Cal Having Historically Bad Basketball Season

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If Cal goes winless in league play — it figures to be an underdog in each of its six remaining regular season games — it will have done so despite playing in one of the weakest power conferences college basketball has seen in years.

At the moment, the Pac-12 is flirting heavily with becoming the first single-bid power conference since the NCAA tournament expanded in 1985.

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Non Pac-12 teams that have defeated Cal this season:

Yale (by 17)
Saint Mary’s (by 13)
San Francisco (by 19)
Fresno State (by 22)
Seattle (by 9)

The Bears’ five wins this season have come against 10-14 Hampton, 13-12 Santa Clara, 15-9 San Diego State, 5-17 Cal Poly (by 1), and 3-20 San Jose State.

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Cal hasn’t just gone 0-12 in arguably the worst power conference of all-time, more times than not, the Bears have been throttled by these average teams. Their 12 defeats have come by an average of 13.3 ppg. Half of those losses have come by 14 points or more, and just one — an 84-81 home loss to Stanford on Feb. 3 — has come by fewer than eight points.

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Despite playing just the 80th-toughest schedule in Division-I, Cal registers as one of the worst defensive teams in the country. Out of 353 D-I squads, the Bears rank 333rd in adjusted defensive efficiency. They are allowing opponents to produce an effective field goal percentage of 57.8 percent, the worst of any power conference team since Ken Pomeroy began tracking the statistic in 2002, and the second-worst of any team in the country.

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