Tosh Lupoi will be as successful as the resources he inspires
Now more than ever, money is the factor that determines winners and losers . . . and Cal just might have some money.
There are hundreds of skills a good college football head coach needs to possess, and I have no idea exactly how good Tosh Lupoi is at any of them.
Can he identify a good offensive coordinator? Can he convince a good one to come to Cal?
Does he know how to recognize budding talent that would make a good assistant coach?
Is he capable of fostering a healthy program culture within a massive operation involving ~100 players, a full staff of coaches, and tons of support and operational staff?
How will he react when something goes wrong? Will he be capable of looking dispassionately at a problem, identifying what went wrong, and fixing it? Even (or especially) if it’s a decision he made that caused the problem?
Is he capable of recruiting as a head coach, where he needs to close the deal by selling recruits on his vision for the entire team? (I mean almost certainly yes, because he’s one of the best recruiters in the entire sport and he’s proving his chops already, but technically he’s never done it as a head coach.)
I could go on. Still, in spite of so much uncertainty, I think that Tosh Lupoi was the right choice as Cal’s next head coach for one reason:
I think he’s going to raise an insane amount of money, and that’s clearly the single most important factor that wins football games.
Here’s a case study in how to think about the modern college football head coach: what do you know about Joey McGuire?
If you know anything at all, it is that he is the current head coach of Texas Tech. I barely knew his name coming into this season, even though Cal played his team a couple years ago. But his name is important now; he just won a Big-12 title and is about to receive a first round bye in the college football playoffs after a 12-1 season.
12 months ago, he was a generally anonymous mid level college football coach. For 20 years, he was a Texas high school football coach, before spending five years as a Baylor position coach and ace recruiter. Texas Tech hired him as their head coach after the 2021 season, despite the fact that he had never even been a coordinator at the college level. The idea was that his connections in the world of Texas high school football and general recruiting ability would translate at the head coaching level.
Here is what McGuire’s four year history at Texas Tech looks like:
In McGuire’s first three years, his teams were fine. Pull one upset, lose one game you shouldn’t, finish a touch above .500. An anonymous, average Big-12 team. Then, in the off-season, Texas Tech boosters invested 25 million dollars in the roster and turned an average power conference team into a national title contender.
So: was Joey McGuire a mediocre head coach who suddenly made a magical leap in coaching ability? Or is he the same guy he always was, who was suddenly blessed with a roster that is the envy of all but a small handful of programs? I think we all know the answer to that question.
Texas Tech’s transformation has not gone unnoticed. You can’t throw a rock without hitting a story of massive rich-person investment in their preferred college football team. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of recent examples:
Meanwhile, various other schools claim to be making increased investments (read: more money for a more talented roster) when they announce they are giving struggling coaches another year, as seen at Maryland, Boston College, Wisconsin, and Florida State. Those programs haven’t gotten into specific dollar amounts, which is the case for most schools. For a variety of reasons, most programs aren’t super keen to reveal their revenue sharing war chests.
What about Cal?
What I have seen since the collapse of the Pac-12 is a slow but steady administrative transformation that now appears complete.
It began with a battle with Cal’s prior administration to embrace the reality of NIL. A major boost came when Rich Lyons was named chancellor. The transformation continued with the hiring of Ron Rivera as football General Manager. The most critical battle was the sidelining and eventual departure of Jim Knowlton, with full control of football going to Rivera.
The goal of this transformation? Take revenue sports seriously as a competitive enterprise, and put in place the pieces necessary to seriously compete.
Now, finally, the last puzzle piece has been put in place. Cal has hired a hew head coach who can build something out of a foundation and the pile of resources Cal has prepared over the last few years . . . and perhaps inspire even more investment.
Cal is one of those programs that doesn’t shout about their donations with press releases. We know that Cal hit the House Settlement maximum for the current year (20.5 million spread across the athletic department) and intends to do so in the future even as the 20.5 million rises year of year as a term of the settlement. But that isn’t unique among power conference teams, where as best we can tell most are hitting the House Settlement maximum. Doing so is a prerequisite for building a competitive roster, but not in itself sufficient.
To be clear, I have no idea exactly how much more money beyond House max is on the table to support Tosh Lupoi’s efforts to win football games. I’ve heard plenty of social media rumors and talk about donors opening up their checkbooks and making sizeable contributions in the aftermath of the Lupoi announcement, but it is impossible for me to say how much, and how it would measure up to Cal’s conference peers or compare to the broader P4 ecosystem.
Here’s what I think:
That Tosh Lupoi, who built his bona fides in the fully professionalized environments of old-money Alabama and new-money Oregon, would not have agreed to come to Cal if he was not provided ample evidence that Cal was prepared to provide him with a modernized foundation of resources.
That the most prestigious public university in the country, the academic engine of a state that would be the 5th biggest economy in the world, just might have a class of donors capable of competing with any other program in the country . . . they just needed to be convinced that they wouldn’t be throwing their dollars away by handing them to Jim Knowlton, or chasing success backing a football coach who hadn’t managed a winning conference record in nine season.
That Cal currently sits in a conference that has exactly one team with a successful, established, fully modernized college football operation, and Miami is not on Cal’s schedule next year.
Am I saying that Cal is destined to be the next Texas Tech, or that Cal will suddenly build an Oregon-esque football death star? No, that’s a gigantic leap that would be irresponsible to predict without more concrete evidence/dollar figures.
But it’s a leap that is possible to make, because other programs have made it. Oregon, years ago. Indiana and Texas Tech, in the last couple years.
The good news is that Tosh Lupoi does not need to be Curt Cignetti. That dude may be a one-of-one head coach. He just needs to be a Joey McGuire, and I think he’s more than capable of doing just that.