The End of the Sonny Dykes Era

In the end, perhaps it was only fitting that Sonny Dykes was fired out of nowhere, ousted on a Sunday morning when many Cal fans were still sleepily pining for Najee Harris.

After all, we had come to know that feeling well under him – for four seasons, the Dykes era was marked by sudden, surprise strikes, first by Jared Goff’s hand, and then Davis Webb’s.

There are a dizzying array of things to discuss in the aftermath of all this – who will replace him, why now, what does this mean for the recruiting, will Spav and Peeler stay, how are the players doing – and the answers to those things will trickle out as they always do, in the hours to come, by back-channel and hushed whispers. (Trace and I will have plenty more to say about all of these.)

As far as Sonny himself goes, and despite the necessity of this decision, we do owe him a great deal of gratitude. He was flawed, but at a time when the program’s rot ran deeper than anyone on the outside knew, Sonny – a likable, honest man -- did the toughest work: of overhauling the academics from top to bottom, weathering wave after wave of Tedford-era departures and difficult circumstances in a job that is already fraught with institutional gridlock, and opted, most importantly, to start a true freshman when no one would have predicted otherwise; decisions, that bit by bit, acted to restored a program that was nose-diving, and left it in a respectable state.

This can’t be taken for granted -- many programs attempting to paddle toward decency don’t even get that far, spending lost years, lost decades in search of a coach who can accomplish it.

What necessitated Sonny’s departure, though, was the immense difficulty of trusting he could ever go beyond “respectable”. Even in his fourth year, with his own players, such basic things as game management and winning on the road against bottom tier opponents continued to elude him, and that’s before the national laughingstock that was his defensive non-improvement. No matter how amazing and memorable the offensive performances were – and they certainly were – the above meant we were staring at the ceiling of mediocrity under Sonny, however long he chose to remain, with very little reason to feel a breakthrough was coming. Finally, even the most reasonable and patient among us had begun to throw in the towel, come year's end, and it is…shall we say, uncharacteristic of the athletic department for them to come to the same conclusion this quickly, but we will certainly take it all the same, avoiding the longer road to the same end.

It was just time, and we are lucky that that time is still decorated with special memories, even if they do not act to redeem the entirety of the last four years.

Thanks, Sonny. Good luck.

We’ll always have Texas.