Now that the college football season is complete, with the Ohio State football program taking home the program’s ninth-ever national championship, we’re going to hear about NFL draft declarations and some transfer news. After all, it’s a year-round news cycle now, and although many in Buckeye Nation are still basking in the glow of all the glory Monday night, the world doesn’t stop spinning.
We already knew that backup quarterback Devin Brown had entered the transfer portal, but he stayed on board to finish up the national championship run. We hear rumors of his transfer destination, but nothing was official … until now.
According to multiple reports, Brown has decided to transfer to Cal after three years wearing the Scarlet and Gray. Had he decided to stay, it was unlikely that he would be handed the starting job with Julian Sayin’ the likely solution for next year, with five-star prospect Tavien St. Clair as well as Lincoln Kienholz also in the mix.
Brown should be commended for sticking things out in Columbus and it’s hard to blame him for making this move at this time. He will have every opportunity to win the starting job next year in Berkley.
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The Cal Bears appear to be the frontrunner for Devin Brown, an Ohio State transfer quarterback. However, no decision has been made yet.
The Ohio State Buckeyes have numerous talented quarterbacks on their current roster. While they did have an early-season quarterback battle, it always seemed like Will Howard was the answer.
What is up next for the program? That’s a good question, and the path seems clear. It could very well be Julian Sayin next season and then eventually five-star Class of 2025 commit Tavien St. Clair.
That leaves current quarterback Devin Brown without a real opportunity, and he’s expected to hit the transfer portal once this season is over. California is apparently in the mix for Brown.
California is a school in the mix for Ohio State quarterback Devin Brown according to Pete Nakos. pic.twitter.com/AKbVXOxlRn
Brown has not committed to a program yet, although there have been reports of his interest in Cal. Unfortunately, Brown hasn’t been able to get much traction in Columbus.
He played two games as a freshman and then six as a sophomore. This season, he’s been able to get into nine games and throw for 114 yards and a touchdown. That’s not ample playing time, so it isn’t surprising he could end up elsewhere.
Cal joined the ACC this past season and ended with the fourth-worst record at 2-6 and had a 6-7 overall record. Brown should be able to transfer and be the top option for that Power 4 side.
McDaniel retired from her position in Berkeley earlier this year after 29 seasons.
Nancy McDaniel, longtime women’s golf coach at Cal died on Wednesday from cancer. She was 57. Her former player and current Stanford women’s golf coach Anne Walker confirmed her death.
A Portland, Oregon, native and former star golfer at University of Washington, McDaniel retired from her position at Cal earlier this year after 29 seasons as the founding head coach of the women’s golf program. Since answering an ad she read in a golf magazine to be the first women’s golf coach at Cal, McDaniel helped turn the team, which debuted in 1995-96, into one of the most nationally regarded programs. Under her leadership, Cal has consistently been ranked in the top 25 nationally as she led the Golden Bears to 10 NCAA Championship appearances, 22 NCAA regional appearances, the 2003 Pac-10 Championship and the 2012 Pac-12 Championship.
“We have a saying at Cal that team stands for Together Everyone Achieves More,” McDaniel routinely would say.
McDaniel had a post-playing career defined by excellence and was showered with numerous accolades. She was named National Golf Coaches Association (NGCA) Coach of the Year, the LPGA Teaching and Club Professional Coach of the Year and Golfweek magazine’s Coach of the Year.
“I am forever thankful that Cal took a chance on me 29 years ago as it led to a dream career. Having the ability to use golf, a sport that I absolutely love, as a vehicle in mentoring young women both competitively and personally has been profound,” McDaniel said when she stepped down from her post. “The joy comes from watching them step into greatness in all parts of their life and creating relationships with them that last a lifetime. I want to thank my associate head coach and dear friend Bev Terry for always handling our players with positivity, care and compassion, and for supporting me through these last eight years together.”
Cal women’s golf coach Nancy McDaniel talks with her Golded Bears players. (Cal athletics)
Beginning at age eight, McDaniel’s parents began dropping her off at Waverley Country Club, and she went on to Washington from 1984-88 where she was team captain, an All American and earned Pac-10 All-Decade Team honors. She played professionally for five years before becoming the founding coach of Cal’s women’s golf team. Her husband, Jay, is the head golf professional at Claremont Country Club and served as the team’s longtime volunteer assistant coach. “I volunteered him for the last 29 years,” Nancy told NCGA Golf Magazine.
