Power rankings might seem inherently pointless, but they can teach you something.
I mean, there is no need for a list of the top 10 Cal sports. It’s not like this is a recap of an event that happened, in which case we would have a responsibility as journalists to report the news.
That thought bothered me for a while, but it no longer does. Six weeks after we published our first honorable mentions, I feel like this power rankings list actually adds a lot to the discussion of Cal sports.
One thing I realized was how surprisingly top-heavy Cal athletics is.
First off, picking the top few sports was difficult. Should golf or rugby take the top spot? Good arguments could also be made for both women’s and men’s swim, which took the No. 3 and No. 4 spots, respectively.
And it goes beyond those top four. Some people were shocked that women’s basketball was only at No. 5. How can that team be fifth when it made the Final Four and won the Pac-12? That was the best season Cal women’s basketball ever had! And they only barely manage to crack the top five?
But it’s hard to make a case for it to go higher — there are just too many great teams in front of it.
Cal is already top-heavy with the five sports I just mentioned, and it could become even more so in a few years. Both tennis programs — especially the women’s team — are primed to move up. Of course, that would mean bumping out one of those amazing teams I’ve already mentioned — a task that is no less than monumental.
And there are plenty of teams that have been historically excellent but are currently in the midst of an inevitable down cycle. For example, softball, volleyball and baseball all had poor seasons last year but are each only a few years removed from deep postseason runs.
In fact when I think about it, of the 26 sports teams that Cal fields, I would say only five of them are not at least “good” and are also not in a temporary slump. These teams are football, cross-country, field hockey, women’s gymnastics and lacrosse.
I’m not naming those teams to pick on them. Look at that list again. First, there are only five there. And second, the sad truth is that even if all those sports were amazing, fans would still only care about one sport on that list.
This establishes another point — our power rankings list could have easily been 20 sports long. Heck, we could have written rankings on all 26 sports and only had a few cynical thoughts. That level of success is unreal, and i t often goes unnoticed when the struggles of more popular sports take up headlines.
It feels like now would be the appropriate time to throw in a “Go Bears!” and then wrap this column up. But I won’t do that. Yes, Cal athletics are incredibly impressive as they should be. But everything isn’t roses and sunshine.
There is still work to be done. The academic scores for some of these teams are well below what should be acceptable for an institution that considers itself among the top in the nation. Football’s academic struggles are well documented, but did you know that the much-loved women’s basketball team ranked second to last in APR scores in June? There hasn’t been as much of an uproar about that.
There’s room to improve. And Cal sports teams do face many problems. But the power rankings have made me realize that even though some of the most high-profile sports leave a lot to be desired, the overall athletic talent at Cal is incredibly high.
Contact Riley McAtee at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @riley_mcatee