So, here’s the good news – if you’ve been caught up with other things over the last year and forgot Cal football existed, things haven’t changed too much. Pretty much all your Cal Bears from the last real game, the Redbox Bowl, are back. Yeah, Luc Bequette and Zeandae Johnson moved on, and so did Cam Bynum, Traveon Beck and Jake Curhan, but more or less, the faces that were around that run remain again, post-COVID.
This is the same pitch the program is rallying around too, as evidenced by their motto for the year: “Finish the Job”. Under normal conditions, 2020 was meant to be the crowning moment for Cal’s arrival back to the elite – and they are viewing last season as a setback, not a failure. Instead, everything’s been rolled back a year, with this one, the moment when that is meant to come to fruition; the high number of returners speaks to that belief internally.
The thing is, nobody knows how these Cal Bears really look like. There are a few hotly spliced social media videos, sure, but pretty much no one has been at practice – not even our intrepid reporter, Trace Travers.
All of that means Saturday’s Spring Game will be our first fairly meaningful glimpse at the program in awhile (I am, of course, excluding most of last season, where one unit or another would be missing, and so on, and so forth. You know the caveats. If you believe Oregon was the closest mark of what the “true” Cal team should have been, there were still some largely worrying signs there too.)
It’s highly unlikely that there’s an official game of any kind – over the last eight years, across three different coaches, due to depth issues or general secrecy (or both), these events have become public practices more than anything else.
Still, some football is better than no football, and that means there’s a few things that may be worth paying extra attention to on Saturday, starting with:
1) The overall offense
If you’ve followed the stats reported by the program across the last two scrimmages, you may have noticed Chase Garbers hasn’t yet taken a massive leap forward by numbers. As it has been for the last three seasons – the Bears will go as far as #7 takes them, and because of that, the most pressing need is to determine if Garbers simply in a normal place for a QB in his first full spring with a really complex offense.
If he isn’t, then suddenly, there is additional intrigue looming, in the form of one Zach Johnson, who already made the travel squad last year and has progressed far faster than anticipated (I am speaking for myself here), throwing for something like 6 TDs: 0 INTs in those same scrimmages.
Am I suggesting that Chase’s job is in danger? Not at this point in time – that determination won’t be made until the fall camps at the earliest, and likely not even until after some poor play during the season. He’s earned that leeway, and we should know better than to count him out at this point. But, if you want to rebuild buzz, watching QB1 direct the offense on Saturday confidently and efficiently (particularly in early downs, deep throws, and using all sides of the field) would go a long way toward that.
2) Jeremiah Hunter
He would have played a key role for the Bears in 2020. He has continued to draw rave reviews from the staff, who praise his catch radius, his effort, and his consistency.
Now, the rest of us will be looking to see the same.
3) The Young Noses
Outside of Hunter, Ricky Correia and Stanley McKenzie are two other youngsters that have the potential to raise the ceiling for the Bears this fall – the lack of a true nose, or even bodies that could hold up there consistently, meant a chain reaction of things last season: BRETT had to play out of position, taking him away from ruining the lives of other offensive linemen in one on one play, which meant less guaranteed opportunities for the ILBs to play cleanly and unimpeded, which meant…
And you get the idea. The fact that both are set to see time this fall undoes that aforementioned reaction.
The fact that they’ll be joined by reinforcements up front in the summer is even better.
4) Deng at OLB
It’s not worth belaboring the point about Deng’s 2020. He didn’t have the one he wanted, he got a legacy game for his efforts against Oregon, and on top of that, it’s fantastic that he’s returned for another year in a position that should be more natural to his skill set.
Instead, this spring the staff has opted to let him do what he does best – use that freakish wingspan and athleticism – should equal a massive season, especially when the other guy across from him is Goode. If they need more size, they can bring in Croteau or Marqez Bimage. If they need even more speed, then they can rotate in Orin Patu, who seems to have finally completed his weight gain, like Goode did before him.
(Godzilla’s nephew, Patrick Hisatake, is lurking somewhere here too.)
Alright, screw it.
4) All the OLBs. Every last one of them.
5) Tre Watson
The Bears struggled in the back end last year under Yates. Whether that is fair to blame entirely on him is no longer relevant – what they have in his place is a guy with noted recruiting chops, a young voice, and a rallying identity for this unit, three things they lost when GA moved onto the NFL.
I am deeply fascinated by how he gets the most out of the personnel that Cal have available to him, including a rotation of safeties that goes legitimately four deep (even if they didn’t play up to their potential last year), and some really good young corners on the way up.
