Cal had to win in classrooms before winning on football field

Paul Myerberg | USA TODAY Sports

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BERKELEY, Calif. — California's Memorial Stadium sits nestled in the Berkeley Hills, positioned high enough to look down upon this bustling campus but below the rarefied air of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the university's research jewels.

Here, at least, academia stands over athletics — symbolically, physically, emotionally and perpetually.

This helps to explain the task given to Sonny Dykes upon his arrival late in 2012. The Golden Bears hadn't just struggled winning games the previous season, former coach Jeff Tedford's last with the program, but had struggled matching the standards, academically and otherwise, placed forth by the university.

The football team's Academic Progress Rate, a score used by the NCAA to quantify academic success, was just 923 with a four-year average of 935, near the cutline for bowl ineligibility. The Golden Bears' graduation rate for student-athletes who enrolled from 2003-6 was just 46%, the worst of the then-72 major-conference programs in the Football Bowl Subdivision.

"It got too out of hand," said senior defensive back Stefan McClure, who joined the program in 2011. "If you're undisciplined in the classroom or off the field then it's hard to just flip the switch and be disciplined on the field. It was really guys just not being accountable and doing their jobs in all phases, and it just showed on the field."

Reverse our academic decline, Dykes was told, rebuild our culture, and make us proud of our football program. Fittingly, he tackled these issues in order, beginning with a renewed commitment to academics; accountability off the field will trickle into our on-field results, Dykes surmised.

"Culture is what makes you good," Dykes told USA TODAY Sports. "That was our whole approach from day one: Let's make our bed in the morning, because that means we're starting the day off and doing stuff the right way. Let's just do everything right. I tell our guys all the time, everything matters. You get what you deserve in life. If you do things the right way, and you do them the right way, it's going to make you good."

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Three years after his hiring — and with slower progress on the field than off — Dykes has rebuilt the football program's academic reputation, instilled a culture of responsibility and accountability, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, placed the Golden Bears on a collision course for Pac-12 Conference and national contention.

"He's doing everything we've asked him to do," athletics director Mike Williams said.

The Golden Bears had a 969 APR score for the 2012-13 academic year, Dykes' first running the program; the school expects another significant jump when the next round of scores are announced in the spring. The football program stands well ahead of schedule for a new university admissions policy mandating that at least 80% of incoming recruits hold a 3.0 GPA — 77% of recruits during the past two classes topped that mark.

And then there's this: After going 1-11 in 2013 and 5-7 a year ago, Dykes' third team stands at 5-1, with its lone loss to unbeaten Utah, and at No. 19 nationally in this week's Amway Coaches Poll. The Golden Bears' next win will secure their first bowl trip since 2011; barring a collapse, a win against rival Stanford would secure the program's first piece of outright conference hardware — the North Division championship — since 1958.

"When Coach Dykes came in, he told us, OK, here's where we stand right now," junior linebacker Hardy Nickerson said. "Everybody needs to do their part. He changed the culture and pretty much got the whole team on board. That's starting to show."

It wasn't an overnight fix, as the Bears' records suggest. A number of players inherited from the previous staff — nearly a quarter of the initial roster – left the program, on a scale of wholesale attrition unmatched among recent major-conference programs. After a one-win season in 2013, players returned from winter break to see locker-room cubbies empty; personalized nametags had been replaced by generic labels, surprising contributors expecting to be reunited with friends and teammates.

Players who remained were indoctrinated into a new standard: Dykes and his staff would penalize players for academic infractions, with penalties including early-morning workouts not just for the offending student-athlete but his entire position group — sometimes, the player would be forced to take a knee and watch his positional grouping go through the workouts alone.

"They've seen that evidence," offensive coordinator Tony Franklin said. "They know that we can be successful in football. They know that we can graduate people. They know that we can achieve at the highest academic level here and achieve at the highest football level player.

"Everything we told them would come to fruition is coming to fruition. So they believe."

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Players use the same word to describe the program's new mindset: accountability. It's about "building good habits," wide receiver Bryce Treggs said. A new level of competition, said McClure, which has translated to everything. There's been a wholesale culture shift in three years, Nickerson said.

"What goes on in the dark will always come to light," said Nickerson. "So we've been putting in hard work for a really long time. We're 5-1 right now and still got a lot of work to do. We're excited for the rest of the season. I think all of our hard work is finally starting to show up."

And Dykes and his staff have never used the university's academic standards as a crutch; it's become one of the program's greatest assets, used not just to set expectations within its own doors but as a crucial draw on the recruiting trail. Even if upward of half of the state of California's top prospects wouldn't pass academic muster for admission, the university's academic credentials has allowed the program to recruit nationally, Dykes said.

"The strengths of this university is that it's the No. 1 public university in the world," he said. "If that doesn't mean something when we're recruiting, we're not recruiting the right guy. It's that simple. If that doesn't ring true to you, then we're wasting our time."

What began as a mandate — to reverse the Golden Bears' academic decline — has become the program's defining characteristic. There's a misconception that Dykes is winning with scheme, with an Air Raid offense designed to catch opponents off-kilter while offsetting any mismatch in talent or personnel. That's not true: Dykes and his staff are winning with a shared belief.

"I don't think this is the shortcut kind of place," said Dykes. "The culture is something that makes this sustain itself. It'll make you great for a long time. The only way you can change a culture is through constant work. It's been a process for everything."

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