Will Cal mens basketball ever be good again?

BERKELEY, Calif. — It is another resplendent sunny afternoon in the East Bay of northern California. The Cal football players are strolling onto the field at Memorial Stadium and getting into place for pre-practice stretches. Mark Fox, the school’s basketball coach, is chatting behind the north end zone with his football counterpart, Justin Wilcox. At one point during the conversation, Fox turns to a visitor and points to a bright green line in the turf that stretches from the start of the tunnel to the back of the end zone.

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“Do you know what that is?” Fox asks.

“No,” comes the reply.

“That’s the fault line.”

Fox is referring to the Hayward Fault, a subterranean ticking time bomb that runs parallel to the infamous San Andreas Fault, through the heart of the Cal campus and directly underneath Memorial Stadium, traveling virtually goal post to goal post. The school knew about it when the stadium was built in 1922, but it wasn’t until 1997, when a study rendered the stadium’s safety rating as “poor,” that Cal was forced to rebuild Memorial so it could withstand a major earthquake. This being Cal, the project took a while. The university had to wrangle with local zoning boards, consult with dozens of engineers, maneuver through a labyrinthine political maze, conduct meetings with the Academic Senate, survive a spate of court-mandated injunctions, and for one 19-month period, endure a small but determined group of tree-sitters. The upgrade finally began in the summer of 2010 and was completed two years later. In 2017, when Under Armour re-surfaced the field, some marketing genius came up with the idea to mark the Hayward Fault with a bright green line. The folks who live in Berkeley are known to take themselves a little too seriously at times, so give them credit for the sardonic self-deprecation. It’s not often people go to such lengths to point out their faults.

The Hayward Fault isn’t just an apt metaphor for the shaky state of Cal athletics. It’s also a major financial drag. To pay for the project, which also included retrofitting several other campus buildings and erecting a $150 million athletic support center, the university had to accumulate more than $440 million of bonded debt. The annual payments run about $18 million and will increase to $26 million in 2032. The final installment is due in 2112. Cal hoped to recoup a chunk of that money by selling long-term premium seat licenses to football games, but that effort flopped because the teams were so lousy. As a result, the athletic department sank deeply into the red, which had reverberations throughout a university that was already strapped for cash.

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Cal basketball has had its share of ups and downs over the years, but by the time Fox got here in 2019 the program had cratered. The Golden Bears were coming off consecutive eight-win seasons, the worst two-year stretch in their history. That, combined with plummeting attendance and graduation rates, prompted the school to jettison coach Wyking Jones after just two seasons. Fox himself had gotten the axe at Georgia one year before Cal scooped him up (at an affordable price), but he did win 55 percent of his games during nine years in Athens, and prior to that, he had taken Nevada to three NCAA Tournaments in five years. No one called him a home run hire, but no one was complaining too loudly, either. Things had nowhere to go but up.

Now, though, Fox is facing his own ticking time bomb. His team went 7-12 in the Pac-12 his first season (14-18 overall), but then he ran smack into the COVID-19 pandemic, which was especially challenging considering the Bay Area instituted some of the most stringent protocols in the country. During his second year on the job, the Bears went 3-17 in the league (9-20 overall), and only marginally improved last season to 5-15 (12-20). There is not much reason to believe things will be substantially better this winter. Fox lost his top three scorers, and his three-man recruiting class (two freshmen and an undergraduate transfer) is ranked 11th in the league by 247Sports. His original five-year, $8.25 million contract was extended by a year in March 2021, but Fox, 53, understands full well the public impression as to where he stands. “I don’t feel like this is a make-or-break season,” he says. “But I’m fine if other people feel that way. It comes with the territory.”

