Bear Witness: The Most Exciting College Team This Season

With a loaded roster featuring young and NBA-ready players, Cal should be the most exciting college team in the country this season.

- Brandon J. Peters

The energy surrounding the Cal Men’s basketball program these days is unlike any Bears fans have seen in a minute. There is an unmistakable air of confidence and focus that permeates through the coaches and the team. And why not? After a respectable 18-15 campaign last season—the first with coach Cuonzo Martin—he and his staff pulled off the best recruiting hall in the program's history, landing top-10 players Jaylen Brown and Ivan Rabb, as well as SoCal forward Roman Davis (who it was just announced will sit out this season as a redshirt). Add them to a trio of top-notch returning talent in four-year senior Tyrone Wallace, former McDonald’s All American Jabari Bird and the much-improved 2-guard Jordan Matthews, and the Cal faithful have a reason to be excited. 

Very excited.

The addition of Oakland native Rabb (or Ive, as his team mates call him) and Brown as the catalysts of a top-5 recruiting class immediately catapulted Cal onto the radar of even the most pedestrian college hoops fan, as well as into the top 15 of most pre-season polls and lists—official and unofficial.

Both Jaylen and Ivan were recruited by Kentucky, Kansas, UCLA—traditional powerhouse schools—but they chose Cal for different but equally important reasons.

“A lot of people from the inner city don’t get the opportunity [to come to Cal], so for me it was just another opportunity to prove [people] wrong that I could make it here, just like I made it at [Bishop] O’Dowd, [when] they said I wasn’t intelligent enough,” Rabb says.