BERKELEY — To build a football contender in the Pac-12 Conference, Cal coach Sonny Dykes will need to deal with more than Oregon, Stanford and the Los Angeles schools. He also must contend with a new admission policy, implemented by the school.

Most Cal athletes going forward will be required to have a 3.0 grade-point average in high school. That’s substantially lower than the general student body at Cal, but it’s higher than any Pac-12 school except Stanford. The new standards begin to go into effect this fall, when 40 percent of the incoming athletes must have a 3.0 GPA or better. That number climbs to 60 percent next year and to 80 percent in 2017.

Can Cal thrive on the sports field — particularly in football and men’s basketball — facing those demands in the classroom in the ferocious modern landscape of intercollegiate sports?

Dykes said he is confident the Bears can win games and graduate players. “I believe that more strongly today than I did when I took the job,” said Dykes, who was hired in December 2012.

Basketball coach Cuonzo Martin, coming off his first season at Cal, is just as optimistic as Dykes that the higher academic standards won’t impact the won-lost record. “You understand it’s a tremendous institution when you take over the job. You know what you’re getting into.”

The new admission policy was the school’s response to the 2012 report that ranked Cal among the nation’s worst in academic performance and graduation rates for football and men’s basketball. The news did not go down easily at a university that has been ranked the nation’s No. 1 public institution for 17 straight years by U.S. News and World Report.

Football coach Jeff Tedford was fired after the 2012 season for the Bears’ poor performance in the classroom and on the field. Athletic director Sandy Barbour was let go in June 2014 because of the academic issues and her handling of the department’s finances.

Chancellor Nicholas Dirks assembled a task force that provided 50 recommendations, including the need for a revised admissions policy for athletes.

University of the Pacific athletic director Ted Leland applauds the changes. He was the A.D. at Stanford from 1991-2005, a period when the athletic department began to view its prestigious academic reputation as an advantage, not an obstacle.

“Cal can do the same thing because a California degree means a lot in the world. I think they can turn this into a huge positive,” said Leland, who oversaw one Pac-10 football championship and four conference men’s basketball titles during his tenure at Stanford.

“You’ve just got to get really good at selling it and realize you’re going to lose a few great athletes who are wonderful human beings but just don’t have that academic profile that’s going to work for you.”

Others aren’t sure that Cal can emulate Stanford’s model.

One of the skeptics is Greg Biggins, a national football recruiting analyst for Scout.com. He pointed out that in past years, Cal sometimes could recruit athletes who weren’t admitted to sister campus UCLA. As a prime example, Biggins cited Marshawn Lynch, the Seattle Seahawks running back whom Cal recruited from Oakland Tech.

“UCLA was all over Marshawn Lynch but had to back off because they couldn’t get him in,” Biggins said. “Now the tables are going to turn.”

Jon Embree, the assistant coach who recruited Lynch for UCLA, confirmed what Biggins said.

Tedford and Rick Neuheisel, who coached football at UCLA during part of the time Tedford was at Cal, both said admissions standards were fairly comparable, but they sometimes wondered how the other was able to recruit a player not qualified to attend his school, especially since the universities are part of the same system.

Former Cal star Todd Steussie, who played offensive tackle in the NFL for 14 seasons, said he would not have been admitted to Berkeley using the new standards.

“I had a fine SAT, but I wasn’t a 3.0 student,” Steussie said. “I doubt they would have used one of those exceptions on me.”

Steussie questions using GPA as a measuring stick for admissions. He believes it is a poor predictor of future success in college and uses himself as an example.

After retiring from the NFL, Steussie returned to school and earned an undergrad degree at Cal and an MBA from Northwestern. He completed additional courses through the business schools at Penn and Harvard. Now 44, Steussie is the co-founder and executive vice-president of PotentiaMetrics, Inc., an Austin, Texas-based analytics company that focuses on health care outcomes.

Steussie worries that allowing only 20 percent of incoming freshmen to have GPAs below 3.0 is too steep a threshold. He recommends a 50-50 split.

Former Bears basketball coach Mike Montgomery, who retired after the 2013-14 season, said the changes will make the job harder but won’t thwart Cal’s ability to win.

“Cal is not easy,” said Montgomery, who spent 18 years coaching at Stanford before six seasons at Cal. “There are no majors you can get into and just breeze on through. And like it or not, in football and men’s basketball, (academics) is not the first thing on everybody’s mind.

“It’s going to be a real plus in the long run,” Montgomery added. “Those kids will be happier, more qualified, and will belong with the student body.”

But the higher GPA requirements will force Cal to change its approach to recruiting.

“It’s a big deal anytime you make the recruiting pool smaller,” said Neuheisel, an analyst for CBS who coached at Colorado and Washington in addition to UCLA.

Dykes said perhaps just 20 of 100 prospects who submit high school transcripts will end up being academically qualified under the new standards.

“As a result, we’re going to have to look at a whole lot more kids. With that, we’re going to spend more money traveling,” said Dykes, who signed 12 out-of-state prospects in February, seven of them from the Southeast.

Cal’s annual football recruiting budget of $313,000 has been boosted to $500,000, partly to help with additional travel. Previously, it was the lowest of the 10 public universities in the Pac-12 and less than half of the three biggest spenders — Washington ($709,000), Oregon ($674,000) and Arizona State ($660,000), according to data from USA Today.

Neuheisel agreed with Leland that Cal’s academic status can be a difference-maker in attracting top players.

“Cal was always a very formidable opponent in recruiting, especially when Jeff got the program to be a consistent winner,” he said. “It’s a very powerful entity when all the boats are going in the same direction.”

Said Dykes, “If that doesn’t mean something to people, then we’re probably not recruiting the right guys.”

Russell Ude, a well-regarded defensive end from Atlanta, appears to be an ideal Cal recruiting candidate. Born to parents from Nigeria, Ude said they made education a priority. The 3.5 student said he picked Cal over several Southeastern Conference schools because “I was looking for a school that could set me up not just for four years but for 40 years.”

Still, Biggins said fielding a team with 60 elite academic kids is easier said than done.

“It’s not going to be a level playing field with the rest of the Pac-12,” he said.

Recently hired athletic director H. Michael Williams understands the rigors facing athletes. A former Cal wrestler and 1982 alum, Williams said there is ample evidence that the athletic department can find and cultivate players who excel on the field and in the classroom. At halftime of a basketball game last season, more than 400 Cal athletes who earned 3.0 fall GPAs were paraded in front of the Haas Pavilion crowd.

“Twenty-eight of those are football players,” Williams said.

Follow Jeff Faraudo on Twitter at twitter.com/JeffFaraudo.