It's Too Early to Overreact to Cal's Poor Performance

Cal's offense has been disappointing, but it's still a small sample size

Jordan Somerville | Photo by Jake Curtis

It’s a fan’s prerogative to overreact to one or two football games, claiming the sky is falling or bragging the sky’s the limit.

College football is a rare sport in that it has just 12 regular-season games and a week between each contest to allow fans and “experts” to expound on the importance and implications of each critical result.

Cal is 2-2 heading into Saturday afternoon’s game at Las Vegas (2-2), and while you’d have to be blind not to recognize the Bears’ offensive shortcomings in their 24-10 loss to Clemson, it’s too soon to draw sweeping conclusions about Cal, its coaches or its players one-third of the way through a season.

This is not a Pollyanna response to Cal’s problems, which are obvious.  The same premature warnings would be issued if Cal were 4-0, with fans claiming a berth in the College Football Playoff was in the cards.

Even one full season would not be enough to pass a positive or negative judgment on Tosh Lupoi, whose strength is recruiting high school players.

The person in the crosshairs at the moment is offensive coordinator and play-caller Jordan Somerville, with the biggest complaint being that he has never been an offensive coordinator or play-caller before this season.  It’s a valid concern, and it’s possible Lupoi will make a change with regard to play-calling this week or in the near future.

The subpar performance by Cal quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele through four games was not expected either after his stellar freshman season, and Somerville is taking the heat for that as well.

However, consider the recent status of Davis Webb, a former Cal quarterback and now in his first season as the offensive coordinator and play-caller for the Denver Broncos.

Webb is considered one of the brightest offensive minds in football and even interviewed for three NFL head coaching jobs this past offseason despite never being a coordinator.

But when the Broncos averaged 15.0 points over their first two games and were shut out in the first half against the Rams in their third game, TV analyst Cris Collinsworth wondered aloud whether play-calling duties might be taken away from him.

“He was a series or two from having Sean Payton take over,” said Collinsworth.

The Broncos offense then scored 23 second-half points, won the game 30-26, and the focus was off Webb.

Collinsworth called Webb’s slow start “the growing pains of a first-time play-caller.”

This is not to say that Somerville is blameless for the poor offensive showings so far, nor does it guarantee that Somerville – or whoever takes over play-calling duties if that occurs – will rectify the offense’s obvious problems  by the end of the season.

If the Beare are 10 games into the season, dragging a 3-7 record, a punchless offense and continued Sagapolutele struggles into the game against Stanford, conclusions about the Bears’ 2026 season are valid.

However, even that poor showing should not provide a concluding statement about Lupoi as a head coach.

Bruce Snyder went 3-6-2 in his first season as Cal’s head coach in 1987 before slowly building a team that went 10-2 and ranked eighth in the country in 1991. Jeff Tedford had moderate immediate success, going 7-5 and 7-6 in his first two regular seasons at Cal before building a national powerhouse.

On the other hand, Cal went 7-4 in its first season under Joe Kapp in 1982, causing observers to conclude that his fiery winning attitude could compensate for his lack of coaching experience. But the program slowly regressed to the point where the Bears went 5-22 in conference games over his final three seasons.

How a team starts a season is not always a fair indication of how the season will go, either. 

The last time Cal won a conference title (shared with USC) in 2006, the Bears lost their opener to Tennessee 35-18 in a game Cal trailed 35-0 in the third quarter.

Cal lost its first two games in 1958 but ended up getting to the Rose Bowl.

However, Cal began the 2007 season 5-0 and ranked No. 2 only to lose six of their final seven regular-season games.

Just seven years ago, Cal started 4-0 and was ranked No. 15, but finished 4-5 in Pac-10 play.

There’s a reason one of college football’s most popular mantras is “September lies.”

This is not to suggest that everything is hunky-dory in Golden Bears land this week, nor is it a prediction that the Bears’ offense or Sagapolutele will come alive in October.

It’s just too soon to say.

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