After garnering back-to-back Pac-10 and West Regional Coach of the Year awards in 2001 and 2002, McDaniel led the Bears to a nation-best seven first-place tournament finishes in 2002-03, their highest-ever national ranking at No. 2 and their first of two conference championships.
She was inducted into the WGCA Hall of Fame in 2016 in the later years of a 20-season consecutive run to NCAA Regionals. She coached 17 All Americans, 31 NGCA/WGCA All-American Scholars and 43 All-Pac 10/12 golfers.
One of those players was Walker, head coach of the Stanford women’s golf team since 2012 — a native Scot, and a former Golden Bear player who was McDaniel’s first-ever international recruit way back in 1997, then McDaniel’s assistant coach for six years.
When McDaniel was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, Walker was by McDaniel’s side. And when doctors told McDaniel the cancer returned in the summer of 2023 and had moved to her stomach, Walker moved even closer.
“She’s my first responder,” McDaniel told NCGA Golf earlier this year. “When I went to the hospital in June (2023) and found out things were happening again with the cancer, she was the person there. She was my eyes and ears when things were getting emotional. She was there asking the questions.”
Last fall, Walker created the Player for Her campaign to support breast cancer research.
“My best friend has cancer, and I looked myself in the mirror and said: ‘What the hell are you doing, Anne?” Walker told NCGA Golf. “You’re hosting a tournament in the middle of October, no women’s golf tournament had any presence on the topic . . . we need to model the way and bring awareness.”
And so the Stanford Intercollegiate tournament, which is held in October during Breast Cancer Awareness month, became a platform for making a difference. McDaniel came out to watch and smiled at all the golfers dressed in pink.
“It felt like we were all on the same team,” McDaniel said of the magical weekend in October at Stanford. “We were all playing for something bigger, and playing on a team called golf.”
In 2018, McDaniel received the Kim Moore Spirit Award for her great spirit and positive attitude within the game of golf and her success as a role model by demonstrating great mental toughness in the face of challenges. McDaniel was inducted into the Northern California Golf Association’s Hall of Fame on Oct. 16 as one of four members of the Class of 2024. Husband Jay accepted the honor in the Lifetime Achievement category on her behalf during a ceremony held at Silverado Resort in Napa.
“The impact Nancy has made on Cal and collegiate golf is immeasurable. She is truly a pioneer whose legacy will be felt for a long time,” Cal Director of Athletics Jim Knowlton said. “Not only was Nancy a terrific golf coach, she was a role model to the countless women that came through our program for the past 29 years.”
Joe Kapp had quite the story, and he was Ron Rivera’s college head coach.
Did you know the only quarterback to lead teams to a Rose Bowl, Grey Cup and Super Bowl was actually drafted out of college by the then-Washington Redskins?
He would later go on to become the college head coach of now current Washington Commanders head coach, Ron Rivera.
Joe Kapp who died Monday at age 85, was actually drafted by the Redskins in the 1959 NFL draft, the 209th overall selection. Twenty-three years later he became the head coach of the Cal Bears (1982-86) and one of his better defensive players was a linebacker, Ron Rivera. Rivera would play well enough as a Cal Bear he was drafted 44th overall by the Chicago Bears in the 1984 NFL Draft.
Back to Joe Kapp, the relationship between Kapp and Washington ended strangely, quite strangely. Here goes an attempt at it.
The quarterback for Washington during the previous 1958 season had been Eddie LeBaron. Perhaps Washington felt that having LeBaron they didn’t need the reigning Pacific Coast Champion Cal Bears quarterback, Kapp.
So, strange as it may seem, the legend is that after drafting Kapp, the Washington administration determined to not invite him to training camp, to not attempt to sign him. As bizarre as it sounds, it seems Washington decided to not even contact Kapp at all!
How in the world do you determine to not contact a player you drafted? What’s more when he had proven himself, leading his team to Pacific Coast Conference championship his senior season?
Consequently, Kapp pursued an opportunity to play in the Canadian Football League and play he did, making it to two Grey Cup title games, winning once.
When he returned to the NFL, it was to the Minnesota Vikings, where he led them to a 12-2 1969 record, playoff wins over the Los Angeles Rams and Cleveland Browns, before losing to the Kansas City Chiefs (23-7) in Super Bowl IV.
