I’m at a loss. What do you even say after that?
Wake Forest was beyond better. It was pretty clear after a few snaps. With Cal mostly playing its backup offense, our paths to victory were limited, and we were going to have to play S-tier football to get an upset.
But Cal might as well have sent up the surrender flag by the second drive. The Bears were outclassed in every phase of the game.
Execution, decision-making, effort, coaching, make up your own phase, Cal was worse. It’s barely worth looking at the micro elements of this game—every warning flag we’ve put up with Cal’s relative lack of experience in coaching was exposed, as the Demon Deacons ground whatever we were doing into powder.
A confusing and pedestrian offensive gameplan? Check.
A bottled run game with no versatility? Yessir.
A defense that lost individual matchups and gave up explosive plays? Well, this was a bit different; it was mostly in the air this time instead of on the ground. I’ve been kind to defensive coordinator Michael Hutchings for incremental improvements through the year, but his unit has made mistakes all year, and this game was a steep regression.
A coaching staff that made questionable decisions that every normie could question? Oh, we will get to that.
This was a demoralizing experience at Memorial Stadium. A barely half-filled Memorial Stadium emptied out half of its fans by halftime, and then another half of the remaining fans left after the Cal Band halftime show. Those who remained booed, yelled, or stewed. We got less than nothing on Saturday, and now who knows how many of us will be back for non-Stanford activities this year.
We’re in a dark place, Cal family. And it feels like nearly all of what happened Saturday night can be traced to the bizarre quarterback management from head coach Tosh Lupoi.
All Golden Bears were relieved to escape with a win against Virginia Tech last week. But just like with Syracuse, there was a concern this might be fool’s gold, and that our very young coaching staff might take the wrong lessons. Cal escaped as much as they won, and there are only so many tricks you can play with a backup group of emergency players.
And it seems as if Lupoi took the wrong lesson by announcing Jackson Brousseau as the starter last week over the recovering Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele.
Brousseau did very well in the first six quarters he had the reins. He led several very important end-of-game drives and managed the game state. In no world do any serious football minds believe that he is a better long-term option at the signal-caller position than JKS.
This was proven out against Wake Forest, where Brousseau essentially was shut down after his first drive. He averaged a horrific 2.9 yards per pass, which is a worse outcome than Cal’s already bottom-10 FBS rushing attack (3.2). It’s not Brousseau’s fault—he was the backup quarterback for a reason. Facing a playoff contender like Wake Forest, with seasoned defensive minds like Jake Dickert and Scottie Hazelton having actual tape on him to analyze and assess his QB profiles, was always going to be a stark return to reality.
Yet not once in the meaningful period of this game, not at 14-0, not at 21-0, not even at the start of the second half, did Lupoi even consider putting in Sagapolutele. The anemic Cal offense trotted along, threw a dozen passes short of the sticks on long-down situations, picked up a first down here and there, and then punted the ball right back to an unstoppable Wake offense.
So JKS’s eventual appearance in the 4th quarter, against Wake Forest’s backups in meaningless mop-up work, does not make any sense from a football perspective. If he was healthy, why wasn’t he put in earlier, when Cal had a chance to rally? Why was he put in that late, when there was nothing to be gained and the risk of re-injury was always on the table?
My ultimate determination for this logic is that Tosh Lupoi actually believed on Saturday that Jackson Brousseau should stay the starter, will remain the starter against SMU, and Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele will remain the designated QB2. This is generally how most QB rooms operate—the starter plays until the game is out of doubt, and the backup comes in to protect the starter from injury.
If Sagapolutele is going to earn the starting spot back, it’ll have to come by looking like the better quarterback in practice. Because otherwise I cannot make heads or tails of what we just watched.
Why that is now the determination is beyond me. Whether that calculus changes based on the reaction to that chain of decisions remains to be seen. But it puts this team and program in a place they definitely were not planning for at any point this fall, moving the Wake game from absolute embarrassment to a potential self-immolation event.
All of this underlies the same theme: Tosh Lupoi is making very basic mistakes in his first year at coach, with many of them centered around how the Cal coaching staff has managed their top quarterback talent.
Rookie offensive playcaller Jordan Somerville was Lupoi’s choice to bring Sagapolutele to the next level, and he proceeded to install an offensive scheme that was too difficult for JKS to execute.
Additionally, Somerville was incapable of making the right adjustments in-game, leading to a month-plus of offensive droughts that immediately alienated a Cal fanbase that saw nothing worth seeing.
That scheme led Sagapolutele to take more risks than he needed to in hopes of making plays to make the offense to go, leading to injuries against UCLA and UNLV.
Cal rebooted with a new playcaller with Pat McCann, and the offense appeared to find new life. And for some reason, Lupoi decided a healthy Sagapolutele should not be given the same opportunity with this new playcaller in our last home game for a month.
Cal fans, donors, and leadership have to be a mixture of angry, bewildered and—worst of all—increasingly apathetic to what they’re seeing. After all the expectations going into this year, none of them have come close to being met. This is absolutely not something that can happen in Year One for a program that is in win-now mode before realignment kicks off again.
It’s been a series of escalating disasters this season, and Saturday night was a 10 on the Richter Scale for the Cal football program. I don’t know what the aftershocks will bring for Tosh Lupoi. He will have to learn fast, because the product we’re seeing right now threatens to break this team irreparably.
I was all in on Tosh. I bought the hype. I loved reading about him flying to Hawaii to secure JKS. Tosh was a Golden Bear returning to the lair to bring the Bears back into the national picture. I'll own all of that.
Now though it is clear that the hype was nothing more than morning dew on the grass. By the time the sun came up (the horrific season we are seeing) the hype was gone. It has become clear this was a terrible hire. We are left with nothing but loathing and sorrow
Consider, we have one of the most sought after QBs in the country and Tosh is treating him like he is a JV player trying to play with the Varsity. Let's speak the truth out loud: Tosh is a man child. He's all talk, no walk.
I was born in 1958. Six weeks after I arrived in this world Joe Kapp led the Bears to the Rose Bowl. They lost but I dealt with it pretty well for an infant. My dad was an old Blue. I knew all of the words to all of the CAL fight songs by the time I was 5 years old. My favorite Cal player in the 60's was Dave Penhall. Then Vince Ferragamo came along, hit Steve Sweeney in the end zone in a driving rain storm to beat furd and I was hooked for life. I was there with my dad on November 20, 1982. After furd made that field goal my dad made me stand for the kickoff. To this day I am glad he did because I witnessed the greatest college football play in history.
So, I'm all in for the University of California Golden Bears. I will love them forever but the Bears are at a crossroads. Tosh is overmatched. He's been outcoached in every game, including the wins. He's incapable of learning on the job. If the Bears want to be relevant again they need to bring in a coach with a record of winning at every level. The rah rah stuff is meaningless. Saban could care less about all of that when he was coaching. He was all in on the X's and O's and Jimmy's and Joe's. We have the Jimmy's and Joe's but the X's and O's are terrible. The Bears look lost and confused.
The time for bold, drastic action has arrived. This season is lost. Say aloha to Tosh and spend the next three months finding a coach who can coach and bring him to Berkeley to return us to the glory years of the early aughts, the '90s and the '50s and before.
Go Bears.
I’m glad you wrote this piece, Avi. We need veteran voices of our program to speak up and call forth the standards of our University. Nothing about Cal is academically mediocre, and we should not accept mediocre football teams. I have great respect for Ron and told him so at the game. But big changes need to be made, and soon. Soon means before the end of the season.