To top it all off, Fox is being asked to navigate the program through a period of seismic change. The ability of players to cash in on their name, image and likeness rights has widened the chasm between winning programs and struggling ones, and there is no palpable sign the Cal community is trying to bridge that divide. (Coaches are not allowed to directly set up NIL deals or collectives.) The vast majority of today’s coaches are using the transfer portal to upgrade their rosters, but Cal’s high academic standards make that difficult, especially with respect to grad transfers. Cal is halfway through its 10-year, $86 million deal with Under Armour, but the company is trying to terminate it, and the two sides could be nearing an exit next spring. The biggest tremor came in July, when USC and UCLA announced they were leaving for the Big Ten starting in 2024.

Where does all this leave Cal basketball? Pretty much in no man’s land. The Bears play in a power conference, but they have mid-major resources, Ivy League admission standards, and a campus culture that places a relatively low priority on major sports. That does not bode well for the program’s future, or Fox’s for that matter, but he is moving forward as optimistically he can. “This is a life-changing place,” Fox says. “With the kind of student-athletes we get here, we can build a hell of a foundation. Then you can build on top of it. But the key is to get that in place. Because if you try to build something like this on a house of cards, it crumbles.”

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

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It’s not common for an interview about a college athletics program to begin with a quote from Tennyson, but Cal is a most uncommon place. In the most recent edition of U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of best global universities, Cal came in at No. 4, behind only Harvard, MIT, and its private Bay Area rival, Stanford. The quote that concludes Tennyson’s “Ulysses” is proffered by the university’s chancellor, Carol Christ, a renowned scholar in Victorian literature who once chaired Cal’s English department. Her responsibilities are a lot bigger nowadays, but her perspective on athletics remains the same. Asked whether she believes that big-time sports should serve as a “front porch” to the university, Christ throws a sharp elbow, literary-style.

“So I’m going to change your metaphor,” she says. “We really have a wraparound porch. We have 30 sports, and it’s extraordinarily important to me that our athletes, and there are over 900 of them, have opportunities to compete at the highest level. Last year we had three national championships, in men’s water polo, men’s swimming and diving, and men’s crew. I understand that football and basketball are revenue sports, but I don’t see them as the sole measure of athletic success.”

Christ inherited a hot mess when she was elevated to the chancellor’s chair in March 2017. Her predecessor, Nicholas Dirks, had resigned the previous August following withering criticism over his handling of various campus controversies, most prominently accusations of sexual harassment against three prominent professors. At the time, the school faced a $150 million operating deficit, which was largely the result of plummeting state aid. Through a series of austerity measures and tuition spikes, Christ was able to balance the budget by early 2020. Cal dipped back into the red as a result of the pandemic, but Christ quickly put the house back in order. And she did it without cutting a single sport.

When Christ hired Jim Knowlton as athletic director in 2018, he was coming off his third year as the AD at Air Force. A retired Army colonel, engineer and former hockey captain at West Point, Knowlton learned during their interviews that Cal’s AD did not have a seat in the chancellor’s cabinet. Christ promised to rectify that and be a full partner if he came on board. She has been true to her word. Christ meets with Knowlton regularly, brings him to chancellor’s advisory council meetings around the country, and spent a year-and-a-half hammering out a budget agreement that completely changed the department’s financial health. As part of that deal, the university agreed to take on much of the debt responsibilities for the stadium rebuild and increase its contribution to the athletics budget from $5 million annually to $20 million. According to the department’s most recent fiscal report, Cal athletics recorded a $3 million surplus for the second straight year.

Knowlton came to Berkeley just as Jones was about to begin his second season as the basketball coach. He didn’t expect to make a change so soon, but he clearly had no choice. “I love Wyking, he’s a great man, but I just didn’t feel like he was going to be able to turn the program around,” Knowlton says. Tasked with hiring the school’s fourth basketball coach in seven years, Knowlton was encouraged by some alumni to consider then-Gonzaga assistant Tommy Lloyd, who was the nation’s foremost international recruiter. Having just fired a coach who had no previous head coaching experience, Knowlton opted to go with Fox instead. It’s easy to say in retrospect that that was a mistake considering Lloyd led Arizona to a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament last season, but Lloyd was also greeted by a lot more stability and talent than he would have had in Berkeley.

