution as a Golden Bear alum?
Agreed. It remains to be seen if he can do at this level what he did in high school and FCS. Wait and see.
You want to wait four more years?? What are you? 24?
What is supposed to happen in the next four years?
Well Cal will still have Wilcox, the question will be whether Wilcox will have had a winning Pac12 season finally in that decade.
No, he won’t.
In what universe would that ever happen? Did the last 5 years not happen?
Is Wilcox still the Cal Head Coach in 4 years?
Our donors seem to love tough, grind it out losses with real hard nosed, “football guy” answers in the post game presser. Four years from now we’ll still be hearing about how everyone, players coaches everyone need to be better, and how we’re close, it’s just a matter of executing on game days.
It's not like Knowlton would fire anyone for a losing record or taking advantage of their power dynamic as coach to foster a toxic culture of abuse...
If Knowlton is still the AD, he probably will be the HC and give Wilcox another 4 year extension.
My hatred of knowlton is going to boil over. What an absolute buffoon. Disappointed Taylor took this job, but life changing generational wealth is what is. What an embarrassment to our university this asshat AD is.
I feel like Stanford hired Harbaugh 2.0 and Cal doubled down on Holmoe 2.0.
Wilcox better hope Spavital can save him from himself and get this offense going.
Did you not watch the offense without Musgrave? Dont know what else you need to see it wasnt JW holding this offense back
Troy Taylor is a good hire for Stanfurd. He will give them some new energy and confidence, but he has a team that has been beat down (like CAL) and needs to rally his players (like CAL). He will replace David Shaw's pro style ball control offensive system (like CAL) with a spread system (like CAL). His problem is that he is losing some good players in the portal (like CAL) and he has an over rated QB (like CAL). It's going to come down to recruiting and it will be interesting to see how successfully he and his new staff recruit. The good news for him is that Stanfurd has a national brand, albeit a bit tarnished as of late, but the reputation of the academic institution should give him a head start. I'm happy for Coach Taylor, happy for the PAC12 and actually happy for CAL. (Why you ask? Because we got Spav and now we just need to get back to where we were prior to Covid with our recruiting). It's good to have another good coach and hopefully good PAC12 team; it makes the PAC12 more relevant in the national picture.
He has no QB, McKee declared for draft.
Taylor crossed the DMZ, is now dining amongst the enemy in Pyongyang. He is on the other side of the line now, that is that.
Shhh...let us not reveal the nature of agent Taylor's true mission. 🥷
So much for all of the Sacto Homers who swore that Troy was staying to build a winner at Sacramento State. That was some funny BS.
Even if the Pac-12 becomes more relevant w/ Furd's resurgence, how does that help Cal's integration into the Ivy League? More of a hindrance than anything.
Alas, I donated my last few fcks at some point last year. Keep the faith, brother, for all of us.
And let's not forget Coach Prime at CU is also good for the Pac12.
You don't want to hear my thoughts. Trust me.
DO IT for free speech
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLO
It probably would have worked out if TT was hired by Cal, but the timing of the extension and "all-in" gesture on Wilcox prevented a serious discussion other than Taylor for OC which obviously was too much of a lateral move for him even with a 4x salary bump. He went for the big $$. But who can blame him. Maybe Stanford will have an ex-Cal braintrust just like ours is purely Oregon.
This just in: Tosh Lupoi leaving Oregon to take over as DC at Stanfurd because, as he put it, "As a former player and alum, I know that Cal fans just can't experience enough pain. There is always another level that can be found. GO BEARS!!!!". Yes, this is a gut punch but we won't really know anything until next season. If he leads a Lincoln Riley style turnaround at the farm, then yes, LOTS of people will be even more pissed off than they are now and demanding Knowlton's head on a platter. But if Spavital turns out to be the missing ingredient that can get us back on the road to respectability, then this will turn out to be an awkward moment that people will forget about (we hope).
This just in: NCAA rules that Marshawn Lynch has one more year of eligibility and Lupoi has negotiated the largest NIL deal in history for him at Stanford.
He will flop.
He took the job to ground the tree deeper than it’s roots.
GoBears49, can you just give us one big “I told you so” right now and then never again? Because you did, you DID tell us so and I suspect this hire is gonna bite us in the ass. Good for Taylor!
Now I only laugh when I would normally cry.
still learning how to cope, open to new ideas, what's your secret?
I get a lot of help from my friends Jim, Jack and Jose to cope with the pain.
Love me a straight tequila night…
We screwed the pooch
Nice TD, well said…
He’ll get Stanford turned around offensively, though the D will likely be a work in progress. Fear the days of Wilcox handling incompetent, boring Shaw teams are over…and if Wilcox stops beating Furd, he’s pretty much useless.
3 P12 teams got new HC’s this year….I fear Cal finishes behind all 3 in the standings.
Let's wait and see.
Cal has been waiting and seeing since 1957.
This is true. I was not quite yet born but my parents remember this, because they went to that Rose Bowl.
I heard stories about how the Athletic Dept sent a car to pick up and drop back off my mother-who worked for the Director of Public Relations in the Cal athletic dept. at the time. They stayed at my grandparents' house in Inglewood, so the car would drive her to Huntington Beach where the Athletic Dept was holed up working in preparation for game day and take her back at the end of the day.
That's my new moniker on here.
That’s no fun.
I'm trying to protect my mental health.
you still have some mental health :/ ?
LOL. Not sure.
I hear that!
Great point. I think the real question is who he gets to run his D.... his team just got LIT UP by Incarnate Word in the FCS tournament. If Spav remembers even half of what he did under Dykes, our streak against the farm might extend itself after all...