Cal Basketball: Dissecting What Has Happened and Where Things Go From Here

Thirty years after Jason Kidd led Cal to its greatest basketball heights since the Pete Newell era, the program hit rock bottom this season.

Well, Kidd, who powered the Bears into the Sweet 16 in 1993, is not walking through that door. Neither is Newell, the late coaching great who guided the Bears to the 1959 national championship and a return to the Final Four a year later.

Also not walking through the doors at Haas Pavilion again is Mark Fox, fired on Thursday after a 3-29 season that capped a four-year run of 38-87, winning barely 30 percent of his games. The Bears were 17-61 in Pac-12 play under Fox, finishing last in the conference two of the past three seasons.

Let’s give all that has happened and what is coming next some context:

— How much of what’s happened is Fox’s fault?

Certainly not all of it. The pandemic and all the local restrictions that came with it were tougher on Cal than at many places throughout the Pac-12.

The Bears were decimated by injuries this season, with what were expected to be perhaps their three best players — top returnee Jalen Celestine and transfers Devin Askew and DeJuan Clayton — combining to play just 22 games and providing an average of fewer than 9 points per game.

Cal has some serious issues that must be addressed, including rigid admissions standards, funding and facilities that don’t match up to those of their conference rivals. Former coach Mike Montgomery addressed those in a recent interview, suggesting that simply firing the coach would not fix the program.

Parting ways with Fox was no longer open to debate — it had to be done. Too many important constituencies had long ago run out of patience, starting with fans and boosters. Attendance at Haas Pavilion cratered because the Bears — even though they never quit trying — were often unwatchable. Losing streaks of 12 games and 16 games in the same season is not only unacceptable, it’s mathematically nearly impossible.

Without a change, some current players — and there a few that the next coach will want to keep around — almost certainly would have bailed on the program. The talent base is thin enough the school could not afford to risk making things worse with an exodus of players to the transfer portal.

Same logic applies to recruits, including the two prospects the Bears already have signed for next season. Beyond that, convincing any top-200 level player to sign on had become increasingly difficult.

The bottom line: Everything that’s gone wrong is not directly the fault of Mark Fox. But it was his program, with all players he recruited on this year's roster.

He had four years to repair and overcome a bad situation. Instead, things got worse, and that happened on his watch. Cal’s decision to make a change was entirely warranted and necessary.

— How should Cal proceed in its search for a new coach?

This is a complicated question. The university should not rush the process — they have to get this one right. Six straight losing seasons under two coaches that had to be fired requires Cal to nail this one.

There are a lot of brilliant people on the Berkeley campus, and hopefully Chancellor Carol T. Christ already has a game plan in place for how to approach this. After all, she should have been able to see this coming for a while. A long while.

Business as usual cannot be how the university operates here. Cal has to be smart, creative, willing to perhaps think outside the box (to a point) and the campus must provide the kind of support to basketball that Montgomery and others say has been absent.

The first thing she must decide — and maybe she already has — is whether athletic director Jim Knowlton will be the man to make the decision. And to that point, will Knowlton remain the person in charge of Cal athletics?

He hired Fox and he seemingly allowed a toxic environment within the powerhouse women’s swim program to fester, either ignoring dozens of complaints about the alleged abusive behavior of coach Teri McKeever over a period of years, or just not taking them seriously. McKeever was recently fired, but there is an outcry from some corners of this sad situation that Knowlton should also to be sent on his way.

So hires the next coach?

No one worth having will be comfortable taking the job if he believes he will have a new boss he doesn’t know within weeks or months.

If Knowlton is here to stay — or even if there a change coming soon — the interview process should include others with a stake in the program, including those in the athletic administration, a key booster or two and the athletes themselves. Players should get a voice and need to be convinced things will get better.

Christ should invite Montgomery to participate so that his views as Cal’s most success basketball coach over the past 60 years can be folded into the conversation.

— What should Cal look for in its next coach?

There already are lists of potential coaching candidates out there. But this is Day 1 and more important than a knee-jerk list is an assessment of what qualities the next coach must have to succeed.

Cal is not an easy place. There are levels of bureaucracy that anyone coming into the system cannot fully appreciate from the outside. Ask Montgomery — he was right across the bay at Stanford for two decades and even he was a bit unprepared for how long it takes to get things done and how many people put their fingerprints on each decision.

So a familiarity with Cal is helpful. That presumably gives an edge so someone like UC Santa Barbara’s Joe Pasternack — who I am guessing would take the job in a heartbeat. Or Missouri coach Dennis Gates — who I don’t believe the Bears could pry away.

But bringing back an alum is not necessary to make this work, not if the hiring is smart and support is improved.

That goes to the new coach having an ability to effectively recruit out of the transfer portal, which can help turn around a basketball almost overnight. There are 22 starters on a football so one or two recruits cannot flip the script by themselves. But with basketball, where two players account for 40 percent of the starting lineup, finding a couple key players can help facilitate a quick fix.

Cal will not and should not become a school that relies primarily on transfers. But it’s an obvious way to kickstart a program whose talent level must be improved to compete in the upper half of the Pac-12.

Then it’s up to the coach and his staff to develop players and build a team.

Cal has a lot to offer recruits, starting with a world-class education, a great location and (this weekend notwithstanding) spectacular year-round weather.

But as much as those are selling points, 17-year-old recruits are primarily interested in playing winning basketball for a program that can help them realize their basketball dreams.

Cal must find and support a coach who can create that environment and sell that vision.

Cover photo of Haas Pavilion courtesy of Cal Athletics

Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo