Cal Football: Justin Wilcox on Possible Pay Cut and Off-Campus Training Camp

Coach said he's on board with whatever helps the athletic department

Cal coach Justin Wilcox prefaces most remarks these days related to the 2020 football season and the coronavirus pandemic by noting, “Everything is on the table.”

And during Thursday’s Pac-12 football coaches video conference call with media, Wilcox said taking a pay cut to aid with athletic department finances and holding a quarantined training camp off-campus both are possibilities.

Wilcox appeared with Oregon’s Mario Cristobal and Arizona’s Kevin Sumlin and Pac-12 Networks football analyst Yogi Roth in the last of four webinars hosted this week by the Pac-12.

Cristobal and Sumlin confirmed they already have accepted pay reductions to help with campus finances. According to the Register-Guard, all Oregon head coaches will take 10 percent cuts in 2020-21, saving the department about $1.1 million. At Arizona, all coaches earning more than $200,000 per year (including Sumlin, who makes $3.5 million), will take 20 percent reductions.

Wilcox, who earned a minimum of $2.765 million in 2019, said coaches at Cal have not been asked to take pay reduction.

“We haven’t yet,” he said. “There’s been a lot of discussions in different ways of how some of us as coaches and even administrators … can be part of the solution in supporting our athletic department.

"I’m 100 parent behind that. There’s just been a lot of different ways that have been discussed in how to do that. That’s where we’re at.”

Cristobal and Sumlin said accepting those salary cuts was not difficult, given the big picture.

“It’s a difficult and unprecedented time and now more than ever people have to show unity as we tackle this together. So, no, it wasn’t difficult,” Cristobal said.

“All you have to do is turn on the news at night or read the paper or get on the internet and you see the struggles of people across the country,” Sumlin added. “From that standpoint and the standpoint of what can you do to help the situation at your university, no, it doesn’t become difficult at all.”

Wilcox confirmed there have been discussions about possibly moving football training camp off campus. But he stressed there are countless moving parts that will dictate whether that makes sense.

“When we talk about all this modeling, whether it’s at a conference level or at an institutional level, we’re looking at every scenario based on where we’re at at that current time,” he said. “There’s just these different points (on the calendar) where we’re looking at is that a possibility? It could be. We’ve modeled that out.

“We’ve discussed preliminary logistics. And there are logistics involved. Those are the discussions we’re having on a daily basis.”

Former coach Keith Gilbertson’s team held training camp in Santa Rosa in 1993 and Steve Mariucci took the Bears to Turlock for fall camp at Stanislaus State in 1996. The rationale behind those moves was more in line with trying to create an atmosphere where the team could done without distractions.

This would be for entirely different reasons, specifically to keep players healthy and safe, quarantined for outsiders, presumably after first being tested for COVID-19.

Wilcox said multiple possible sites have been discussed, but declined to identify those locations.

There's also the matter of cost. Taking fall camp, even for two weeks, to another location would have costs for moving players and equipment, along with housing and meals, not to mention a likely fee for using someone else's facility. Given stretched budgets these days, it's a tradeoff the administration will have to weigh. 

“We’ve discussed the idea of that, if it becomes necessary. It hasn’t been determined if that’s going to become necessary,” Wilcox said. “It’s all planning and modeling. We could sit here and talk through an exponential number of scenarios, but to your question, we have talked about that.

“If it was a necessity, in order for us to prepare to play, that would be something we could consider.”