RIP Joe Kapp, the #Vikings' rock-tough quarterback of the late-1960s
This play from Minnesota's victory over the Browns in the 1969 NFL Championship encapsulates his style perfectly.pic.twitter.com/oEbsit4crW
Back to the Redskins, two years after determining to not contact the quarterback they had drafted, Washington struggling without a good quarterback, drafted Norm Snead with the second overall selection in the 1961 NFL draft.
But after three seasons of Snead, Washington traded the former Wake Forest quarterback to Philadelphia for another quarterback you may have heard of …. Sonny Jurgensen.
Jurgensen played for Washington from 1964-74, set franchise and NFL records, and earned himself a place in the NFL Hall of Fame (class of 1983).
If Washington had contacted Kapp, perhaps might we have never enjoyed Sonny Jurgensen as a player or team radio broadcaster.
It’s becoming increasingly harder to see how Stanford and Cal can continue with their current head coaches. That and more in this #Pac12 notebook.
It’s getting late very early in the San Francisco Bay Area. Stanford and Cal basketball are facing the very real possibility that they might have to fire their head coaches.
We can talk about how the pandemic hurts recruiting and the transfer portal. We can talk about how Cal has limited resources and will need UCLA to pay some money to Berkeley when the Bruins leave for the Big Ten. New media rights dollars will help cover the costs for the Bruins, so that Cal has more cash on hand to keep the lights on. We can talk about so many other things which limit Stanford and Cal basketball right now. Yet, none of this can be viewed as remotely tolerable.
One would have to think that in Palo Alto and Berkeley, changes are about to come. Two programs can’t be this dead, this adrift, this lifeless, this flat.
Stanford — which led by four points with 3:45 left — didn’t make another field goal in the remainder of regulation time and lost to Colorado to fall to 5-8 for the season, 0-3 in Pac-12 play.
Cal scored just 43 points and lost by 15 to Utah. Cal and Stanford are the only two Pac-12 teams to be 0-3 through three conference games. Cal has won only one game this season.
It’s not as though Jerod Haase of Stanford and Mark Fox of Cal are new coaches, either. Haase has been at Stanford since 2016. Fox has been in Berkeley since 2019.
Even with limitations existing at both schools, it’s hard to see how either coach will be around for the 2023-2024 college basketball season.
Let’s look at other notes around the Pac-12 in both basketball and football:
We had a lot to discuss with @MarkRogersTV at the @VoiceOfCFB. We also had Cal insider @JakeCurtis53 to talk about the Golden Bears.
It’s the month of November. We got past October and Halloween and trick-or-treating. More than 60 percent of the college football season has been completed. If we aren’t in the home stretch, we are certainly getting close.
We have a weekly USC show at The Voice of College Football with host Mark Rogers. Our live broadcast Monday night tackled a lot of different topics. We invite you to subscribe to, like, and share Mark’s USC channel where we air this show plus our USC postgame show after every Trojan game during the season.
We will share the video of our show below, which — near the end — had a segment with California Golden Bear insider Jake Curtis of the Cal Sports Report before this week’s USC-Cal game.
Here’s a rundown of all the topic we hit on in this broadcast, which took stock of the USC program at the start of November:
The Celtics All-Star was a 5-star recruit out of high school.
If you clicked on this headline, chances are you’re like the rest of us on the East who refuse to stay up late for Pac-12 basketball. And that’s your first hint as to where Boston Celtics All-Star Jaylen Brown went to college.
The answer is he went to University of California (Berkeley), otherwise known as Cal. A five-star recruit from Georgia and McDonald’s All-American, the explosive athlete only needed one year of college — another reason you might’ve missed him.
Brown started all 34 games for Cal in 2015-16, helping lead the Bears to a No. 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament. He was the team’s second-leading scorer and rebounder at 14.6 points and 5.4 rebounds per game.
Brown struggled in the team’s first-round loss to Hawaii, scoring just four points on 1-of-6 shooting before fouling out. That was his final college game, as he entered the 2016 NBA Draft and the Celtics selected him third overall. The following year, the team landed Jayson Tatum at the same spot in the draft, forming the dynamic duo that has now led the Celtics to an NBA Finals.
Zhu is a former college golfer at Pepperdine with a champion tennis player for a father.
November 30, 2021, will be a day Collin Morikawa remembers for a long time.
The 24-year-old didn’t earn one of his five PGA Tour wins, four DP World Tour wins or two major championships on that day. Rather, it was the day she said, “yes.”
