California Mark Madness? Breaking down Cal's impressive start

It was only three seasons ago that we saw California end their season on a sixteen game losing streak to finish with a 3-29 record overall. They finished the Pac 12 in last place with the 320th ranked KenPom offense and 195th defense. Over the next few seasons they’ve made a key coaching change to hire former Stanford star Mark Madsen. In Madsen’s first full season, he was able to lead this team to a 13-19 overall and 9-11 Pac 12 regular season. They jumped to rankings of 126th offensively and 139th defensively, a drastic improvement in just one year. In the 2024-2025 season, they struggled again but were still nowhere near as bad as before and actually made it into being a top 100 KenPom offense finishing that year 94th. In their current season, they are off to a 9-1 start including a ranked win against 18th UCLA. What's made this current team so much better now than just a few seasons ago?

It all starts with the transfer portal where their top four leading scorers came through to help this team jump to a now top 75 KenPom offense and defense. Leading scorer Dai Dai Adams is shooting 48.1% from range and in their win against UCLA, they shot 50% from three as a team. Keep in mind that UCLA is the 36th ranked KenPom defense and this win did come on a neutral court. Their one loss this season was on the road against Kansas State who does have the leading scorer in the country in P.J. Haggerty. Cal was picked to finish 16th in the ACC preseason poll and predicted to have another bad season.

Can this team earn a bid for the NCAA tournament? If we look at the ACC, it does look extremely difficult to beat teams with tremendous talents like Duke or Louisville and earn an automatic bid but can they potentially get an at-large? According to Joe Lunardi’s most recent bracketology update, he has VCU as one of the last teams in. VCU sits at the 58th highest NET rating while Cal is 54th. It’ll be up to the team to earn some big wins as conference play begins. The good thing for them is that they’ll have plenty of opportunities to do so.