The Art of Cal Football Hosted by Justin Wilcox
Cal focuses towards 2025 in the LA Bowl
With Wednesday’s 24-13 loss to UNLV in the LA Bowl, Cal’s choppy 2024 season has come to a close. Truthfully if you had asked me how to describe or categorize this season, it would be pretty difficult. So much happened on and off the field, its astounding how wide the scale of this iteration of Cal Football was. For 30 minutes, Cal looked all in on trying to beat UNLV to earn a seventh win on the year. In the other 30, the Golden Bears paused those efforts and looked towards the future. However you feel or what you glean from those glorified development periods is your prerogative, but as it was after the Independence Bowl in 2023, the Bears will end the year once again at 6-7 overall.
Thank you to the seniors
A lot of chapters came to a close for Cal Football players at SoFi Stadium. Regardless of circumstances and results (and I’m aware how much I said this after Big Game), I want it known that the fans appreciate all the blood, sweat, and tears that everyone has shown over the years. For guys like Craig Woodson and Miles Williams, they deserved to go out on top. In an increasingly rare phenomenon, they were loyal to the Golden Bears at their core when they didn’t have to be.
Others like Teddye Buchanan may have only been at Cal for a year, but his impact was felt throughout the year. Everyone has their own story to tell but whether its been one year or six years, the seniors have made their mark on the community at large. I cannot wait for Xavier Carlton, Nohl Williams, David Reese among others to continue to wreak havoc at the next level. To cap it all off, most of the seniors never lost the Axe, one of only a few classes to ever sweep the Big Games.
Being in the Cal family isn’t just a phrase that gets thrown out there. Everyone has earned the title “Golden Bear for life”. Thanks for everything guys.
Winning vs Future Evaluations
The elephant in the room after the clock hit 0 in the LA Bowl. Justin Wilcox stated postgame that he knew rotations would be expanded and that a lot of young guys would have the chance to play against UNLV.
For the whole first half, Cal scratched and clawed as they did the whole season, putting up a solid fight across all phases of the game until a well executed fake punt from the Rebels gave them the lead late in the half.
Coming off out the locker room, the air came out of the tires as QB CJ Harris went to the locker room with an injury and a lot of backups came into the game on defense.
On the one hand, it makes sense given the auraless state of bowl games and transfer portal timing that you need to find out about who is in line amidst the fear of losing your best elsewhere. Within these circumstances, that can be justified and considering opt outs across the nation the last few years, Cal is no exception to this line of thinking.
However, the interest in winning the LA Bowl leaves a sour taste in my mouth. I know 6 wins vs 7 wins means absolutely nothing given what happened this year along with Wilcox returning in 2025. Fans traveled down to SoFi Stadium to gather in community and see the Bears one last time in an area where the parking, transportation, and hotel expenses rack up quickly.
To usher in your second spring game of the season by the time it was the middle of the fourth quarter rightfully fired up a lot of fans who invested time in person. I don’t care whether Cal is in the Rose Bowl or the Winner is Ejected from the Solar System Bowl on Mars, the objective is to win football games. As much as I don’t like to say it, winning is a luxury for this program right now and there should absolutely be little to no doubt as to whether you did all you could to make it happen in the limited opportunities you receive.
All this to say, I don’t really know what the solution to the bowl game fiasco is. I don’t like purposefully pivoting to evaluating the roster in a one game sample size where you don’t see enough anyway. At the same time, unloading the bag of tricks and playing starters 75+ snaps seems like a surefire way to get someone unnecessarily hurt while they prepare to head to the NFL. As Justin Wilcox said postgame, the transfer portal and college football system right now needs a little work. Once action is taken, the future of what Cal fans should expect from the Bears in a bowl game will become more clear.
Conclusions
What a year. No one two weeks were the same in reporting, analyzing, commentating, and telling the stories of the 2024 California Golden Bears.
In talking to other reporters postgame, its astounding to think of the phrase that sums up most of the season well. “How is it your most memorable season as Head Coach and you went 6-7” was stuck in my head all night because while it can be stated that it’s a cynical way to look at everything this year, it is not exactly wrong.
Everything that happened on and off the field this past season transcended anything that people could have expected, from the good to the bad. From the peaks and valleys, it was certainly one of the most Cal seasons of all time.
If you had told me after the 2023 Independence Bowl about all the malarky and tomfoolery that Cal would get up to in 2024 just for the year to end the exact same way at 6-7, I wouldn’t have believed you.
But, that’s part of the “fun” of being a Cal fan. You never know what you’ll get or who you will get to do it alongside.
2025 does feel similar to the start of a new chapter. I’m titling it “Justin Wilcox’s last stand.” I’d be foolish to predict anything that will occur next year knowing that the transfer portal is still active as ever but if the offseason additions on staff to this point tell me anything, its all or nothing now.
There are lots of different tracks that this train can go down at this point but if there’s anything we have learned from recent memory, its to hold on for dear life and let the cards fall where they may.
I'm just not sure how much interest I will have anymore in college football after this season. After finally getting to the point of a meaningful championship playoff structure with any team with any small bit of rationale to claim being the best team, the entire stability of teams collapses in terms of both players and coaches....how meaningful post season games are in terms of claims and final rankings is very questionable. There are a lot of ways to spend the finite time we have and post-season college football has become a circus. Perhaps if players were "employees" with contracts and had to perform post season or lose substantial NIL dollars under those contracts that might be one way to address this situation. But it just makes it virtually the same as being pro, and I don't follow pro. Additionally, the entire way the initial push for NIL was stated was the players were being taken advantage of by rich athletic departments. But now it's just "you all need to donate even more than you ever have." The only thing that might get my interest renewed would be if the top 32 football teams over the past decade or something like that split off and dominated all players able to be drafted pro, the rest of collegiate football returned to players with substantial interest in getting a degree, buying season tickets and donating $250, $500 or $1000 a year was sufficient for the regular supportive fan not sitting on a pile of Bitcoin or Apple or Tesla stock. The question does have to be asked for each team and its fan base: how many millions more are needed each year in donations to compete with the top 32 teams? And even beyond that: what does it mean to play for four schools in five years? Assuming you did earn a degree after all of that, to which school are you loyal and how can you build any kind of record of accomplishment in the school record books and be recognized as a "great"? It will be interesting to see what happens to fans across the 100+ football schools as this circus continues and the dollars demanded continue to sky rocket.
Cal is like a box of chocolates.