Morikawa got engaged to girlfriend Katherine Zhu, a former college golfer for Pepperdine, on Tuesday night, and took to social media to announce the news.
“11.30.2021 My love, forever,” wrote Morikawa, while Zhu shared, “A lifetime together forever.”
With a win at this week’s Hero World Challenge in the Bahamas, Morikawa would become the No. 1 player in the Official World Golf Ranking. If so, he’d reach the mark in just his 61st start and be the second quickest to do so behind Hero host Tiger Woods, who reached No. 1 in just 21 starts.
Morikawa, 23, tied for the low round of the day at TPC Harding Park to give himself a chance to win his first major.
Fourteen months ago, Collin Morikawa was finishing up his college career at the University of California-Berkeley, just a short trip across the Bay Bridge from TPC Harding Park, site of the 102nd PGA Championship. Morikawa figures he played the jewel of the Bay Area’s municipal courses at least a dozen times during his college career. So, how much has that familiarity helped him this week?
“Other than knowing how to get here off the freeway without my phone and not get a ticket by the police, no, it has not helped me at all,” Morikawa said.
On Saturday, the 23-year-old SoCal native didn’t need to rely on any local NorCal knowledge because he played with the calm of a steely-eyed veteran, making seven birdies, including three of his final four holes to shoot 5-under 65 at TPC Harding Park.
“He played the kind of round today that I woke up thinking I’d like to play,” said former Masters champion Adam Scott, who played alongside him. “It was really incredibly solid. He was in complete control, really, of all parts of his game.”
With two wins under his belt, most recently at the Workday Charity Open in July, Morikawa, ranked No. 12 in the world, already has lived up to his advancing billing coming out of Cal. His ball-striking is sublime – he ranks T-4 in driving accuracy and third in approach proximity – and has served him well as he climbed up the leaderboard. Morikawa, who tied for the low round of the day, improved to 7-under 203, tied for fourth and just two strokes behind leader Dustin Johnson.
The difference this week has been Morikawa’s molten putter. If there is an Achilles’ heel in his game, Morikawa has struggled on the greens, most notably when he missed a 3-foot putt on the first playoff hole to lose to Daniel Berger in the Charles Schwab Challenge in June.
Morikawa credited his caddie, J.J. Jackovic, for helping him with his putting mechanics and learned from watching superb putters Steve Stricker, with whom he played a practice round Tuesday, and Zach Johnson, his playing competitor in the first two rounds. Morikawa’s putter remained fiery on Saturday, as he gained more than four strokes on the field on the greens and h now ranks fourth in Strokes Gained: Putting this week.
Morikawa made a pair of 22-foot birdie putts early at the third and fifth holes and a 7-foot birdie at 7 to shoot 3-under 32 on his opening nine. He tacked on a short birdie at 10 before hitting a road bump with bogeys at Nos. 12 and 13. But Morikawa wasn’t done yet. He rattled off three birdies in a row beginning at 15, and capped by sinking an 18-foot birdie putt at 17.
Could Morikawa nab his first major title in just his second start in one of golf’s Grand Slam events? Scott, for one, wouldn’t be surprised at all.
“He played major championship kind of golf today, and you know, it’s easy to say he’s got all the credentials, but he’s kind of proving it,” he said.
It was only a matter of time until we started to learn the fate of some of college football’s postseason bowl games and Friday brought news that the annual bowl game played at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California won’t be played this winter. …
It was only a matter of time until we started to learn the fate of some of college football’s postseason bowl games and Friday brought news that the annual bowl game played at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California won’t be played this winter.
The game, most recently known as the RedBox Bowl was canceled on Friday and was first reported by Brett McMurphy.
.@RedboxBowl will not be played this year. Game was scheduled to feature Big 10 vs. Pac-12, so now we’re down to 41 FBS bowls. Please adjust your schedules accordingly
The game matches up Big Ten and Pac-12 teams each year. Last year it was Cal beating Illinois, 35-20.
Since debuting in 2002 the game was played from 2002-2013 at AT&T Park in San Francisco before moving to Levi’s Stadium in 2014 and remaining there since.
The game has had a handful of names over the years: San Francisco Bowl, Emerald Bowl, Fight Hunger Bowl and Foster Farms Bowl before being named the Red Box Bowl in 2018.
The college bowl schedule now sits at just 41 games.
