Wilcox a perfect fit for Cal football? C1
Justin Wilcox takes BART to work and other reasons he’s perfect fit for Cal’s culture
Chris Pezman received confirmation that Justin Wilcox was the perfect fit for Cal the moment Wilcox didn’t accept the job.
It was the second Friday of January 2017, and the Bears were deep into negotiations with Wilcox to replace Sonny Dykes.
The term sheet was ready. They expected him to accept. The only thing missing was his signature.
But at that moment, Wilcox put everything on hold and … vanished.
“The rumor is that he went on a hike to clear his head,” Pezman recalled. “He knew once he took it, everything would change. So he unplugged. He wanted to clear his head, so he was ready for the moment.
“I thought that was really mature. A lot of guys would rush, rush, rush. But Justin has another level of maturity. He’s got the quiet confidence to have his own plan.”
That quiet confidence was just one of the Cal running back Christopher Brown Jr. was injured in Saturday’s win, but may play today.
reasons Pezman believed Wilcox would be the ideal head coach for the Bears, and what Pezman thought mattered a great deal.
He was the athletic department’s chief operating officer — the point man on the search, responsible for putting candidates in front of athletic director Mike Williams and chancellor Nicholas Dirks.
Two hours later, Wilcox returned, signed the term sheet at the bar at the Claremont Hotel, and began overhauling the program.
“He’s on track, if not ahead of where I thought he’d be at this point,” said Pezman, who left Cal in late 2017 to became the AD at the University of Houston, his alma mater. “It wasn’t going to be a one-year fix.”
Not with the remodel that awaited Wilcox.
Cal stunned the college football world by terminating Sonny Dykes just a week earlier, on Jan. 8 — the oddest of times — but Pezman had already determined the Air Raid was all wrong for the program.
He also knew Dykes continually had an eye on vacancies elsewhere — Baylor had been the most recent instance — and that Cal’s season-ticket base was eroding as the losses piled up under Dykes.
If a change unfolded, Pezman wanted to be ready.
“I had been thinking about where we were as a program, and we weren’t going to beat Washington or Oregon or USC for the elite athletes,” he said earlier this week. “Instead of playing 49-46 games, we needed to shorten the game. We had to play small ball, like Stanford and Utah. You can’t have your defense on the field for 40 minutes. It can’t sustain that.”
Dykes’ system, which depended on recruiting elite athletes at the skill positions — many of them from other regions of the country — didn’t fit with the recruiting model.
“We were going to Texas and Mississippi, but the bulk of our talent should be coming from in-state, and we weren’t getting it,” Pezman said. “There’s no reason Cal shouldn’t get those
6-foot-4 or 6-foot-5 volleyballtypes, who can grow into their bodies and be offensive linemen, defensive ends, linebackers, tight ends or even H-backs.
“That’s the recruiting sweet spot for Cal.”
Pezman had the strategy figured out. Once Dykes was dismissed, it became a matter of identifying candidates who could execute.
For advice, he turned to Andrew McGraw, assistant athletic director for football administration.
If anyone knew who and what would work in Berkeley, it was McGraw. He had served in various capacities for five head coaches (Keith Gilbertson, Steve Mariucci, Tom Holmoe, Jeff Tedford and Dykes) and, crucially, had worked closely with dozens of coordinators and assistants.
According to Pezman, McGraw’s response was immediate:
The search should start and end with Justin Wilcox.
“I knew if they put Justin in the room with (Cal decisionmakers), he would rise above the other candidates,’’ said McGraw, who became friends with Wilcox during the latter’s threeyear stint as an assistant coach under Tedford. “I knew the kids would thrive with him. He’s been in their shoes (as a safety at Oregon in the late 1990s). He knew what Cal was like. He’s a West Coast guy. And I thought he would connect with recruits and our donor base.”
But there was another layer, McGraw explained, an interconnection between Wilcox’s personality and the Cal ethos.
Wilcox owns one car — it’s 30 years old — and has taken BART to work during stretches of his tenure in Berkeley.
He’s an avid reader, especially with regard to books on leadership.
And when Wilcox vacations, he vacations: He leaves the country and tunes out.
“He has the best work-life balance of all the coaches I’ve ever worked with,” McGraw said.
Which meshes perfectly with the campus culture: It cannot be all football for the players.
In order to thrive in Berkeley, they must fit academically and socially.
Same with the head coach.