College Football Morning: The Deal With Cal Football

Memes, Mendoza, and a battle with itself.

There were a lot of moments these last few years, as the Pac-12 banner frayed and frayed some more, when we wondered what would become of Cal. Despite its prime location for visiting fans, attendance for major sports was meager. Despite a rich athletic history, enthusiasm surrounding the Golden Bears was low. Despite two previous 20-loss seasons in a row, the university waited for a 3–29 year to buy out men’s basketball coach Mark Fox. Institutional prestige and access to a top-ten media market wasn’t enough to earn Cal the Big Ten’s passing glance. The football team’s last Rose Bowl trip (1958) was prehistoric. The Aaron Rodgers/Marshawn Lynch glory days had become a historic curiosity. Sports apathy reigned in Berkeley, and Cal was doing little on the field to jolt its people awake.

A low point for the Golden Bears came a year ago this past week, when a university task force announced its recommendation that the athletic department rebrand itself as “Cal Berkeley,” citing polling which revealed most Americans don’t realize Cal and UC Berkeley are one and the same. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem the athletic department took the resource-intensive task force’s recommendation to heart. Graced by history with a name connoting flagship status in the union’s most populous state, Cal’s athletic department did not self-relegate its brand to the ranks of UC Davis, UC Irvine, and UC’s three other low-major Division I schools. There has been no addition of “Berkeley” below the iconic script “Cal” on the side of those blue helmets. Thankfully.

Still, the task force revealed something, and what it revealed was troubling for the future of Cal athletics. Athletics have become such an afterthought in Berkeley that their best role in a strategic conception of the university is that of a small advertisement for the institution, not a point of pride capable of standing on its own accord. The athletic department’s high-profile teams aren’t performing well enough to be worthy of their own historic name. The task force could have said, Not enough people realize Cal and UC Berkeley are the same thing. We need to draw enough attention to our teams that people relearn who we are. Instead, the task force’s strategic recommendation was to wave a white flag and abandon 100 years of history. We used to be Cal, the task force seemed to say. Now we are Cal Berkeley. Something different. Something more Cornell than UCLA.

Two weeks prior to the task force’s announcement, another major press release had come down the line: Alongside Stanford, Cal would join the ACC, paying preexisting ACC schools roughly $100 million in total over its first ten years. By returning portions of its media revenue to the conference, Cal would make roughly two thirds of the standard media revenue share in the Power Four’s least lucrative league. On top of that indignity, a perception took root that what the ACC really wanted was Stanford, a juggernaut both academically and in Olympic sports. Perception held and holds today that Cal’s invitation was a carrot to the Cardinal, who may have otherwise chosen some level of independence over full conference membership.

The accuracy of the ACC/Cal perception can be disputed, but there are at least pieces of truth within it. One that’s been explicitly confirmed: The most athletically ambitious schools in the conference wanted neither Stanford nor Cal. Among those ambitious schools? Florida State. But we’ll come back to the Seminoles.

Like the task force, the shape of the ACC life raft pointed to a broader theme: Cal—blessed with advantages in geography, history, and natural prestige for which schools like Kansas State and Louisville would kill—had allowed its sports to deteriorate to the point where its very inclusion in a power conference was a gift to its historic rival. Cal had allowed a world to emerge in which “Arkansas” and “Arizona” meant more to college sports than the name “California.”

I’m still not sure how much Cal minds this. I know many within the Cal community mind, and mind it a lot, but I’m not sure how much the institution’s leadership really cares. On a per capita basis, the West Coast is less interested in college sports than the rest of the country. Cal is probably the single best academic state school in the nation. But UCLA and others aren’t far behind in the classroom, and while those schools chase excellence across multiple categories, Cal—UC Berkeley, I should say—seems comfortable retreating to an only academic leaderboard, a space alongside the lesser Ivies rather than Virginia and UNC. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that choice, if that’s what Cal wants to be. But Stanford has a thriving athletic department, and it sure hasn’t injured their academic reputation. You can have both, if you’re willing to try.

So, like Washington State and Oregon State and like Boston College, Cal’s athletic department finds itself on shaky ground. Should we feel bad for Cal? To a point. The athletic department deserves some sympathy. It might be getting less institutional support than anybody else in high-major college sports. But institutions reflect the communities they represent. If UC Berkeley doesn’t care, it’s because not enough Cal fans care.

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Somebody who does care, someone who has to care, is Cal head coach Justin Wilcox. A safety in the 90’s at Oregon, Wilcox came to Cal after eleven seasons of high-level defensive coordinator positions ranging from Boise State to USC to Wisconsin. Wilcox, a former linebackers coach in Berkeley under Jeff Tedford, inherited a program in an awkward place. Good enough to produce the first overall pick in 2016 but bad enough to miss a bowl in four of the five preceding years, Cal had yet to finish in the top half of the Pac-12 North, six seasons into the Pac-12’s two-division system.

