Jeff Tedford believes the decision to be removed as Cal's football coach was made weeks in advance of the season finale, according to an exclusive interview recently conducted in the San Jose Mercury News.
Cal officially released Tedford from his duties as head coach on November 20, bringing an end to the longest active football coaching tenure in the Pac 12. According to Tedford, there was no chance of swaying the decision any other way.
"Her decision had been made, and there wasn't really anything I could say," Tedford said to the San Jose Mercury News. "It was very cut and dried. No explanations," Tedford said. "After it was all said and done, I think their minds were made up a couple weeks before."
"This was an extraordinarily difficult decision, one that required a thorough and thoughtful analysis of a complex set of factors," Cal Director of Athletics Sandy Barbour said in a statement in November.
In the interview Tedford also suggests the decision may have been influenced from higher up within the administration. Low academic scores from the football program were a concern for the school and Tedford, who says he was as concerned as anyone else over the academic performance, believes it played a role. Barbour responded by suggesting part of the reason for the low scores was partly influenced by players leaving before the end of a semester to train for a shot at the NFL.
"It was not a matter of football players flunking out," Barbour said. Barbour also noted that Cal's academic support staff had tripled in size since 2004, but Tedford said "There seemed to always be a stumbling block financially," when it came to having an adequate academic staff available.
Cal hired Sonny Dykes from Louisiana Tech on December 5.
Tedford touched on a few more subjects related to Cal's performance in 2012 as well. Read the full exclusive story from San Jose Mercury News.
Comments