California’s season has gone off the rails fast enough that Ron Rivera didn’t bother sugarcoating it this week.
With the Golden Bears sitting at 3-6 during their open date, the Cal general manager took direct aim at the rough first year of coach Tosh Lupoi, saying the first-time head coach has been learning some hard lessons on the job.
“Tosh came in as a first-time head coach. He did bring a couple of inexperienced coordinators with him,” Rivera said Thursday on KNBR.
“Things didn’t work out the way we needed them to work out on offense. He has bumped his head a lot.
We’ve talked a lot, tried to give him a lot of advice, point him in the right direction and, you know, some of it he’s been very receptive and other portions of it he hasn’t.”
Cal entered the fall with real buzz, especially with Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele back at quarterback after his breakout freshman year. Instead, the Bears opened with a 45-24 loss to UCLA, a game that made the Bruins and first-year coach Bob Chesney look ahead of schedule. UCLA is still unbeaten and ranked No. 8 in the first College Football Playoff rankings this week.
Rivera said the comparison between the two programs and coaches doesn’t tell the whole story.
“The biggest thing I can tell you guys is, again, I know the expectations were very, very high,” Rivera said. “And I know there’s that comparison to UCLA, but the thing everybody’s got to understand is UCLA brought in a current head coach that came and brought probably half of the team that he had that went to the playoffs to begin with.”
Lupoi’s tenure started with promise. Before his introductory press conference last December, he flew to Hawaii to try to convince Sagapolutele to stay. The quarterback was viewed as the centerpiece of a team expected to build on last year’s 7-5 finish under fired coach Justin Wilcox.
Cal got out to a 2-1 start after beating Syracuse and Wagner, then headed into a Friday night matchup with Clemson. That’s where things began to unravel. The Bears were held in check offensively in a 24-10 loss, and the next week Lupoi took play-calling duties away from offensive coordinator Jordan Somerville and handed them to passing game coordinator Pat McCann at halftime of a 39-31 loss to UNLV.
The Bears bounced back with a different signal caller in a win over Virginia Tech, but Lupoi later benched Sagapolutele before a 41-7 loss to Wake Forest. Since then, Cal has dropped five of its last six and now faces the possibility of missing the postseason altogether unless it wins out against Virginia, Stanford and Pitt.
Sagapolutele’s freshman season set a much different tone. He completed 63.6% of his passes for 3,117 yards, 17 touchdowns and nine interceptions, ranking third in the conference in passing yards while winning ACC Rookie of the Week four times.
He has started the last two games after getting his job back, but he hasn’t thrown multiple touchdown passes in a game since Sept. 19, when he did it for the fifth time as a freshman.
“We have to show that we are growing, there has been some growth and development of our players, our team, and the culture is getting stronger,” Rivera said. “Those are all things that you have to have going forward.”
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Virginias Fast Start To The Season Comes With One Clear Concern
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Even with the final margin, the game also gave Virginia something to keep working on. The full-court press had mixed results, and the defense needed time to settle in before its adjustments started to show up more clearly. For a team with early-season momentum, that makes the next stretch worth watching closely, because the Cavaliers already look dangerous when things click, but they also know there is still one area that can make the difference between a strong start and a truly complete one. [Read more 🡒]