Knowlton has worked closely with Christ to upgrade the basketball team’s weight room and locker room, and they provided the program with the resources to travel more frequently by charter. The next big item on the agenda is a dedicated practice facility. Cal is one of only a few power-conference schools that does not have one, a fact that is often mentioned by rival recruiters. Once again, it has taken some time, but the school has finally selected the land, cleared the political hurdles, and hired an architectural firm to produce a set of designs. Those should be completed in the coming weeks, after which Knowlton will hit the hustings to raise the $100 million required to build it. If all goes according to plan — and at Cal, it rarely does — work could begin by the summer of 2025, which would put the facility on track to be completed in time for the 2026-27 season. That would potentially be Fox’s eighth year in the program. “It’s the number one priority for athletics,” Christ says. “I’m sure it’s going to happen.”

For fans and alums who want to see the football and basketball teams win again, it is refreshing to see a chancellor working so diligently with her athletic director to produce better outcomes. But let’s not get anything twisted. People from the outside love to knock Cal for letting the academic folks make all the big decisions, but around these parts, that is a point of golden pride. “Yes, the faculty run the place,” Christ says. “That’s why Berkeley is Berkeley.”

You have to go back a ways to find the glory years of Cal basketball. Under Hall of Fame coach Pete Newell, the Golden Bears won an NCAA championship in 1959 and lost in the final the following year. Newell, however, burned out and retired at the age of 44, a decision that was cruelly timed with John Wooden’s ascent at UCLA. That sent the program on a long walk through the desert, but in the early 1990s things picked up again. From 1993 to 2016, the Bears played in 13 NCAA Tournaments and made the Sweet 16 twice. That included an appearance by the 1993 squad led by a scintillating freshman point guard named Jason Kidd. Mike Montgomery, who had great success at Stanford before a brief, ill-fated stint with the Golden State Warriors, coached Cal to four NCAA Tournaments from 2008-13. The Bears weren’t shaking up the world, exactly, but at least they were relevant.

Alas, the high-water marks brought low moments as well, which gave fodder to all those professors who warned of the perils that come with big-time athletics. In the summer of 1996, coach Todd Bozeman was forced to resign after he admitted to paying $30,000 over two years to the parents of one of his players, Jelani Gardner. The NCAA forced Cal to vacate the entire 1994-95 season and all but two games of the 1995-96 season, and Bozeman was given an eight-year show-cause penalty. After Cuonzo Martin came over from Tennessee in 2014, he recruited a pair of McDonald’s All-Americans in Jaylen Brown and Ivan Rabb, but in March 2016 one of his assistants, Yanni Hufnagel, was fired after being accused of sexually harassing a local reporter who was covering the team. Martin left for Missouri a year later.

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There was no shortage of qualified candidates ready to fill Martin’s chair. Eric Musselman, a former coach of the Golden State Warriors, was making waves in his second season at Nevada. Travis DeCuire, a former assistant under Montgomery at Cal, was having early success at Montana. Instead, then-AD Mike Williams went with Jones, who was Martin’s top assistant. That turned out to be a disaster.

Fox might have won more games early on if he had forced some of Jones’ players to transfer, but that is not the Cal way. “I felt like every kid deserved the opportunity to graduate from here, because that’s the reason a lot of them come,” he says. On the other hand, Fox has lost several players to the transfer portal whom he needed to stick around. Chief among them was Matt Bradley, a 6-foot-4 guard from San Bernardino, Calif., who averaged 17.7 points per game over his sophomore and junior seasons but transferred to San Diego State in 2021 because he was tired of losing. Last year’s starting center, 6-8 senior Andre Kelly, left for UC Santa Barbara, partly because he did not want to come back to Cal for grad school.

Portal madness has overtaken the sport, but Fox believes his best strategy is to recruit high school players and develop them year by year. He has proven in his previous stops to be an effective developer of talent, but that method takes time, and he does not have much of that. Fortunately for him, Christ understands that it’s unfair for a school to give a coach subpar facilities and make it harder for him to bring in transfers, and then send him packing for not winning enough. “I often feel that coaches get fired too quickly,” she says. “There are lots of things that go into being a coach in addition to winning and losing.”

