Tosh Lupoi: A Recollection

A memory of Cal’s new head coach as a football camp counselor.

Photo Credit: Rob Hwang

In the summer of 2009, when I was an innocent 10-year-old kid, I attended a camp put on by the Cal football program. It took place mostly within Memorial Stadium and largely consisted of putting the campers through drills similar to those done by the players, as led by both those players and the coaches at the time. But out of all the drills we did, not a single one sticks clearer in my mind than the one led by a 27-year-old defensive line coach in sunglasses and a visor with a blond buzz cut by the name of Tosh Lupoi.

Lupoi — who, after a wide variety of stops elsewhere, is now Cal’s head coach — oversaw a drill in which he imitated a quarterback’s cadence. To teach us to begin rushing on the snap, he’d call out “Hut!” while simultaneously lifting up his foot. After doing this a few times, he’d call “Hut!” again — only without moving his foot. Inevitably, at least some of the kids would jump “offsides.” He eventually tricked everybody with this — perhaps not everyone at once, but all of us got fooled at one time or another. The lesson was clear: watch the ball for the snap, and don’t bite on hard counts.

But over the course of a few days, another lesson emerged. A lesson about the importance of personality in college football.

Tosh Lupoi is, quite possibly, the most gregarious individual I have ever met. His personality was big enough to fill the whole stadium. He was deeply intense, but also tremendously funny. He knew how to mess with people without ever crossing the line into bullying. Just about every camper was drawn to him, wanting to be around him. Everyone wanted to show him they could work hard, that they wouldn’t be tricked by his hard count. I was a pretty shy kid, so that sort of boisterousness was a little too much for me at certain points, but even I couldn’t help but gravitate towards him. He just naturally had that ability.

At the time, I had a vague understanding of recruiting in the college football world, but didn’t yet know about everything that it entailed. However, once I fully learned what it was and that Lupoi was considered to be an elite recruiter, only one thought crossed my mind.

“Well, yeah. Of course he’d be good at that.”

Even from my limited contact with Lupoi, I can understand why he’s good at connecting with 17-year-olds getting ready to make the biggest decisions of their lives. It’s abundantly clear how a high school football player could walk away from a meeting with him thinking, “I want to play for that guy.” His larger-than-life qualities still stand out to me, 16 years after I interacted with him for less than a week. You can be pretty sure they’ll stand out to recruits right before they decide where they’ll be going to college.

His personality seems to still be a draw for players even after they join him. His intensity can be summed up pretty well from a quote he had as Oregon’s defensive coordinator, stating, “Our goal is to physically and mentally assault the quarterback.” When your mentality is that clear and determined, players will want to follow you.

“Cal gave me Coach Lupoi, who has been the greatest coach I’ve had,” longtime NFL defensive end Cameron Jordan, who played under Lupoi for his last three seasons in Berkeley, said in a 2011 interview. “[He] has helped develop techniques that come natural to me, as well as introduce new techniques and do it in a way the players gravitate to [and] want to learn them.”

Right now, Lupoi’s recruiting ability is mostly known to Cal fans in the context of what he took away from the football program rather than what he brought to it. After bringing a top-10 recruiting class to Berkeley ahead of the 2012 season, he controversially took most of those recruits with him to Washington in a move that arguably served as the inflection point for Cal’s descent in the time since then. (Several ex-Cal players who played with or were coached by Lupoi, including Jordan, publicly forgave him for this and actively endorsed him for the head coaching job.)

But his reputation as a recruiter has only grown since then. In his time at Alabama, he brought in numerous future NFL players, including Bay Area product Najee Harris. After a few years in the NFL, he came back to the college ranks at Oregon, where he adjusted to the transfer portal era and helped recruit the pieces necessary to turn the Ducks into back-to-back College Football Playoff participants. His first task as head coach was recruiting, in a sense, and it appears he has succeeded by convincing Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele to stay in Berkeley, about a year after he convinced the quarterback to flip his commitment and go to Eugene in the first place.

I’ve long held the belief that a head coach effectively has two jobs — tactician and manager. Tosh Lupoi has never been a head coach before. We have no idea how he’ll handle the tactician parts, such as installing the right schemes or using his timeouts effectively in late-game scenarios. But the manager role? The part that has to connect with people and establish a culture? He’s got that down in spades. After all, it’s pretty much exactly what he’s been doing for the better part of two decades.