Below is a column from college sports writer John Canzano. You can sign up for his Bald Faced Truth newsletter at johncanzano.com.

What’s wrong with basketball at Cal?

For the first time in Cal’s 116-year program history, the Bears posted three consecutive 20-loss records. This season, which ended with a first-round loss in the Pac-12 Tournament, was the Bears’ worst ever, a 3-29 campaign that led to coach Mark Fox’s firing Thursday

Cal’s dismal season wasn’t just embarrassing, it dragged down the Pac-12’s NET rankings. The Bears are currently ranked No. 313 out of 363 Division I men’s basketball programs, second-worst among Power Five members.

“When I was hired, I understood the challenges,” Fox said last month after a loss at Utah. “We knew that we had a massive rebuild in front of us and my athletic director was very honest about the rebuilding he needed to do in his area.”

Fox’s record in three-plus seasons at Cal: 38-87.

His Pac-12 Conference record: 17-61.

Is Cal investing enough in basketball? Can the program be fixed? And will a coaching change make a difference?

“The next guy will probably just lose, too,” said one program insider last month.

The lingering questions in Berkeley feel as heavy as a bag of bricks. But if Cal is going to win games again in the Pac-12 Conference, it needs to get real with itself.

The Bottom Line >> The 2021-22 Cal basketball season is an interesting case study. Fox’s team posted a 12-20 record and finished 10th in the conference. It was a lousy season. But the men’s basketball program posted one notable victory last year.

It turned a profit. The haul: $954,846.

UCLA reached the Elite Eight last March, but Cal beat the pants off the Bruins when it came to the bottom line. Despite the losing record, the Bears profited $153,000 more than UCLA. Cal also beat another perennial contender, Oregon, by clearing $145,000 more than the Ducks last year.

In the fiscal year ending in June 2022, UCLA spent $11.9 million on men’s basketball. Oregon poured $10.9 million into its program. Cal played in a mostly-empty home arena and didn’t generate large sport-specific donations but kept costs down, only spending $7.5 million.

Between Cal and its conference peers, the largest disparity in the men’s basketball investment came in coaching salaries, travel expenditures and game-day costs.

UCLA spent $1.5 million on team travel in 2022. Oregon spent $1.1 million. Cal’s men’s basketball travel expenses were only $652,000, in part, because the program more frequently utilized commercial flights.

That didn’t mean they stopped using charters entirely. After a February loss to Utah, the Bears boarded a chartered Saab 2000 twin-engined high-speed airliner for the trip back to the Bay Area.

“Cal has consistently chartered to and from games this season,” a Cal spokesperson said.

A current Cal player, however, said that the team did not use charter airline travel for every conference road game this season. The team used a commercial flight to make trips to the two Arizona schools, among others. Cal confirmed that it used a commercial flight to fly between Boulder and Salt Lake City the weekend of the Utah game.

Pac-12 Deputy Commissioner Jamie Zaninovich is the conference’s supervisor of basketball. He recently told me that the conference doesn’t mandate charter flights. It does, however, encourage them.

“The programs that are succeeding,” Zaninovich said, “most of that has to do with investment.”

Creative Solutions >> The Cal men’s basketball team shares its practice facility. Not just with the women’s team, but with the entire student body. The Bears hold their practices at UC Berkeley’s campus Recreational Sports Facility.

The RSF is open to members of the student body seven days a week. The venue’s offerings include lap swimming, martial arts, intramural sports, table tennis, intramural basketball, badminton and volleyball.

One campus insider told me that it’s not unusual for Fox’s practices to be interrupted by curious students, who poke their heads into the gym thinking it might be one of the various scheduled “Open Gym” sessions.

Kuany Kuany, a Cal forward, said: “You can still get your shots up. It may not be as often as you would like, but as long as we still have access, no one is making it an excuse.”

Former Cal coach Ben Braun came up with a creative solution during his tenure (1996-2008). Braun forged a relationship with the Golden State Warriors. His players took a 20-minute bus ride from campus to the NBA franchise’s practice facility in downtown Oakland.

In his first season, Braun said he would try to go into the RSF during the winter months, but soon realized the university had turned the heat off while students were on break. His players could see their breath in the air. It’s a cost-cutting practice that still exists, Braun said.

Braun said: “It kills you in recruiting. Even your own players are going, ‘What is this?’”

In his 12 seasons as head coach at Cal, Braun posted a .587 win percentage. Cal reached the NCAA Tournament five times and advanced to the Sweet 16 once. Not because Braun had deep resources — he didn’t — but because he was creative and tireless.

When Cal’s administration balked at the costs of various things — chartered flights, adding a film room and a dedicated strength and conditioning coach among them — he called on donors himself, enlisting the help of the Maxwell Family (founders of PowerBar), the Goldman family (Cal’s largest current donor) and Bob Haas (a Cal graduate and the grand nephew of Levi Strauss)

“I raised every freaking penny of it,” Braun said. “You have to be creative. You have to get the funding for these things.”

“It’s what you had to do to get what you needed to win.”

Question of Leadership >> Fox went 4-41 in Pac-12 road games during his tenure. The losses are difficult to ignore. His recruiting classes don’t make a strong case for retention, either. From 2020 to 2022, the Bears had the No. 89-, No. 70- and No. 91-ranked classes. The 2023 class is currently ranked 56th by 247Sports.

“How do you get better players?” said Braun. “You didn’t charter like some others. You have no practice facility. You’re not going to get the best players. You’re going to get some good academics, though.”

Athletic director Jim Knowlton’s background is in civil engineering. He played college ice hockey and was a team captain at Army West Point. He has a well-respected military service record, a good handshake, and previously served as the athletic director at the Air Force Academy.

But is he right for Cal?

In 2018, Knowlton became the latest in a line of curious AD hires in Berkeley. None of the last four Cal athletic directors arrived with a background that included personal experience with football or men’s basketball.

Said one UC Berkeley athletic department employee: “They’re clueless. The ADs they hire have backgrounds in rowing, field hockey, ice hockey and wrestling. It’s not what you need if you want to promote revenue-generating sports.”

Cal’s biggest athletic successes in recent years have come in rowing, water polo, swimming and diving. The women’s basketball program went 4-14 in conference play this season. The football team finished 4-8 last season and is 10-18 in the last three combined seasons.

And with men’s basketball, boosters and former Cal players are growing weary watching the program’s low-flying trajectory.

“Everybody is culpable,” Braun said. “You can’t pin this on COVID, or fans not coming out, or no practice facility. There’s a combination of things that contribute to it. I had challenges. We were on the NCAA death penalty, we didn’t have a gym, we had to travel with backpacks on a bus to practice.

“It’s all related. It snowballs. They can change the coach — it won’t fix it.”