Days after California showcased its new offensive weapons in the spring game, some welcome off-field news became official for the Golden Bears: The football program scored 997 of a maximum 1,000 points on the NCAA's annual Academic Progress Rate (APR) score.

That score pits Cal in a tie with Utah for the Pac-12's best mark, a monumental achievement for Sonny Dykes considering that the program's academic reputation was in tatters when he took over in 2013. The Bears posted sub-930 scores in consecutive seasons before Dykes' hiring, relegating them to the Pac-12 cellar.

This was a particularly troublesome black eye for an institution that is otherwise commonly ranked as the nation's top public university.

"To go from one of the worst to one of the best just shows what kind of hard work and effort and character these guys have," Dykes said after the spring game.

Academic progress has mirrored the Bears' on-field success. Cal won only one game in Dykes' first season before notching five victories in 2014. This past season, the program finished 8-5 and returned to the postseason for the first time since 2011.

"There’s been a change in the culture of our program and I’m really proud of our student-athletes in so many different ways," Dykes said in a statement.

The football program's four-year APR average of 960, which saw a conference-best 19-point jump this year, is still hindered by a slew of transfers and early departures that marked the beginning of the Dykes era -- eligibility, retention, and graduation are used to calculate APR -- but further improvement is expected as time progresses and past struggles come off the books.

"The issue we were dealing with early was we had some numbers that weren't very good," Dykes said. "A lot of these kids came to Cal with a leap of faith. They're the guys that did it."

Given this marked on- and off-the-field improvement, the challenges facing the Bears moving forward have evolved. Cal is now tasked with building on eight-win success even without star quarterback Jared Goff and a large crop of his cohorts that fueled that turnaround. Early spring returns have given reason for optimism on that front, and this latest academic news should also help the Bears on the recruiting trail, as they will now have a much easier time touting the value of a Cal education to prospects.

Therein lies the formula to more stable football prosperity in Berkeley.

Here are the rest of the single-year APR scores in the Pac-12 behind Cal and Utah's leading 997-point tallies: Arizona State 990, Colorado 973, USC 973, Stanford 971, Oregon 967, UCLA 963, Washington 962, Washington State 962, Oregon State 956, and Arizona 916.