Breaking Down the Fully Formed Coaching Staff

At long last, the Cal Bears have a complete coaching staff, which means we can now unleash…our extremely nuanced and reasonable takes on Wilcox’s vision of the program. (Surely you did not expect me to do anything different.)

But there’s a reason it took so long for this article to come out -- I preferred to release it only when everything was complete. After all, a coach’s initial hires offer a valuable, press conference cliché-free glimpse into what they want out of their program.

Dykes’ philosophy, for example, was twofold – his hires told us that he a) was ready to gamble on his young assistants on offense, trusting them to transition well to a larger Power 5 stage despite no West Coast experience, and he b) knew his weaknesses and accounted for his deficienies with veteran hires all along the defense. At the time, this vision made some sense, and Dykes was ultimately proven correct about that first half. His very best assistants -- Peeler, Spavital, Jones, Likens -- were all on the offensive side of the ball, all hand-picked and among the staff’s best recruiters.

Much of what doomed him, as we know, was the unbelievable, inconceivable level of defensive incompetence – Dykes understood what he needed and still managed to strike out on each of these critical initial hires, ultimately replacing all of them within the first two years.

So, now that Wilcox’s nine lieutenants are complete, let’s take a closer look at some of the important, emerging themes, with the help of a handy #chart:

West Coast/Nor-Cal roots on both sides – By itself, this figure is not meant to be the only evaluative metric.

But it is extremely telling, all the same. Dykes recruited decently overall in his four years here, but never quite made as much progress here in California as anyone would have liked, losing far too many battles for players who might have been had with more concerted efforts locally. While he made up for this by dipping into the South, had he continued here in Berkeley, it’s fair to say that that was probably unsustainable long-term. Few schools can really consistently rely on imported talent, and at this current juncture, Cal obviously isn’t one of them.

Having already coached here under Tedford, Wilcox intimately knows the need to recruit this area first-hand, and shaped his staff accordingly. There are experienced members who are familiar with the West Coast (Greatwood, Tuiasosopo, Azzinaro, Wilcox), and even the younger guys recruited the West Coast (Alexander, Edwards, Ragle). A few even recruit the islands, and I don’t just mean Hawaii (Tuioti, Greatwood).

This is an incredibly important turnaround in philosophy. Out of state talent connections should be tapped as necessary, but the backbone of a successful Cal program is going to come from the Golden State first, especially when so much talent is already only a BART ride or day trip away. They will not win every battle for Nor-Cal or California prospects yet – not without more on-field wins, of course – but they can become considerably more competitive for them simply because of the staff’s makeup, and we already have several reports of Nor-Cal programs receiving visits from Wilcox and company, when they didn’t even get a once-over from Dykes. Expect this to begin paying off as soon as this year, in what should be one of the deepest years of California talent ever.

This is Not a Rebuild – Probably the closest thing you’ll get to a hot take from me, but the public comments Wilcox has made and the decision to bring in Baldwin suggest to me that he does not view this as a tear down. At his opening press conference, Wilcox noted that he would slowly transition over to the 3-4, emphasizing winning with the guys who are already on campus and putting them in a position to succeed. Despite the fact that this should be standard practice for coaches, it isn’t always the case, and his explicit mention of that suggests that he is aiming to remain reasonably competitive with the defense already on hand, rather than playing “his guys” immediately. We shouldn’t necessarily bottom out and win two games, in other words, but we are building toward something that better fits him long term.

The same is true on offense, where Wilcox surprised us all by bringing in Beau Baldwin, who has been impressive for years up at Eastern Washington. Again, rather than force the pro-style offense onto this roster, it appears that Wilcox evaluated what might best help his program off the ground, and made a strong resumed, high-ceiling hire within our budget, one who can work with what is already at hand. Because Baldwin runs something reasonably close to what Dykes did, we get to avoid some of the massive departures that a different offensive hire might have forced.

Diversity – Young. Old. Ethnic. Experienced. Up and coming. Teachers. Recruiters. Whatever adjectives you usually use for a staff, Wilcox has it. It’s a terrific blend of established developers of talent (Azzinaro, Greatwood, DeRuyter) and guys who have chances of becoming the next Peelers on the recruiting trail (Tuioti, Tuiasosopo, Edwards, Alexander, Ragle), or were simply waiting for their big break (Baldwin), assembled on a tight budget. There isn’t Tosh or Spavital, so there’s no home run, but there’s something like a triple here among all that, especially because we didn’t have the biggest salary pool to begin with. Even the most pessimistic view on this staff has to acknowledge that if they merely perform to expectation and never exceed it, they should be able to compete at the Pac-12 level.

After all, they already did at other schools.

Admittedly, there’s a risk that these types of young assistants will bounce after some success, but that’s a problem for future donors and future Wilcox to worry about. If we even get to the point where that is an issue, then that means we have re-arrived at the doorstep of decent, if not better.