Cal basketball

Born in Walnut Creek, Madsen is an East Bay local. Madsen is coming off a 28-9 season as head coach of Utah Valley — the winningest in school history.

The sports department’s staff writers got to take a break from (or, rather, add more work to) their regularly-scheduled beat coverage for this very special edition of the paper.

The pair arrived at Cal in 2019 from Canada and Australia, respectively. Their departure will further entrench Cal’s dire scoring struggles and represent significant loss for an already-feeble Cal team.

The 1959 championship remains the only title in Cal basketball’s storied history. Like most good things in Cal Athletics history, it came well before many of us were born. 

The move was announced by Cal Athletic Director Jim Knolwton on Thursday, just one day after the Bears crashed out of the Pac-12 tournament in a 69-52 loss to Washington State.

Rock bottom nowhere in sight, where do the Bears go from here? The answer is simple: down.

The Supreme Court of the United States, the British Monarchy and Cal basketball’s losing streak: It was actually the last of the three — not the institutions that are designed as bastions of stability in a fickle, volatile society — that remained constant over the last nine-and-a-half months.

With its total losses now reaching double digits, Cal is no longer just battling talent and skill gaps, but morale ones too.

If the opponents that Cal has faced have been above its paygrade, the Trojans are on a different level entirely.

The gulf in historical success between the two teams cannot be understated. Following Tuesday’s game, however, the Tritons have fully established recent superiority over the Bears.