If they don’t add some quality freshmen they are going to be looking at a major rebuilding effort in a year or two when all the guys who’ve already spent 3 or four years with the program are gone. I don’t think many players are going to hang around for six years regardless of eligibility especially if team isn’t doing well. Gilliam and Perryman illustrate that. The class of 2021 didn’t show much and wasn’t that big of a class. Even some of our redshirt freshmen from last year may start to graduate after one more academic year.
Adding upper classmen transfers won’t balance the roster, need new freshmen every year.

Tysean White’s eligibility illustrates the importance of picking the right school if you want to have much of a playing career.
He’s played a season at Navy’s prep team, a season with Navy and no stats, and fragments of three games for us. Seems unfair that he has only one year of eligibility left considering some guys play more than fifty games.

Sure, a second string guy at Cal would be a great pickup for us, but what would motivate him to transfer here ?
Castles is an outlier, like Lekkerkerker from UCLA twenty years ago they came here for academic or quality of life issues. Two starters from UC transfers in twenty years are fairly rare. I don’t see that suddenly changing because we didn’t sign many high school guys. Point being we will occasionally get an impact transfer but can’t count on it and the incentives are less than they were in years prior for those guys to come here.

More typical transfers for us are the QB from Boise, the running back from Fresno that were just distractions here. And we had the Nevada wide reciever who now only runs track, the former walk-on at Oregon State or UCLA that are backups for us, a QB from Georgetown who never played, a offensive tackle from Cornel that redshirted there and didn’t get on the field for us, a linebacker from Navy who never played for Navy but just their prep school. I’m sure we’ll continue to get those kind of transfers.

Castles was a very highly regarded recruit who wasn’t happy at Cal, reportedly mostly for non football reasons. We get very few guys who transfer for quality of life reasons. Berkeley not to everyone’s tastes. Would he have transferred here if he could have transferred to another FBS school without sitting out a year? Maybe, but there are certainly a lot of small town schools he could have chosen from.
I guess I’ll clarify my reference to impact as meaning at our level. Of course the incentives for someone who is an impact player in FBS to transfer to FCS are few. We only get a player who transfers down and makes an impact here once a decade or so.

I agree this isn’t a major impact recruit but he does have a record of some long plays and some speed. We do lose two starting receivers so maybe this will be a good pickup.
San Jose’s football stats seem unavailable so I don’t know what he did that’s not in his bio. I don’t know what he means by “all money in” but maybe he got a scholarship with us. Don’t know that he had one at SJSU
If we pick up one FBS transfer who makes an impact, I.e. not a former walk-on who never plays, that will unexpected to me. I think the odds of getting an FBS transfer are lower than in the past. Maybe we’ll get an FCS transfer, although we have no history of that except for guys who didn’t earn playing time after they got here.

South Dakota State, that team with the reported advantage over us in scholarships due to COVID exemption rules signed 14 for the December signing day.
So we have some catching up to do, if we plan to compete.

I may be wrong but I don’t see the transfer changes helping us much attracting transfers. Rule changes eliminated the advantage FCS schools had as transfer destinations for FBS players wanting to play immediately. The rules make it easier for someone to transfer from an FCS school but no difference for FBS transfers moving down, because they didn’t have to sit out before. . Those guys can now go to another FBS school and play right away. On the other hand our players can go to FBS and play right away now. So net result is we’ll lose more transfers and gain fewer over the long term. We’ve hardly ever had a player transfer from another FCS program and make an impact.

According to the huddle stats, he’s reasonably fast, not so much in the 40 as the 100. His bench press is pretty pathetic as listed, might be a typo. Pretty good vertical.
The bar is very high to get a scholarship.

Just for clarity I’m not talking about coaches not having played at all, but rather if they are position coaches did they play the position they coach.

Maybe those are school years and not seasons, one year at each place. It’s actually Victor Valley College..

I fear we have too many inexperienced coaches, some of whom have not had a lot of success as players at the position they coach. Maybe that doesn’t matter, maybe anyone can coach anything if they’ve been around the subject. Kind of like your math teacher doesn’t really need to be any good solving problems if she can present the lesson plan.
However, I think playing gives insight into subtleties about individual skills that might help the position players.

I hope they get an experienced receivers coach as a replacement. The program has replaced several departed experienced coaches with guys new to the role or new to this level of football.
Arceneaux was one of the more experienced recent hires.
We haven’t seen much productivity from young receivers aside from CJ Hutton, and maybe he was just ready to play. Some receivers who haven’t played much thus far are going to have to fill Vaughn and Harrell’s shoes.

South Dakota State was pretty close. Most teams aren’t physical enough to match up, but South Dakota State did.

From the NFL.com site:
“Any college player who has completed four years of college eligibility, as distinguished from those who had a redshirt year, will be considered eligible for the 2022 draft unless a player submits a request to not be considered for the draft to the league by Feb. 4, 2022”.
Thomas doesn’t need to declare.
Thomas has been with the team for six seasons, redshirting his first year and hardly missing a game in the five seasons he played. Declaring is just a publicity stunt.

Hawaii knew what they were getting, so it’s really the school that’s at fault. A clue was that Arizona State was willing to forfeit 12M to get rid of him after a few seasons with not horrendous results.

I don’t think they should either. It’s interesting that in the case of Hawaii and Reno, we see the two opposites, players leaving to get away from a coach and players transferring to follow a coach.

The new mobility for players is going to make certain styles of coaching obsolete. It’s not like guys enlist for the duration,

In the past declaring for the draft was newsworthy only when a player still had eligibility.

Compare Hawkins experience with Ploughs on his first time here. Cody has more experienced playing and coaching.
Being a coaches son means growing up in football. As a quarterback in Colorado he played for other coaches besides his father so he’s seen other perspectives; his offensive coordinator at Colorado went on the be head coach at Oregon and offensive coordinator for the Chicago Bears. He worked as a position coach here under Plough. I wouldn’t discount his knowledge of the game just because his Dad was head coach.

There is a clear difference in physicality between our team and the teams we need to beat. We had a great game plan and some breaks when we beat Tulsa. But when we play teams that are familiar with what we do it’s harder. Our team needs the ability to play some power football to make the rest work.