For all the conjecture about Fox’s job security, he may actually have more of it than some of his bosses. In May, Scott Reid of the Southern California News Group published the results of a lengthy investigation during which 19 current and former Cal female swimmers detailed threats, bullying and emotional abuse directed at them by the team’s coach, Teri McKeever, who has won four NCAA championships and coached Team USA at the 2012 London Olympics. SCNG later reported that members of Cal’s administration and athletic department were first made aware of complaints about McKeever in 2010 regarding incidents that dated back to 2001. During the 2021-22 season, four seniors allegedly met with Knowlton and executive senior associate AD Jennifer Simon-O’Neill to complain about McKeever’s alleged abuse, only to claim their concerns were dismissed.

The day after Reid’s bombshell, Cal placed McKeever on paid administrative leave and later hired a Los Angeles-based law firm to investigate. The firm’s work should be wrapped up by January. Citing the ongoing investigation, Christ and Knowlton declined to comment on any specifics. The episode has been an unwelcome disruption for an athletics program that has already had more than its share.

Whatever problems Cal faces in the future, the ability to raise money won’t be one of them. In 2014, the school launched an ambitious campaign to raise $6 billion to cover all kinds of university expenses, including hiring faculty, funding scholarships and fellowships, and building affordable student housing. Just eight years later, most of that money has been collected. Though only $250 million is earmarked for athletics, Cal’s $100 million annual budget is the fifth-largest in the Pac-12, and it is very much in line with its top competitors. (Washington has the largest athletic budget in the conference at $129 million, according to the most recent NCAA figures.) There is simply no doubt that Cal is capable of building elite football and men’s basketball programs. But does it really want to? “That’s the $64,000 question,” Montgomery says. “Athletics is a big part of who they are, but it’s not what’s most important to them.”

With its proximity to Silicon Valley and access to deep-pocketed alumni, Cal should be well-positioned to take advantage of the new NIL paradigm. Yet, if there is any real movement in that space, no one seems to know about it. As the coach of the Dallas Mavericks, Kidd is restricted as to how much support he can provide the men’s program, though he has endowed a scholarship for the women. Yet, he has made clear to Fox and everyone else that he is ready to help however he can. Kidd doesn’t want Cal to stop being Cal. He just wants the team to win more. “Mark has things going in the right direction, but when you’re starting a rebuild and trying to change the culture, people want it to happen overnight,” Kidd says. “Things don’t happen fast at Cal.”

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Good thing Fox is well-constituted to play the long game. He has lived, played and coached in just about every corner of the country. Those experiences have taught him how to adapt to new environments and connect with all kinds of people. He loves that his players engage in intellectual discussions about world history and divorce rates, he’s tickled that his manager got a perfect math score on the SAT but lacks a certain common sense, and he chuckles to himself every time he drives by parking spaces reserved for Nobel laureates. Fox may be wealthy and highly successful, but in many ways he is still the humble, hoops-crazed kid from Garden City, Kansas, whose father retired early as a high school coach so he could be at all of his sons’ games. “It’s hard where I grew up. We were lower middle class,” Fox says. “That’s why you can throw 7 million darts at me in this article, and I won’t care. I’m very grateful to be at a place like this, where I can impact young people. I’ve had a lot of people carry me here, and I think we have a team that can win.”

Knowlton demurs when asked if Fox is on the hot seat. “We’re all on the hot seat,” he says. “We all feel pressure every day to be exceptional in everything we do.” Fox is acutely aware of just how steep his challenge is. And yet he climbs. “I want us to be a team that’s competing for the league championship every year,” he says. “Can we eventually get back to the point where we’re knocking on the door for Final Fours? If we keep making the progress we’re making, I don’t see why that’s not possible. I refuse to see why that’s not possible.”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic: Photos: Ethan Miller, Mark Brown, Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)

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