Did Wilcox turn it around?

No.

Not really.

Wilcox is now 39–43 over his seven-plus years in Berkeley. He went 21–37 in the Pac-12. He did kind of finish in the top half of the North Division once, when there was three-way tie for second at 4–5, but he never posted a winning Pac-12 record. Now, he’s in the ACC, and…Cal is winning?

Cal hasn’t won an ACC game yet. Cal hasn’t played an ACC game yet. That’ll first happen on Saturday at Doak Campbell Stadium, 3–0 Cal playing against 0–3 Florida State, as we all expected when FSU voted against inviting the hippies from Berkeley to join their loathed conference.

ACC or not, Cal is winning. Cal beat Auburn. Cal beat UC Davis. Cal beat Auburn. Cal beat San Diego State. Did we mention Cal beat Auburn? It happened. It happened ten days ago, at Jordan-Hare Stadium in Auburn, Alabama. Cal beat Auburn.

Auburn should be a decent team. Our model calls them the twelfth-best team in the SEC and projects them to win 5.8 games. That might not sound like much, but it is. Movelor, our model’s rating system, has the Tigers the 37th-best team in the country. SP+ and FPI? They’re even higher on the Tigers, placing Hugh Freeze’s team 24th nationally, on average, and tenth in the SEC. Auburn might be unhappy with that status, but Cal? Cal beat a solid team, and it beat that solid team on the road. Is this a moment for the Golden Bears?

Yes and no. Our model has Wilcox’s team finishing the regular season 8–4, implying a 5–4 conference record. It ranks the Golden Bears 43rd nationally, an almost identical location to where SP+ and FPI have this team. This is not 2004. But compared to the last 18 years of California football? If Cal went 8–4 and won a bowl game, it’d be their first nine-win season since 2008. That mark—9–4 after a bowl game win—is their median expectation right now. Cal’s median expectation is for this to be the best overall season in Berkeley since 2008, with the first winning record in conference play since 2009.

That’s only the median, too. There’s room for more success on top of that. With all three of Movelor/SP+/FPI labeling Cal an underdog this weekend, even against dysfunctional Florida State, an updraft created by that dysfunction could carry Cal into legitimate ACC contention. Cal doesn’t play Louisville or Clemson. Cal gets Miami at home. If Cal wins on Saturday in Tallahassee, we will be including Wilcox’s men in our playoff watch category, a space reserved for teams with better than a 1-in-10 shot at cracking the CFP field.

I don’t know whether Wilcox is doing well or not at Cal. My guess, though, is that his has been a quietly impressive Cal performance. Cal should be a good job, but it isn’t, and that’s largely not Wilcox’s fault. What I do know—and something we should take away from this—is that the plague of mediocrity running rampant through the Atlantic Coast Conference has created some collateral opportunity. We’ve seen mid-majors turn one conference championship into a conference dynasty, then turn a mid-major conference dynasty into power conference membership. We’re not saying Cal can bring the Big Ten calling, but this program could resurrect itself. This team could do what the task force seemed to dismiss as a possibility: Make people care about the name “Cal.” That is the updraft created by Florida State and UNC and Virginia Tech’s dysfunction.

Two things to know about the Golden Bears:

First, their quarterback—Fernando Mendoza—is a little bit of a phenomenon. It’s too early in the season for statistical comparisons to mean much, but his stats are good. Five touchdowns, one interception, a 70% completion rate…they’re good. What’s really going for Mendoza is that his name is Fernando Mendoza and he happens to be playing well at the exact moment Cal football is on the cusp of a minor renaissance. A one-time Yale commit, he fits the academic identity Berkeley was seeking all along. A South Floridian Cuban-American, stereotypes accompanying his background don’t really fit Cal’s Marx-friendly identity. That’s probably good for all of us.

That Marx mention leads us well into the second thing.

If you spend a lot of time on the internet, you know this already, but there is a veritable brigade of online Cal fans trolling the southeastern United States over Cal’s football success. “Success” might be a strong word here. It’s mostly that they beat Auburn. But it is very hard for Florida State fans to clap back, because the very premise of Cal football fandom right now is that they celebrate wins hard and really do not give a shit when they lose. Anyway, every one of these trollings consists of telling southeastern football fans that Cal is now going to impose its woke way of life upon Alabama and the Florida panhandle. It is maybe the best-natured culture war content I have ever seen. Two favorites:

After beating Auburn: “War Eagle? Sorry. It’s now the Peace, (Diversity), Equity, and Inclusion Eagle.”

Ahead of this weekend’s Florida State game: This mockup of “Woke Campbell Stadium.”

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We’ll preview Week 4 tomorrow, from Tallahassee to Provo. See you there.

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This post was also published at www.thebarkingcrow.com, where you can always find all of Joe Stunardi, Stuart McGrath, and NIT Stu’s work.