(Before I start, an apology to all our readers.
After years of yelling at clouds online about how bringing Tosh Lupoi back to Berkeley would be a bad idea based on how his first departure came about, and the many warning signs elsewhere, I had to sell myself back in when it became clear what decision was coming last fall.
I have never felt worse about any decision I’ve ever made as a writer. Because every worst-case scenario came true. Talk is cheap when the words are written, but I do apologize for not writing more honestly about how I felt.
But if it’s any consolation, I’m getting punished in spectacular fashion.)
If the Tosh Lupoi era is doomed, I at least got to witness in person the signature play of his tenure on Saturday night in Charlottesville.
Behold, the stupidest moment from the stupidest season in Cal football history.
Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele threw a pick-six at the line of scrimmage to essentially end the game in the third quarter, and somehow it wasn’t the worst pick-six of the day. All this against a flailing Virginia team that had one FBS win in two months.
That’s the Tosh Lupoi experience in a nutshell. Aimless, stupid, wasteful football.
Dating back to SMU, Cal has now been outscored 83-0 in its last three second halves. If you include the first half of Wake Forest, you get to Cal being outscored 117-0 in four halves of their last four games.
That’s 120 minutes of garbage, where Cal’s opponent essentially needed only half a game or less to figure out everything the Bears had in their arsenal.
The Cal special teams blocked an extra point. JKS attempted a pooch punt with the Bears down three scores and a quarter remaining on 4th and whatever. There was whatever that play was up there. This is easily the most entertainingly bad unit on this team, you never know what you’re going to get.
The Cal defense has this amazing ability to make even the most pedestrian offense look like a juggernaut. Virginia really didn’t have a passing attack to consist of, but the Cal defense found themselves caught off guard by several Beau Pribula keepers and let go of the rope a few times in coverage.
It was a by-the-numbers, pedestrian defensive performance for an overwhelmed unit that has shown barely any signs of energy or life in the last month. Here are the updated Cal defensive FBS metrics, all bottom-tier:
20+ yard plays allowed (135th of 138 teams)
6.3 yards per play (119th)
194 rushing yards per game (121st)
5.1 yards per rush (123rd)
140 pass rating (91st)
36 tackles per loss (120th)
34.8 points per game (124th)
43% 3rd down conversion (105th)
93% 4th down conversion (Last)
That performance gave Virginia enough cushion for the Cal offense to hang itself.
The Cal offense was as grounded as the American aviation system this weekend. With two weeks to tinker with new potential formulas or ideas, the Frankenstein pro-style scheme that Jordan Somerville installed remains stuck in place, with no incremental improvement from the coaches or the players.
JKS is completely unable to execute this system. He will have one or two nice drives a game before the opponent realizes he cannot read a zone defense or a disguised blitz, and the game will essentially end. Receivers again dropped many of his scrambling throws. Defenders instinctively seem to know when a run up the middle is coming, with Adam Mohammed bottled up as the box gets quickly plugged.
The result is an offensive margin call.
4.5 yards per play (135th of 138 FBS teams)
72.6 rushing yards per game (137th)
2.68 yards per rush (136th)
5.7 yards per pass (128th)
115 passer rating (117th)
63 tackles for loss allowed (126th)
22% 4th down conversions (134th)
17 points/game (129th)
Tosh Lupoi had one goal going into this season: Maximize the talents of an athletically gifted quarterback and some impressive skill transfers with proper coaching, scheme and system. Cal installed an offense not commensurate with his talents (complex reads, changed mechanics, wrong reads), and Sagapolutele is suffering.
He has failed spectacularly. And it might end his time at Cal before it’s really even begun.
Ultimately, what is happening off the field now becomes far more interesting and potentially gutting for the future of Cal football.
What comes next? Could Cal seriously move on from Tosh Lupoi after only one season? And what exactly is Ron Rivera doing owning one of the worst hires in recent college football history?
The alarm bells were off with Ron Rivera’s candid radio interview identifying the mistakes Lupoi had made in his first year, and they became ringing sirens when the New York Times broke the next day that Lupoi and Rivera had been at odds all season. This was not helped this week when Lupoi and Rivera gave a group presser, and it was exacerbated further when both were interviewed separately at Virginia, and each was referred to as coach.
There is reported dysfunction throughout the program, with tired staffers unable to handle Lupoi’s manic management of every facet of the football team. The resentment seems to be boiling over as the product on the field decomposes, with more and more whispers of dissatisfaction about how the team is not being prepared through the week to win games.
Having watched many of these games in person, staffers look confused and lifeless through most of the games. Players run down the count, get randomly subbed in, and then usually fail to execute their assignments. Lupoi continues to randomly run around the sidelines with puppy dog energy, but does not seem to be attuned to game situation, time and place, with Exhibit A displayed at the top of this article.
