Cal Fans Want Answers - And They Deserve To Hear Them

The avalanche of football departures into the transfer portal has prompted frustration and anger

Former Cal running back Jaydn Ott / Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images

When we last heard from Cal football coach Justin Wilcox, just five days ago as spring practice ended, this is what he told us:

“I feel really good about where the team can be. We’ve got a lot of areas where we’ve got to continue to improve. I’m very confident.”

In late February, with just weeks left in the basketball season, coach Mark Madsen made this vow: 

"Key players are going to be retained. And every effort is going to be made to retain key players.”

Those optimistic pronouncements quickly went up in smoke.

Even before the spring football transfer portal officially opened on Wednesday, star running back Jaydn Ott revealed he was leaving. Tight end Jack Endries, a former walk-on with East Bay roots but the team’s top pass-catcher last fall, did the same. 

Oakland native Jaivian Thomas, who filled in capably last season when Ott was shelved by a nagging ankle injury, also has entered the portal — the fifth Cal running back to do so in a matter of days.

Ott is headed to Oklahoma, and 247Sports is predicting “100 percent” that Endries will commit to Texas. We don’t know yet where Thomas will wind up, but raise your hand if you think he will be in Memorial Stadium when fall camp begins in August.

All this is in the wake of quarterback Fernando Mendoza, a budding star, defecting to Indiana after the regular season.

On the basketball front, guard Jeremiah Wilkinson, the Bears’ most promising freshman since Jaylen Brown, transferred to Georgia. Yes, it’s his home state, but was there nothing Cal could do to retain a player who averaged almost 20 points over the final 14 games after becoming a starter?

Andrej Stojakovic, the team's best player, apparently was staying. That changed on Wednesday, when the sophomore guard became the eighth member of the basketball team to jump into the portal.

The women’s basketball team, which made it to the NCAA tournament this season for the first time since 2019, watched as two-year starter Marta Suarez departed for TCU.

The transfer portal, NIL money and soon-to-arrive profit-sharing direct payments to athletes have turned college athletics upside down. There are, so far, no guard rails to help create some level of sanity with all this.

But Cal officials, from chancellor Rich Lyons on down, have insisted the Bears will remain competitive and, in fact, generate better outcomes. 

So far, whatever those efforts have been, the bottom line has been failure.

Cal fans, venting on social media, are justifiably in panic mode:

Twitter

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And one more from Ghost, who clearly has maintained a sense of humor:

Twitter

There certainly are bigger problems in America right now than the state of Cal athletics, but for fans of the Golden Bears this is serious stuff. They pledge their hearts and their wallets to Cal’s sports programs and right now they are frustrated, depressed, angry, discouraged, confused. Did I cover it all?

Cal fans deserve some answers, and not just a generic news release promising that everything will be fine. That’s the equivalent of a pat on the head.

Folks need to hear directly from Justin Wilcox or athletic director Jim Knowlton or newly hired football general manager Ron Rivera, whose responsibilities include overseeing roster management. Some of those fans would like to see Rivera given full control over the football program.

Fans deserve to understand how this happened and what was done in an attempt to prevent it. Is this all about money? If not, what are the other issues at play?

And most importantly, exactly what is being done to turn the tide?

We put in a request to Cal athletics this morning to interviews Wilcox, Knowlton or Rivera. We were told we’d hear from someone soon.

Venom directed at the players feels misguided. The system gives them the opportunity to improve their situation, and who can honestly say that as a college student they’d turn down six (or seven) figures in the name of school spirit?

Like it or not, this is the new era of college athletics. If Cal wants to be competitive in big-time sports, it has to step up and make things work. It will be difficult and expensive. 

But this is the current landscape and Cal appears lost in the wilderness. The least Cal fans deserve are some honest answers.

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