What On Earth Is Going On With Cal Football?

On an uneasy power struggle, mass player exodus and a shifting college football landscape.

California Golden Bears mascot Oski on Kleeberger prior to a Cal home football game against the UCLA Bruins. The Golden Bears won 41-20. - Credit: BrokenSphere - Wikimedia Commons

In the last week, the Cal Golden Bears football program has lost 10 outgoing transfers (five of whom are running backs), endured a donor-led coach-GM power struggle, and now appears to be grappling with its future in an ever-evolving Power 4 college football landscape.

Things move fast in college football, but this situation has escalated at an alarming rate, even by typical standards. This is not a story about routine transfer portal roster turnover. Nor is it just about behind-the-scenes drama. Instead, I think this is the culmination of multiple missteps at every level of the Golden Bears program, all of which have suddenly thrust a proud program into the national spotlight for all of the wrong reasons.

A cash influx and Ron Rivera’s looming influence

CBS Sports reporter Richard Johnson detailed this entire story exceptionally, but the gist of the situation is as follows.

Earlier this month, two high-profile Cal football donors publicly vowed to stop giving money to the athletic department unless newly appointed football GM Ron Rivera was given carte blanche power, a la Andrew Luck at Stanford.

The donors want the Super Bowl coach to call the shots within the football program, not head coach Justin Wilcox or athletic director Jim Knowlton. The donors felt like the Cal athletic department kowtows to Olympic sports too frequently.

There is also a high level of concern with head coach Justin Wilcox’s long-term future within the program. The two high-profile donors essentially think that Rivera will outlast Wilcox, thus the reasoning on why he should call the shots and sit ahead of Wilcox on the org chart.

According to Johnson, Cal is not afraid to spend money, as evidenced by the 38th overall ranking in Cal's reported "donations and contributions list" pool from two years ago. But the big donor base doesn’t want to settle for middle of the road, and instead believes a second round of funding could jolt some life into a program that desperately needs it.

Johnson also cited the notable Cal alumni base as a factor in potential new investment in the football program. Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Owen Van Natta, formerly the COO at Facebook, and Bob Haas, the CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., have previously donated money to the program. NFL quarterbacks Aaron Rodgers and Jared Goff are also notable alumni with deep pockets.

I don’t totally disagree with the idea that it might be helpful for Rivera to sit atop the org chart ahead of Justin Wilcox. Wilcox is entering his ninth year in Berkeley, and despite seven- and eight-win seasons in 2018 and 2019, things have stagnated with him at the helm.

All that said, I don’t believe there’s a great way to usurp a sitting head coach on the org chart. Head coaches are used to having the keys to the castle and don’t want to be micromanaged. They’d likely prefer to just be left alone and told to win by athletic directors.

But college football is changing, and now general managers have gone from nice to have to a necessity. GMs need to fit somewhere on the org chart, and if a program hopes to have any level of consistency and clear chain of command, those lines need to be clearly drawn early on in the process.

I kind of like the idea of a GM overseeing an entire program’s football operations and ultimately making the hiring and firing decisions. I realize not everyone or every situation requires that. Overall, I just don’t think a school like Cal should be surprised that their sitting head coach isn’t in love with the idea of an outside hire immediately joining the program and becoming his boss.

An empty running back room

The transfer portal giveth and the transfer portal taketh away. For Cal football, there’s a lot more of the former happening than the latter.

In the last week, 10 Cal players have hit the transfer portal, with five of them being running backs. That figure includes former Pac-12 standout running back Jaydn Ott, who transferred to Oklahoma. This is an unprecedented level of attrition happening in the spring transfer portal window. What gives?

According to Johnson, Ott’s departure goes back to a disconnect over staff turnover on the offensive side of the ball. Reading the tea leaves, Ott was a fan of his previous running backs coach, Aristotle Thompson. But Thompson is no longer a part of the program, nor is former offensive coordinator Mike Bloesch. Instead, Julian Griffin is manning the running back group, and former Auburn head coach Bryan Harsin has assumed the offensive coordinator role.

Label me as totally shocked that someone like Bryan Harsin is not a good cultural fit in Berkeley.

Harsin stacked some wins at Boise State before taking a big boy job on The Plains with Auburn. But things ended disastrously with the Tigers, in large part because he rubbed the wrong people the wrong way. He went just 9-12 and didn’t even finish two full seasons in SEC country.

As if adding Harsin into an already combustible situation wasn’t bad enough, Wilcox opted to bring former Washington State head coach Nick Rolovich into the mix as an offensive assistant. Why does Rolovich sound familiar? He made headlines for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine and was later fired for failing to comply with the state’s mandate.

From where I sit, it seems that Wilcox knew that he was already on shaky footing after the end of the 2024 season and opted to take some big swings with the hires of Harsin and Rolovich. But the Golden Bears haven’t even kicked a live ball yet, and these hires feel like giant own goals.

Where does Cal go from here?

Cal and the ACC were never a match made in heaven as much as it was a match made out of necessity.

When the Pac-12 imploded, Cal and other fledgling schools scrambled to find a home to avoid being left out in the cold like compatriots Oregon State and Washington State. Cal found a home in the ACC (at a significant discount) and in some way, I suppose that’s a good thing.

But the writing is on the wall, and unless something drastic happens, it feels like Cal football is drifting further and further away from the Power 2 giants that are calling the shots in the sport.

Justin Wilcox is at a crossroads. The hiring of GM Ron Rivera has been anything but smooth. And the on-field product, well, what can you say? The Golden Bears are bleeding talent. Even with a respectable roster in 2024 (headlined by Ott and quarterback Fernando Mendoza), the Golden Bears just barely scraped by to the six-win mark. This year, even for the most optimistic onlookers, 2025 feels like almost a certain step back in the in win column.

I grew up in central Mississippi, about as far geographically and culturally as you could possibly get from the University of California. And yet over the years, I have fond memories of Cal on the national stage.

DeSean Jackson was electric and was an absolute weapon of a return man in the old NCAA football games. Aaron Rodgers and Jared Goff made some big plays and won some important games back in the day. And Marshawn Lynch, man, oh man, what can you say about our rowdy cousin Marshawn, other than to thank him for his iconic golf cart moment and for running through some many MFers’ faces.

Overall, this is a sad situation, and I feel for the fans in Berkeley. Last year, the Cal football program got its 15 minutes of fame with the onslaught of the #CALgorithm and narrowly upset a top-ten ranked Miami team on a wacky late Saturday night game. But that moment was fleeting. It came and went. Now, the Golden Bears have to be asking themselves what comes next?

The tectonic plates of college football are shifting beneath its feet. What will Cal do next?

What I’m Reading

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