And his media appearances continue to be a garbled disaster of bravado and half-baked run-on sentences. I have gotten multiple inquiries from Cal alum who don’t pay attention to football asking how this man graduated from UC Berkeley. I do not have a good response right now.
Barring scandal, it is exceptionally rare for a football team to fire a head coach in its first season. Even the Jimmy Lakes and Deshaun Fosters of the world got multiple years to try and figure it out before the plug was pulled. Even absolute disasters like Chad Morris and Jeremy Pruitt got multiple reboots.
But if he comes back, I have very little hope a turnaround is coming. Because Tosh Lupoi has not shown any sign that he knows what he’s doing, and after that bizarre play Saturday, now the whole college football world knows of it.
He has made very public bad decisions, particularly around his handling of the quarterback situation. He does not show any signs in-game of being even a mediocre decision-maker, making bizarre 4th down calls, refusing to call timeouts, and having the wrong players on the field for the wrong situation.
He has made bad staffing decisions, hiring first-time coordinators who were immediately overwhelmed to install schemes players were not prepared for. He hired numerous graduate assistants who seemed to be brought in for their ability to acquire talent via the portal and recruiting, but have not really upskilled their players. And he has micromanaged this program to the point that national publications are now reporting on the dysfunction spreading from Strawberry Canyon. His only plus remains his recruiting, but the decommits are starting to flow in, and it’s hard to imagine that this end-of-season spiral will have positive ramifications.
Then there is Rivera, who is now going to have to thoroughly own this hire. What did he get wrong in the process? Why was Lupoi not more thoroughly vetted for his strategic football abilities before this decision was made? How is he making the situation worse right now with his very public meddling? How will Rich Lyons be able to trust him to make the next decision here, after so badly bungling this one?
After nearly freezing to death in Charlottesville watching three-plus hours of this nonsense, I am frankly sick of watching this, and am for the first time in nearly 20 years reconsidering my relationship with this program if this continues. I now dread Cal football Saturdays, and will have to walk into Memorial Stadium this weekend with almost no hope we will beat a talent-deficient but hardworking Stanford team. Cal families who have for decades loyally stood with the Bears have been doing, or are in the process of doing the same thing.
Many Cal fans have passed the breaking point with Tosh Lupoi. How much longer does Cal football have until it irrevocably breaks?
I was of the opinion that even if there were financial resources to fire Lupoi in the first season, it would be difficult to find a quality replacement if the program is perceived by the coaching talent pool as trigger happy. After this game and this play in particular, I don’t have that concern any longer. This is so deeply embarrassing.
Because I'm old, and still have memories of once seeing Rich Campbell adorn the cover of Street & Smith's College Football annual, shortly before Cal began a 3-8 season, I’ve seen some pretty bad Cal teams going back to those Roger Theder years. And while the Holmoecaust team and the 2013 squad gets mostly mentioned here, this team is almost as clueless as the ‘86 team that got Joe Kapp fired right before Big Game. I mean, I’ve never seen a time since that team which did not have any cohesive idea as to what they wanted to do on either side of the ball. (At least the 2013 team had a fun offense...) And JKS is absolutely the wrong QB for an O-line that can’t protect anyone in the pocket.
But here was the thing about that 1986 team. Kapp's schtick had finally run its course, and a rudderless team careened between Brian Bedford and Kevin Brown at QB, before Kapp, desperate to save his job, burned Troy Taylor's redshirt season right before Cal was massacred 49-0 against ASU. Losing to USC the following week made a 28-3 loss actually seem like an improvement. But by then, Taylor was out for the season, having broken his jaw against the Trojans. In addition, he also sustained a mild concussion, and lost two of his teeth, which he tried to find shortly after he was hit. It was embarrassing, and Kapp got the news that he was gone after Big Game the following week.
But then this clueless, mismatched team coaslesced behind the previously demoted Kevin Brown, and came back to upset Stanfurd in the Big Game. There was no rational reason for a broken Cal team to hope to win, yet somehow it managed to pull off a win that I personally remember more fondly than The Play.
This year's team so reminds me of that ordeal 40 years ago. Yet, sadly, I don't get the same sense that this team can pull itself together to rise up like the 1986 team managed to do. But maybe it was the news of Kapp's firing that week that brought the team together. (And yes, announcing Tosh's firing would bring about a symmetry that would be ironic...)
Enough of us know the clichés about rivalry games and whatnot, but there is very little to hang any optimism on for what should be the best week of the season. I'll be wearing my Cal colors in my classroom all week, because that's what I do, and I'll watch the game on Saturday, but this has easily been the most demoralizing season I've ever experienced as a Cal fan going back to 1980.