Will Justin Wilcox Be Cal's Football Coach in 2026?

It’s November 3, 2025, Cal has a 5-4 record, and the question must be asked: Will Justin Wilcox be Cal’s head football coach after this season?

If it was November 3, 2024 and Cal was 5-4, Wilcox’s job would be safe. Last year, athletic director Jim Knowlton was responsible for hiring and firing the head football coach, there was no football general manager and no revenue-sharing with players, and the chancellor was Carol Christ, who supported the football program but seldom said much about it.

However, now Cal has a general manager, a former NFL head coach (Ron Rivera) whose newly created, wide-ranging, $800,000-a-year job at Cal has the ultimate mission of putting a winning team on the field, and that includes the power to dismiss the head coach if needed.

Revenue-sharing with the players, which was adopted this year, has increased the pressure to win. Since the 2025 season began 11 FBS coaches have been fired, considerably more than in past years. Cal has allotted $14 million to pay its players this season, and that makes the need to succeed greater.

The Cal chancellor now is Rich Lyons, a football fan who suggests Cal needs a successful football program for reasons that go beyond sports prestige and has implied that six-win seasons are no longer good enough. He refers to the financial contributions to the football program as investments, implying that he expects returns on those investments.

If Cal had defeated 15th-ranked Virginia on Saturday – and when the Bears were within 24-21 and had a first down at its own 39-yard line with 6:50 left in the game, it seemed possible – Wilcox’s job probably would be safe.

But after the 31-21 loss to the Cavaliers, when Wilcox was asked to assess his team’s performance, he said, “Not good enough to win.”

Wilcox then expanded on that, but those five words spoke volumes.

What will be good enough for Wilcox to keep his job after this season?

Cal has three games left, starting with Saturday’s game at Louisville, followed two weeks later by a road game against Stanford before the regular-season finale at home against SMU. The Bears will be clear underdogs against Louisville and SMU, with the game against Stanford looking like a tossup, although ESPN Analytics give the Cardinal a 55.2% chance of winning the Big Game this year.

Asked in August what would constitute a successful 2025 season, Rivera said, “Anything that puts us in a solid bowl game, eight, nine wins, I think that’s what you’re looking for.” That does not necessarily mean a six- or seven-win season is cause for a firing, but it provides a guideline.

If Cal loses all three remaining games to finish with a 5-7 record, which would include no bowl game, a five-game losing streak to finish the season and a 2-7 record over the final nine games, Wilcox would likely be gone, because the last impression is typically the lasting impression.

By the same token if Cal wins all three remaining games, that 8-4 mark, to go along with the positive late-season impression and the sense that Cal was getting better with a true freshman quarterback (Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele) at the helm, Wilcox presumably would be around for a 10th season in 2026.

If the Bears win one or two games to finish at 6-6 or 7-5 and earn a bowl berth, Rivera will have to weigh a lot of factors to make his decision on Wilcox’s future, and that decision is apt to come before Cal plays its bowl game.

How Cal looks in those final games would be a factor. If the Bears seem to be improving and are competitive in their losses, that would weigh in Wilcox’s favor. If there are some blowout losses down the stretch, that could ruin Wilcox’s job status.

So far Cal has had only one loss that would be considered embarrassing – the 34-0 defeat at the hands of San Diego State. Cal’s four FBS victims this season have a combined record of 12-23; the four teams that beat Cal have a combined record of 22-11. The Bears’ best win came in Game 3 against Minnesota, which has won six of its eight other games and is 4-2 in the Big Ten.

Wilcox, now in his ninth season at Cal, has a 47-54 record that includes two winning seasons, none since 2019. With their current 2-3 ACC record, the Bears might be on their way to their 16th straight season with a losing conference record, the longest such active streak in the country and a run that began before Wilcox came on board.

After last year’s 6-7 season, Wilcox overhauled his offensive coaching staff, which is now headed by former Auburn and Boise State head coach Bryan Harsin, the Bears’ first-year offensive coordinator. Cal ranks 12th in the 17-team ACC in scoring offense and 15th in total offense this season.

But a second year under this offensive system might pay dividends, especially with a true freshman quarterback (Sagapolutele) who seems to have loads of potential that might evolve into stardom in a year or two. Sagapolutele came to Cal partly because Wilcox was the head coach. Would he leave Cal if Wilcox is gone? Will he stay at Cal even if Wilcox is retained?

And will the fact that Wilcox has been an exemplary representative of the university make any difference?

Those are among the many considerations regarding Wilcox’s status.

A major consideration is the fact that Wilcox’s current contract runs through the 2027 season, and Cal would have to forfeit a lot of money to dismiss Wilcox after this season. The contract extension Wilcox signed in January 2022, shortly after he turned down an offer to be Oregon’s head coach, calls for Wilcox to earn about $4.6 million this season and about $5.25 million plus incentives in 2027.

That puts him about in the middle of ACC head coaching salaries and is about half what Clemson’s Dabo Swinney and North Carolina’s Bill Belichick make.

If Wilcox is dismissed Cal would be obligated to pay Wilcox his 2026 and 2027 salaries, although negotiation of those payments is possible.

Another factor is whether Cal administrators believe they can acquire (and pay for) a head coach who will be better. In many cases a coaching change is somewhat of a public-relations move designed to renew interest and optimism surrounding the program. That optimism won’t last long if the team is losing, and it’s nearly impossible to know for sure whether a coaching search will bring a successful head coach to Cal.

The most successful head coaches Cal has hired in the past 50 years were Bruce Snyder, who was an NFL assistant coach when he was hired and had a losing record as Utah State’s head coach before that, and Jeff Tedford, who had no head coaching experience before coming to Berkeley.

And it remains to be seen whether Cal can acquire and retain enough quality player talent in this revenue-sharing era.

Then there is the somewhat philosophical question of whether the No. 1 public institution in the country, known for its academic excellence, would fire a football coach who gets his team to a bowl game.

None of the last six Cal head football coaches who were fired (or pushed out) over the past 45 years were let go after reaching a postseason game. All six had losing records in their final season: Roger Theder (2-9 in 1981), Joe Kapp (2-9 in 1986), Keith Gilbertson (3-8 in 1995), Tom Homoe (1-10 in 2001), Jeff Tedford (3-9 in 2012) and Sonny Dykes (5-7 in 2016). And Tedford and Dykes went on to have success as head coaches at other FBS programs after being let go at Cal.

Fans typically want the head coach fired immediately after a disappointing loss, and praise the man in charge right after an impressive victory.

Ron Rivera must take a broader view of the situation. Afterall, even though he was twice named NFL coach of the year and took the Carolina Panthers to a Super Bowl, Rivera was also fired twice.

“Anything that puts us in a solid bowl game, eight, nine wins, I think that’s what you’re looking for,” Rivera said Wednesday. “That shows growth, growth from last year. Last year we didn’t win the close games. We gotta win the close games. If we want to win eight or nine for sure. Last year, that’s how close it was.”

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