This week, the 3-2-1 looks at a myriad of topics including on the NFL draft, recruiting thoughts, and much more.

Why Football

I've been asking everyone that I've interviewed recently for their thoughts about why football is the sport for them, these are the two answers I got this past week.

Cal RB coach Aristotle Thompson

Football for me, I come from a single parent household, it was my mother, my grandmother and my grandfather, who was in the house but had had a stroke in 1979, the year after I was born, he was in a wheelchair my entire time with him until he passed away in 1995. Football was not only an opportunity for me to get other male interaction, but to also be around other guys who were friends of mine. It was also an opportunity to spend time with my grandfather as I got into high school, to bring in tapes of the games home for him to watch or to watch highlights of the games with him.

It was something for our family to rally around, I had a couple of cousins who were pretty good football players, played in college and a little in the NFL, and those were guys I wanted to emulate growing up. I wanted to be like them and to be better than them. My cousin, Woody Green, he played college ball and his father played in the NFL as well, (the father) was the Chiefs single season rookie record holder for yards, so it was in our DNA, you’re next, you take it over.

Football gave me not only that sense of family, but those male interactions that I did not have. My mother and grandmother did a great job of instilling who I want to be. You learn some things from other male figures that show you how to be the man you want to be, and from football, I had some great interactions. I learned from family, coaches, and players. The game allows me to be another father figure for not only young men, but their friends, their siblings, things like that. It gives me an opportunity to build better men for our world and our society. That’s something that other games can teach you, they can teach you certain things, but nothing’s going to teach you the sacrifice, the humility, the toughness, the edge, and the discipline that the game of football does.

Safety commit Hunter Barth

I’ve loved football since I was little, my brother played at ASU when I was 1 or 2 years old, so football has always been in my life. I played baseball and basketball, so I played three sports year round, but once I came to my freshman year, I narrowed it down to football and that’s what I went with, because I love it so much.

Three Drafted

Cal added three more draft picks to a long line of NFL draftees, as Ashtyn Davis, Jaylinn Hawkins, and Evan Weaver went to the Jets, Falcons, and Cardinals respectively.

Drafted: Davis | Hawkins | Weaver

All three had talked to the teams they went to either at the Senior Bowl or the Combine, though Weaver noted that he was told he was going to go with an earlier pick in the draft by a different franchise, which obviously did not happen.

A few notes:

- Davis is the seventh Cal player to be drafted by the Jets, the highest since WR Wesley Walker went in the second round in 1977

- This is the first time Cal has had two safeties drafted in the same draft

- All three players would've been the highest drafted players for the Bears under Justin Wilcox.

Hawkins admittedly went higher than expected, fourth round to the Falcons, but teams value the size and production that Hawkins had at Cal, not to mention him being a smart player.

Same goes for Weaver, who would've been a first three round guy 15 years ago. Weaver's reputation is that of bravado, but he's a smart football player who takes good angles to the ball. That's a big piece of his success.

Davis has the athletic ability to play deep middle, which is not the easiest thing to do, but he noted that even while not in his best shape right now, he could've probably run in the 4.4 range in the 40.

Two more transfers in for basketball

Ryan Betley and Jarred Hyder joined the Bears in an official capacity, signing with the team and filling two more of Cal's scholarships, leaving them with one final slot to work with. This year is going to be interesting depending on how Mark Fox moves forward. This 2020 class is more transfer laden, while last year's group was filled with international targets in Lars Thiemann and Dimitrios Klonaras, among others with international roots in Kuany Kuany, Joel Brown, and Kareem South.

The question remains as to where the Bears will go in 2021. With the transfer market more prevalent, Cal may turn there (though they're projected to have only two scholarships open for the 2021 class at the moment), something Ben Braun did early in his Cal tenure with the likes of Thomas Kilgore and Geno Carlisle.

In all, it's about continuing to add talent to the roster, something the Bears appear to be doing by tapping the transfer portal for one more player, with Western Michigan transfer Michael Flowers and North Carolina transfer Jeremiah Francis being ones the Bears have contacted.