I had heard rumors of this Tuesday morning, but I was still surprised when the news broke today that Basketball Head Coach Ben Braun was fired.

After watching the Bears flail against a eminently beatable Ohio State, I think it is probably wise to be looking for another coach. There’s too much talent on this team for them to be playing so mediocre.

I’ve been re-acquainting myself with the SAHPC court case and all that’s been going on. The part that is most frustrating to me is how long everything takes. At this point, Cal has pretty much lost another year. A ruling at this point only gives the University 4 months before football season to make progress on construction. They’ll likely defer any real progress until after football season.

In any case, just so everyone is clear, I wanted to give the complete timeline to show just how slow things are going:

• 12/11/06: Original case filed just days after EIR approved by Regents (and yes, that’s 2006)
• 1/23/07: Hearing held on Preliminary Injunction
• 1/29/07: Preliminary Injunction granted (notice how quick that was)
• 4/23/07: First documents submitted for hearings
• 7/11/07: First hearing briefs submitted
• 9/19/07: Start of “2 day hearing” to decide case (hearing delayed from original June estimate)
• 10/11/07: Final day of “2 day hearing”
• 10/26/07: Final briefs filed on hearing (90-day timer starts today, ends 1/24/08)
• 12/10/07: Judge orders additional evidence be submitted
• 12/26/07: Plaintiffs object to submitting evidence
• 1/11/08: Hearing on ojbection to additional evidence
• 1/23/08: Plaintiffs objection denied
• 2/22/08: Additional evidence submitted by both sides
• 3/20/08: Hearing on additional evidence (90-day time starts today, ends 6/18/08)

It’s now been a full 15 months since the original lawsuit was filed and all we’ve been able to do is submit our case, have a hearing, wrangle over evidence in those hearings, and just BARELY start the 90-day timer on the judge making a ruling. We’re now fully two months past the original 90-day deadline that got set aside when the judge decided she didn’t have enough information in the original hearing. A hearing that I might add was scheduled for 2 days but took nearly 3 weeks. There’s no reason the judge couldn’t pull a maneuver like that again, resetting the 90-day timer yet again.

Also note that there have yet to be any appeals or any other additional cases that could further drag this out.

How many times in one category am I allowed to say: unbelievable!

Hello Bear Fans!

I’m back in business starting today and it looks like I didn’t miss much. There was no court ruling. Cal Basketball has played mediocre enough to make it to the NIT. Spring practice hasn’t started for football. What else is there?

Just so everyone knows, here’s the plan for blogging:

1. I’ll post on the Cal vs. OSU NIT game tonight
2. I’ll post on spring practice and am hoping to be able to go down a couple times to watch scrimages and the such
3. I’ll give updates on the trial and why the ruling is taking so long
4. I’ll take us on a walk down memory lane and the 2005 season (more on this in a sec)
5. Later in the spring I’ll review each of the 2007 games

About reviewing past games, I’m become a big fan of keeping DVD archives of every game. There’s always an excuse to go back and look at the old games. Part of making the DVD’s is to watch my finished product on the TV to make sure there were no writing errors and it plays on my DVD player. Since I recently got all of the 2005 games, I’ve got to go through and watch them all. I figure if I’m watching them, I might as well blog about them.

I’ll be doing the same thing with the 2007 season which I still need to download from my DVR and edit our the comercials. My goal is to do 1 a week of those leading up to fall practice.

I hope everyone is excited for the upcoming season as I am!

The server my website is hosted on just had a major upgrade and as all upgrades do, caused some problems to my website. The most visible of these was that I had to rename the ‘stats’ section of the website to be ‘statistics’ because their new admin features linked ‘stats’ to their stuff. This was stupid on their part, but that’s besides the point of this post.

The point here is that, for the last week or so the stats section wasn’t working. I’ve now fixed the problem and everything should be working as before. Please leave a comment if you see any problems.

Also note that if you added a bookmark/favorite that points directly to the stats page, you’re going to need to update it for the new location.

Back for blogging about Cal in less than 2 weeks.