Assessing Cal's Odd 2020 Season: Bears Did Not Reach Expectations

One win.

That's not what Cal fans were expecting out of the Bears' 2020 football season.

Cal came out of last season's Redbox Bowl win with an 8-5 record and thoughts of a Pac-12 championship this year. There was mention of the Bears' first Rose Bowl berth since the 1958 season, although people who uttered that sentiment did not realize that the Rose Bowl this season was a national-championship semifinal game and would not necessarily host the Pac-12 champion.

In any case, Cal's trajectory pushed expectations higher than they had been in more than a decade, back when Jeff Tedford had the Bears in the national picture.

Then the craziness of the COVID-dominated 2020 season arrived.

Nonetheless, Cal was picked to finish second in the Pac-12 North, ahead of Washington and behind only Oregon, the preseason favorite who was ranked No. 9 in the preseason AP poll. The Bears even received three first-place votes in the conference media poll.

It did not work out.

Cal was a slight favorite in each of its first three games, but lost all three, quickly putting itself out of the championship race. A face-saving victory over nationally ranked Oregon turned out to be the last game of a 1-3 season.

"Our record represents our performance," Cal coach Justin Wilcox said Tuesday. "I think we had opportunities in two of those games, if we had played a ttle bit cleaner in a couple plays here or there, where our record would be different."

He said he is still optimistic about the team and its capabilities.

"But ultimately, we had a chance in two of those games just to make a couple of routine plays that changed the outcome," he said.

The opening loss to UCLA was not a fair test. The Bruins had played a game the week before, and the Bears were scrambling to prepare and travel after its game against Arizona State was conceled.

However, Cal appeared to be the better team in the second game against Oregon State and the third game against Stanford.

The Bears had 24 first downs compared to 16 for Oregon State, outgained the Beavers 439-360 and had the same number of turnovers, but still lost 31-27 because of special-teams blunders.

The next week Cal had four more first downs and 92 more yards than Stanford, but lost by a point because of more special-teams woes, specifically two blocked place-kicks.

You can say those are games Cal should have won, but teams good enough to complete for a conference title DO win those games. Cal seemed to have the necessary parts but did not exhibit the championship personality needed to reach the expectations.

It's a fine line, but one Cal has yet to cross.

By contrast, USC easily could have finished 2-3, but the Trojans had a quarterback (Kedon Slovis) who saved the Trojans in the final minutes three times. Instead of USC head coach Clay Helton expecting be fired, he has the only unbeaten and nationally ranked team in the Pac-12.

The Bears' win over Oregon seemed to be more indicative of Cal's capabilities than the first three games. However, Cal has not crossed that bridge that will transport it from being a talented team to being a title-contending team. Cal can see the other side because it's not far away, but it hasn't figured out how to navigate through the barriers known as "the little things that win games" and "the pressure of high expectations" that are still in the way.

The defense was good enough, ranking third in the conference in total defense. But Chase Garbers, who is 11th among Pac-12 starting quarterbacks in passer rating this season, is still more of a potential star than an established star. Running back Chistopher Brown Jr., who was considered a possible 1,000-yard rusher, again had injuries that limited him to 65 rushing yards for the season. The explosive plays, a vital element absent in the recent past, were again rare except for the game against Oregon State. The offensive line was improved, but was hurt by key absences. And the new offense Bill Musgrave brought in with so much hope is last in the conference in total offense for the third straight season and placed 11th in scoring.

The 2020 season was so strange and laced with so many restrictions that it probably was not an accurate measure of Musgrave's offense or Cal's progress in the fourth year under Wilcox.

Maybe the Bears would have been better off if the Pac-12 had not played in the fall and had delayed the season until the spring, which is what the Pac-12 originally planned to do.

Or maybe Cal would have been better off not playing the 2020 season at all.

In short, was it worth it?

"Yeah, it was," Wilcox said, "It wasn't ideal how it all went, but I think it's better than nothing."

It's debatable how Cal fans thought about whether the 2020 season was worth playing, considering no spectatators were allowed to attend home games and only four games were played.

However, the win over Oregon shows Cal can compete against anyone in the Pac-12. It was the fourth straight year Cal beat a nationally ranked team and the second time in the past three years Cal beat a participant in the conference championship game.

You could make a case that Cal might win Friday's conference title game if it had qualified for it, considering the quality of the Pac-12 teams in it this season.

How Cal will do next year will depend on a few things, such as which seniors will opt to return in 2021 since the 2020 season did not count as a year of eligiblity and whether Cal can do the little things -- or avoid the damaging things -- that win close games.

Follow Jake Curtis of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jakecurtis53

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