BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) — The first few months on the job for new California football coach Tosh Lupoi have been a bit of a whirlwind as he has worked on putting together a staff, retaining and adding players to the roster and building a culture he hopes will turn the Golden Bears into a winner.
Now Lupoi gets the chance to get on the field with his team for the first time since being hired in December with Cal set to open what he described as a physical
spring practice period on Wednesday.
“The honeymoon is a little bit over now," Lupoi said Tuesday. "We've done our best as far as taxing the guys. ... Now we’re in true physical combat here. I think we find out a lot about each other. As we progress to getting pads on, we’re going to truly find out who our real football players are.”
The return to Cal is a homecoming for Lupoi, who was born and raised in the Bay Area and played defensive line at Cal from 2000-05. He then spent four years as defensive line coach for the Bears under coach Jeff Tedford before leaving to take an assistant job at Washington in 2012.
Lupoi later went to Alabama where he was on Nick Saban’s staff for two national championships, spent three years in the NFL and was defensive coordinator under Dan Lanning at Oregon the last four seasons before coming back to Cal.
Lupoi inherits a program that has struggled to compete at a high level in recent years with the Bears going 48-56 the past nine seasons with Justin Wilcox in charge. Cal hasn't finished a season ranked in the AP poll since 2006 and won more than seven games only once in nine seasons under Wilcox.
But there are reasons for optimism as the program has made a bigger investment in football since general manager Ron Rivera took over before last season. The Bears are looking to get back to the level they were at when Lupoi was a player. Cal's best season in that span came in 2004 when the Bears went 10-2 with Aaron Rodgers at quarterback and got as high as fourth in the nation that season.
The biggest move Lupoi made came in the first 24 hours he was on the job when he flew to Hawaii to persuade star quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele to return for a second season.
Sagapolutele threw for 3,454 yards and 18 touchdowns as a freshman and is one of the top returning quarterbacks in the country. Cal has worked with Sagapolutele on increasing his NIL value and he just launched a new clothing line this week as part of that.
“There’s been some really cool deals for these guys that they can take advantage of,” Lupoi said. “Love to support them, but we’re not really focused on individual attention. It’s more all about the team and celebrating our pillars of our culture, which Jaren is first and foremost does an elite job at, celebrating team and leading by action thus far.”
Lupoi begins his first head coaching job with first-time coordinators on both sides of the ball with Jordan Somerville running the offense and Michael Hutchings in charge of the defense.
Both have NFL experience, which Lupoi wanted in those roles. Hutchings spent the past three seasons with the Minnesota Vikings and Somerville worked as assistant quarterbacks coach with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the last three seasons.
Those two can lean heavily on Lupoi, who has experience as a defensive coordinator at a high level, and Nick Rolovich, who remained on the staff after serving as interim coach for the bowl game and has served as an offensive coordinator and head coach for years.
"Don’t be naive to the fact I haven't done this before," Somerville said. “We can talk about just the organizational piece that bringing in the wealth of knowledge, but at the end of the day, I haven’t sat in this chair. So to surround myself in an entire unit with wisdom, so to speak, and guys with a lot of experience, is key and critical to our future going forward.”
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