As Jake Spavital tells it, his parents would have preferred he not enter the family business, following in the path of his grandfather Jim and father Steve in pursuing a football coaching career.

But to whatever degree he truly considered an alternate course in life, when it came time to actually decide his future, Spavital's former high school coach Bill Blankenship was coaching the special teams at Tulsa, got him set up with an entry-level support staff job there and, well, so much for any other thoughts.

"Football is such a ... there's not much security, you're always moving, and my parents tried to get me to get a finance degree or just get a better degree and just don't get into coaching," Spavital says.

Jim Spavital played briefly in the NFL -- after being selected as a first-round pick in the 1948 draft -- as well as the CFL and went on to coach in college, the NFL and CFL for more than two decades. Steve Spavital was a high school football coach at several schools in Oklahoma.

For Jake (and his brother Zac), it was perhaps just predestined.

"I just knew I loved the game, didn't really want to give it up. When I had an opportunity to go GA for Gus Malzahn [at Tulsa], I thought it would be a great opportunity to go get my foot in the door. I really just changed my degree program, and instead of getting a finance degree I just got a general business degree and I didn't even walk at graduation -- I just went straight to working for Gus," Spavital says, telling the story in an interview with Golden Bear Report.

Spavital, now Cal's new offensive coordinator (again), would learn for himself how tenuous coaching jobs can be, with no better example than his previous stint in Berkeley.

In his first season with the Golden Bears in 2016, Spavital's offense ranked 10th nationally and tops in the Pac-12 while averaging 513.2 yards per game -- the second-best mark in program history. Nonetheless, it would also be the last season of his tenure.

As his offense was piling up points (37.1 per game), the Cal defense was giving up even more (42.6 PPG to rank second to last in the FBS), and for that reason then-head coach Sonny Dykes and the staff were replaced.

"We were just building a lot of things, and unfortunately it just went a different direction," Spavital says, looking back. "But what I've learned in this profession is you've just got to move onto the next thing and you've got to just keep doing what's right and keep moving forward."

He faced that challenge again this offseason when he was let go after four years as the head coach at Texas State, and ironically the path this time led him back to Berkeley of all places, where he is now tasked with reviving a Bears offense that has been the main culprit in a string of three straight losing seasons for the program (including the 4-8 mark last fall).

Cal ranked 89th nationally at 364.6 yards per game this past season and 96th in scoring at 23.9 points per game, as former offensive coordinator Bill Musgrave was fired in mid-November.

Head coach Justin Wilcox, who took over the program after Dykes and that 2016 staff were let go, heads into a pivotal year in his tenure and replaced three-fifths of the offensive staff this offseason with the belief that better production on that side of the ball will make the difference for a program that has lost 10 games by one score or less over the last two years.

Spavital brings a uniquely intriguing source of optimism in that regard given that he's done it here before and done it well -- far better than anything the Bears have seen offensively since. (Cal has not averaged more than 386 yards per game in a season since that 2016 team topped 500 per game.)

How exactly the offense will look is yet to be fully determined, but there seems to be some general consensus on a new identity for the unit.

"He's going to be aggressive. He wants to score a lot of points, he wants to go after teams and I think that's something that guys are craving here at Cal, and I think he's a great fit for that," new tight ends coach Tim Plough said. "It's just a different style, different thought process, but he knows the program really well because he's been here before, he knows what it's capable of. That kind of excitement, it kind of permeates through the whole group."