(Written by kencraw)

After Saturday’s beat down in Berkeley, I had a vision, a vision that must be shared.

The Bears are going to get better next year. Significantly better.

Year 2 of the Berkeley conversion will result in a far higher level of execution as Dykes and company are able to focus more on execution than on scheme implementation. This young team will be a lot more mature and seasoned. Goff will be significantly improved and will lose the jitters of a Freshman who’s made a couple too many mistakes. The injury plague that has inexplicably gripped this team will not last forever. The Bears will give us early hope that 2014 will include a bowl game.

And while this trend might even extend into year three with so many of today’s young players still on the team, that will be the end of it. Our hope that the trajectory of improvements seen in 2014 continue into the future will find themselves dashed in 2015 and 2016.

Simply put, Dykes won’t win enough games, particularly the critically important ones. Even though massively improved from this year’s 2-10 effort, we likely won’t go to a bowl game, or if we do it’ll be such a low one that nobody of note cares. The recruiting situation will get much worse. We will go back to half empty stadiums full of die-hard Bear fans only.

What good will and program momentum Tedford initially built will slide into a distant memory. The program will return to its steady state position for the last 60 years, lots of 4-8 seasons with just enough home wins and the occasional big upset that keeps the die-hards around.

In between the 2015 and 2016 seasions, Sandy Barbour will be let go because the financial plan built on an assumption of success will go from troublesome to a disaster as season ticket sales plummet. particularly in the ESP sections. The new AD will fire Dykes after the next season, with a year left on his contract. The new AD will be faced with the very difficult decision of who to hire for a massive rebuilding project and probably have very limited funds to do so.

The result will be to go back to the playbook that resulted in hiring Tedford: hire a young coordinator with no head coaching experience from a newly successful BCS conference (NOT mid-major) school. He would like to get somebody with a more polished resume, but both the lack of cash and the lack of intangibles to lure someone like that will prevent it.

And in year 5 we start over again.

(Either that, or I’m reading my Crystal Ball upside down again, like I apparently did in the WSU preview.)