Weeks Where Decades Happen

Fernando and Sagapolutele are out, Harsin and Rolovich are in, our heads are spinning

The things that made Fernando Mendoza special to Cal fans didn’t actually have all that much to do with his quarterback play.

To be clear, Mendoza is a good college quarterback. Maybe even very good some day. He’s only played a season and a half worth of games, and it’s still not clear to what extent the weaknesses in his game are due to his own limitations or the limitations of the offense that he played in. He had obvious strengths (toughness, durability, short route accuracy, the ability to make quick reads) and obvious weaknesses (downfield verticality, the ability to sense pressure and manipulate the pocket) that had to be understood in the context of his team. In 2023 the context was that he was a redshirt freshman unexpectedly thrust into the starting lineup. In 2024, the context was that the offensive line was often porous and the run game support often non-existent.

But Cal has had plenty of good quarterbacks. Pat Barnes and Kyle Boller and Kevin Riley and Davis Webb and Chase Garbers were all good quarterbacks. None of them inspired the kind of fandom that Fernando Mendoza engendered in less than two seasons as a starting quarterback.

No, Fernando was beloved because of a combination of timing and personality.

When Fernando became Cal’s quarterback, it was a dark time for Cal football. Cal was 4-8 in 2022, and lost their ok-not-great stop-gap QB, Jack Plummer, to the transfer portal. Then, 2023 began with Cal giving playing time to two different transfer QBs who were simply not close to the level you need to succeed at the power conference level. And all of this was happening amidst the backdrop of the disintegration of the Pac-12.

To have a no-name, two star, redshirt freshman QB recruit come out of nowhere and offer competent QB play felt like a lightning bolt of good fortune. If Fernando Mendoza hadn’t emerged to win the starting QB spot in 2023, I’d speculate that Cal probably finishes the season 4-8. They certainly wouldn’t have made a bowl game. And without Fernando Cal would have had to dip back into the QB portal market, but probably without the NIL dollars to actually do so successfully. During the off-season last summer I found myself thinking that Fernando Mendoza, simply through average QB play, may have unknowingly saved Cal football.

So the timing of his emergence infatuated Cal fans. But it was his personality that made us fall in love. It started when beat reporters around the team started talking about this unheralded QB who seemed to be just about the nicest athlete they’d ever interacted with. He seemed to embrace Cal publicly in a way that few players did in this modern age of constant roster churn. He showed up to press conferences wearing the jersey of a standout offensive lineman, or wearing fan made t-shirts. The apotheosis of this persona was the “98 yards with my boys” interview. Is there a single thing more Cal than crying over a win against Stanford in a 6-6 season?

Whether intentional or unintentional, Fernando Mendoza made Cal fans think that he loved being a Bear the way we love being Bears.

And then he transferred out.

There are currently a ton of rumors flying around the internet regarding the exact nature of his departure. There are clearly leaks from Fernando’s camp, and leaks from the football program, and it’s not clear which claims are credible and where the truth lies. I don’t think there’s a ton of value trying to litigate rumors and hearsay, particularly when the facts we do have are enough. Regardless of his intent, the mere act of transferring is a devastating short term blow to the Cal football program.

The Fernando Mendoza that we believed in, or perhaps the Fernando Mendoza that we invented in our minds? That Fernando would never transfer away from Cal. The real life Fernando Mendoza left. He killed folk hero Fernando Mendoza on his way out the door. I don’t need to waste a ton of time parsing message board rumors past that basic fact.

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Did Jaron Keawe Sagapolutele decide at the very last second not to come to Cal because he didn’t want to compete with Fernando Mendoza at quarterback this year and into the future? If Fernando Mendoza had informed Cal’s coaching staff that he intended to transfer sooner, might Cal have been able to hold onto what would have been the highest rated QB recruit in more than a decade?

We will never know the answer to these questions. All we really know is that neither player will be at Cal next year, and Cal’s quarterback situation in 2025 is currently very very bleak.

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I am ultimately much more concerned about the state of Cal’s roster and Cal’s many, many transfer portal needs than I am the political opinions of our assistant coaching staff.

Cal needs, conservatively, a QB, 3-4 offensive linemen, an edge rusher, a middle linebacker, and most of a secondary, and that’s just current holes in the starting lineup, before we even talk about depth needs and before we consider the possibility of future departures in the transfer portal. All that to replenish a team that just went 6-6. This team needs a whole bunch of successful additions just to stay in place, and that place isn’t anything anybody is particularly satisfied with.

Hiring Harsin and Rolovich feels very transactional. They are both former head coaches who damaged their own reputations well beyond politics and need an opportunity to rebuild their careers. Cal is desperate for anybody who might be able to fix a constantly stalled offense. A classic marriage of convenience.

And in one strange way, the fact that Bryan Harsin and Nick Rolovich are each getting 2nd chances in Berkeley almost makes me happy because it disproves a dumb stereotype of Berkeley as a town and a university. We’re supposedly the heart of intolerant leftism, but there is a long history of iconoclasts of all type finding a home in Berkeley. The free speech movement still means something here, which is why these two gentlemen are finding gainful employment despite major resume red flags that would concern any institution of any political leaning.

I ultimately don’t think Harsin or Rolovich’s politics will have any meaningful impact on their tenures at Cal. We’ll probably get occasional eyeroll wink-wink tweets from Rolovich or weirdo instagram posts from Harsin that everybody will largely ignore because it speaks to their character but not their coaching ability. The pair will likely spend one quiet year in Berkeley before moving on to something else, either because Cal’s offense succeeds and they get better jobs or because Cal’s offense fails and everybody gets fired.

And in case you glossed over my list of roster concerns, you can probably make an educated guess which scenario I think is more likely. I did my own research.

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This past week has been one of the least fun weeks of Cal football fandom in quite some time, which is really saying something. Here’s a palate cleanser: