2022 Pac 12 Thread

[CatsbyAZ]

Last week Cal Football re-upped Justin Wilcox through 2027. Wilcox will be heading into his sixth season as HC with a middling 26-28 record. Why might you ask, does a 26-28 warrant an extension? Perhaps Cal sought to match Wilcox’s unusual show of loyalty once it was confirmed he turned down an offer from the Oregon Ducks.

I’m wondering if, in the win at all costs world of college football, Cal is the first program we’re seeing long letting off the gas of a football program that anybody can see isn’t the competitive focus for a University whose ambition is social action and expanding an international academic presence.

A Cal blogger states Cal’s consent to football mediocrity the following way: “To start with, some of the institutional support Wilcox is starting to receive is the kind of thing that would be considered standard operating procedures for most P5 schools. But Cal’s recent history, budgeting reality, and increasingly academic focus means that this kind of support must be earned . . . but not necessarily via wins and losses. No, Justin Wilcox appears to tick every single box a Cal coach can for administrators and big money donors tick outside of that most important box [(winning)]. He’s largely drama free and doesn’t spend time complaining about the kind of Berkeley-specific logistical hurdles that certain other Cal coaches have complained about. He’s connected to the glory days of Jeff Tedford. He’s displayed a level of loyalty to Cal that, quite frankly, Cal hasn’t earned.” (https://writeforcalifornia.com/p/2021-season-review-wrap-what-will)

And looking at it from the side of Wilcox, at what point is it worth avoiding the demands of running Oregon if you make $3.4M to deliver .500 seasons without facing discontent from Bay Area beat writers more focused on the Niners or a Cal fan base who increasingly won’t fill half of Strawberry Canyon?

To keep in mind Cal’s obstacles of budgeting, declining fan interest, aging facilities with no planned upgrades, declining local recruiting pipelines, and their difficulty of finding coaches, Cal committing to their match in Wilcox is about the most I’ve seen a football program coming to honest terms with an increasing unwillingness to compete in college football,


https://twitter.com/BR_CFB/status/1484302103489122306

[CatsbyAZ]

Final Pac 12 Recruiting Class Rankings:

Stanford finishes first with prep signees (Table 1) although USC did so well pillaging the Transfer Portal those additions put the Trojans on top overall (Table 2).

Most notable are the Arizona schools, with Arizona finishing second with quite possibly its strongest class since early in the Stoops era, while Arizona State signed arguably their lowest rated class in program history, finishing last. Overall, ASU hitting the transfer portal hard lifts the Sun Devils to 10th, however it’s clear their pending NCAA investigations and the resulting firings and resignations of 5 total assistants is limiting ASU’s recruiting appeal.







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[CatsbyAZ]

Under looming Arizona State football sanctions, plenty of despair abounds on the Sun Devil boards:

“Has there ever been a period this dark in the history of ASU? I guess the sanctions coming out in the late 70s were the worst single event. Truly boggles the mind that nothing is being done other than firing some assistants who likely were following orders. I have zero interest in attending any athletic event at ASU.”



“Take your pick: Running Back Loren Wade shooting to death a former football player behind a night club in Scottsdale? The 1994 ASU point shaving scandal which is now can be enjoyed as a Netflix doc? Numerous sanctions against the baseball program?”



“The BB scandal was bad for an individual sport, and its impact. But overall the investigation into football, mass exodus in BB, and the Smith debacle in Baseball, it's pretty low right now. The fan base is numb with mediocrity. We just participate; and that's simply not good enough for a place like ASU. Whispers of AD sexual harassment cover-ups, Coaches and players can't even communicate, dumpster fire no doubt...which in the end comes from the top. Athletic Director and even President, who is embarrassing the entire university by ignoring all the dysfunction inside ASU Athletics.”



“This is legitimately the worst I’ve ever seen the athletic department as a whole in my entire life. When was the last time we won a tournament game? Went to Omaha? Were invited to a New Years caliber bowl game? How’s attendance? How’s local fan interest? Any metric you use, ASU athletics are a complete dumpster fire right now.”



“ASU athletics gets around 30m a year from the school (highest in the PAC), mostly in the form of student fees it makes everyone pay whether they like it or not. Overall the annual budget for athletics is around $100m. It's amazing that for that kind of dough ASU is totally irrelevant in pretty much all sports in the PAC on a national basis. The AD is one of the highest paid too.”

[CatsbyAZ]

Negative momentum continues building at Arizona State.

Starting QB Jayden Daniels’ recent bailing for the transfer portal is made worse by his season ending commitment to finish his productive college career in Tempe, which in the interim prevented ASU from pursuing a replacement from the top QB transfers, namely Spencer Rattler, a Phoenix native.

News of Daniels leaving wasn’t taken well by teammates:


https://twitter.com/TMZ/status/1494696721896648708

Meanwhile, in a case of the fish rotting from the head, ASU President Michael Crow is the latest University official to deflect blame for the exodus of assistant coaches resulting from the NCAA’s ongoing investigation into ASU’s rampant recruiting malpractices, all while somehow praising Herm Edwards on a local radio show:  “…where you have people who decide not to play by the rules, those people are gone. Now we are looking at what went wrong and why that happened and so forth…Coach Edwards has done an outstanding job of upgrading our overall program. We've got this collision of people that decided to not play by the rules…but coach Edwards is responsible for all of the actions of his people but these are not things that he asked them to do. These are not things that he was a part of so we're looking at everything possible. He's brought a lot of talent and a lot of energy and a lot of creativity.”

Hours after ASU President Michael Crow insisted on Coach Herm’s innocence, news broke of Herm meeting with numerous recruits during strict dead periods:


https://twitter.com/ChrisKarpman/status/1496580553520259074

[847badgerfan]

How can they possibly keep that guy?

[CatsbyAZ]

And we travel out to Seattle next September

Found an article hyping Washington’s early season matchup Vs Michigan State as a “benchmark game” for the Huskies first year coach. It’s your typical offseason beat write up with lots of hope as hyped by several historical parallels that Washington fans are hoping repeat in their favor.

“To begin with, Michael Penix, meet Sonny Sixkiller.”

How, “Fifty-two years ago, a heavily favored Michigan State team arrived in Seattle fully expecting to have its way with a UW football team that the Spartans had beaten 27-11 the year before in East Lansing. They ran smack into a new quarterback in Sixkiller and his college debut and corresponding passing magic, and lost 42-16 when the guy with the great football name threw for 279 yards and 3 touchdowns. Sonny killed them with sixes. The Spartans haven't been back to Montlake since.”

I had to look up who Sonny Sixkiller was, if that was even a real name – from Wikipedia: “On the advice of Willis, head coach Jim Owens recruited Sixkiller and offered him a scholarship to the University of Washington in Seattle. Due to his name, he was given uniform number 6. Sixkiller became the starting quarterback for the Huskies as a sophomore in 1970, and led the Huskies to a 6-4 record, a vast improvement over the 1–9 record in 1969. He completed 186 passes for 2,303 yards and 15 touchdowns in what many called the Year of The Quarterback, in which Jim Plunkett of Stanford passed for 2,715 yards on the year and broke his own conference record. Plunkett won the Heisman Trophy in 1970, beating out Notre Dame's Joe Theismann and Archie Manning of Ole Miss.”

(I know almost nothing of college football before the 1990s.)

Now for the Penix parallel: “While Sixkiller is now a 70-year-old man and will occupy a prime seat high up in the stands for this long overdue Seattle rematch, Penix, an Indiana transfer and an odds-on favorite to become DeBoer's starter behind center, comes to Seattle with valuable intel. He knows how to beat Michigan State. In 2020, Penix led the Hoosiers to a resounding 24-0 victory in East Lansing in Tucker's first season as the Spartans coach. This happened on a sunny day. In an empty stadium. During pandemic peak times. Penix completed 25 of 38 passes for 320 yards and launched touchdowns of 16 and 65 yards to some guy named Ty Fryfogle, who sounds like a cook at Burger King. It was shades of Sixkiller.”

https://www.si.com/college/washington/football/why-michigan-state-is-benchmark-game-for-deboer-winnable

[ELA]

I mean just cancel the season now, it's over


https://twitter.com/ColinCowherd/status/1506387354075873282?t=BmmKFV84GNNQA5hUPXQVlQ&s=19

[FearlessF]

Cowherd

[CatsbyAZ]

It is acknowledged how Cowherd’s fan boy fixation with USC is reaching levels of creepy.

From Petros Papadakis this week on Fox Sports Radio:

“I think the Colin Cowherd thing is become like a joke…so many people on his staff made fun of him for the way he acts about USC. And this is second or third attempt to become like a USC guy. And USC has not cooperated by winning.”
“I remember the year Sark got fired…so there was a Thursday night early in 2015. Chris Petersen was just at Washington…and they went down to USC on a Thursday night and…ran over USC. Sark’s personal secretary had a panic attack on the sideline and had to be gurney-ed out. And Sark had his meltdown the next day. That day on the radio Colin Cowherd proclaimed Washington Football to be dead; USC Football to be back. Washington ended up eventually in the college football playoff and everybody knows what happened to Sark.”
“Colin Cowherd is a great radio talent but he has been trying to link himself to USC every since he got to LA. Now that Lincoln Riley is there he acted like such a girl at a One Direction concert when Lincoln Riley came in to do the carwash when USC hired him. And Cowherd said ‘hey if I can do anything for you, please let me know,’ like off the air. And his staff was so…creeped out by it that now instead of just saying well I was just acting creepy he’s doubled down and is making a joke out of it. So I’m trying not to overreact to Colin’s tweets about USC’s greatest practice ever. But I don’t think the level of competition of the West Coast is really there…to say USC is back.”

Rumor has it Cowherd was given his own personal key to the guesthouse of Riley’s recently purchased LA property:


https://twitter.com/FOS/status/1501971624777637899

[FearlessF]

gotta be a better house than the old place in Okie land

[CatsbyAZ]

I'm interested in Oregon for some reason.

Why might you ask, does a 26-28 warrant an extension? Perhaps Cal sought to match Wilcox’s unusual show of loyalty once it was confirmed he turned down an offer from the Oregon Ducks.

Unsurprisingly there’s more to the story as to why Justin Wilcox surprisingly turned down the Oregon gig – from ESPN:

“The search initially steered toward Cal's Justin Wilcox, with the hope that he could blend the old ways and the new.”

“A well-regarded defensive mind, Wilcox's mediocre win-loss record at Cal (26-28) could be defended by the challenges of winning in Berkeley. Plus, he had extensive knowledge of the program and the Pac-12. There was a feeling inside the Oregon athletic department, multiple sources told ESPN, that if Wilcox was paired with an innovative offensive coordinator and a staff of talented recruiters, it would be close to an ideal succession from Cristobal.”

“A move to Oregon made sense for Wilcox, and from the outside, it appeared to be a dream job for the 45-year-old. Until it wasn't.”

“Sources close to Wilcox said the Oregon job initially came with some conditions related to the recruiting philosophy and possibly assistants to retain or hire. Those "spooked" the coach, one person said. Even when Oregon relaxed on some of those items, Wilcox didn't feel he could run the program like he wanted. He turned down Oregon's offer to become coach, sources said.”

Football Coaching is full of Type A, demanding personalities, a la Jim Tressel. The all-consuming involvement of coaching promotes a control freak’s approach toward every last detail in their program.

But on the other hand, there are scenarios where a coaching tenure could’ve been boosted if an AD stepped in and took more stake in, say, the flailing defense of a program surviving on the high octane success of its offensive minded coach.

Arizona under Rich Rodriguez would’ve greatly benefitted had a frustrated AD fairly or not wrested control of RichRod’s awful 3-4 defense and removed the defensive recruiting, scheming, and player development from his hands.

This isn’t realistic given the military commander’s mindset of control head coaches expect over their program, but in theory I like the Oregon AD’s idea of delegating specific veto powers according to coaching strengths of individual staffers within the football program.


https://twitter.com/wyattgladden/status/1495897274903265280

[CatsbyAZ]

In an interview this week with 247 Sports, Jayden Daniels responded to former ASU teammates trashing his locker after his untimely transfer to LSU:

“I always enjoyed my time at Arizona State. I love coach Herm and those guys over there, but just for my career, my future, I decided to go somewhere else just so I can reach into that untapped potential. They did a great job at ASU, but coming here to LSU, I get to showcase my talent on a national stage. A lot of people back home don’t really get to see our games. Coming here and competing at the highest level with all these weapons here and all these resources, it’s really intriguing for me.”

The “untapped potential” comment takes its cue from Brian Kelly who during press conferences last month criticized Arizona State’s development of Daniels:

“I think he brings more than extending plays, actually. He was in an offensive structure and system which was really built towards ball control this past year, playing to a very good defense. We think that there’s a lot that has not been tapped into with his ability to be a dual-threat quarterback. He’s got arm talent, he’s got a high I.Q. and he can run the football. He’s a talented runner of the football. He wasn’t asked to do that (at Arizona State). He was more of an extender of plays. We think there is much more to that than what he’s brought over the last couple of years.”

As someone who watches ASU games, I agree with Kelly. ASU’s coaches did not improve Daniels’ play; he was the same QB from freshman year through last year, and maybe even a regressed passer.


https://twitter.com/Jeremy_Cluff/status/1513894551093579778

[CatsbyAZ]

More roster hemorrhaging at ASU, from two highly contributing players no less: 
https://twitter.com/ChrisKarpman/status/1517173661601452035

Which I guess helps Arizona if they don’t want to outdo last year’s 1-11 season by going winless, as this guy is convinced: https://saturdayblitz.com/2022/04/10/will-the-arizona-wildcats-go-winless-for-the-2022-23-season/

“Going winless in college football is relatively rare, as it requires an especially-potent combination of mediocrity and strength of schedule to occur. However, it is quite difficult to argue against the Arizona Wildcats having such a combination in store for them next season, and that is why they will go 0-12 in 2022.”

I haven’t season a Pac 12 program as down and out since Washington State’s Paul Wulff years – 9 – 40 from 2008 to 2011.

[847badgerfan]

There is absolutely no excuse for both of those programs to be dumpster fires.