SAN FRANCISCO | Cal was picked to finish 11th out of 12 teams in the Pac-12's preseason basketball poll, which was released Wednesday morning.
A few hours later, Golden Bears coach Mark Fox, point guard Joel Brown and forward/center Lars Thiemann took the stage at Pac-12 Media Day and projected much different expectations.
"The preseason rankings, it's nothing new. Everyone has their own opinions. The one thing is a lot of people don't know about the guys that we have," Brown said. "To Coach's point, we have a lot of depth and versatility. We have a lot more athleticism. In my four years, this is probably one of like the better teams with talent and IQ. At the end of the day, it just comes down to playing hard each night and playing defense, which is what's going to help us separate from other opponents, which is getting stops on that side of the ball, and the offense itself will take care."
Added Thiemann, a fellow senior: "We've got the depth this year. We brought in a lot of new great guys. I feel like the foreign tour helped us really develop a brotherhood and develop the team chemistry we need. We all have belief that we're going to win. So just this mindset, this winning mindset, I feel like it's going to make a big difference for us."
Cal is 35-58 in Fox's first three seasons, including a 12-20 finish last year. Fox has emphasized that this is the first time in his tenure with the program -- after the pandemic season and aftereffects on recruiting -- that he feels he has the depth and size to truly play how he'd like to see the team operate on both ends of the floor.
"We have a lot more guys, so the competition in practice has been tremendous. I'm not going to say that we're going to play 10 or 11 guys, but in practice we have 10 or 11 guys that are getting after it," he said. "We've had to play obviously a little slower since we came because we didn't have the depth. The guys who we did have were undersized, and now we have, I think, legitimate size at every position. We have depth at every position. So we would like to play a little faster, but as all the ex-coaches know, you can only play as fast as you can play well. There's days that we play a little faster than we can play well in practice. But I think it's a group that can pick up the tempo a little bit, and we're excited to have more guys."
Watch the full Pac-12 media day interview below:
