It’s a transition year for Cal, but the Golden Bears still have plenty of firepower

Check out the advanced-stats glossary here. Below, a unique review of last year’s team, a unit-by-unit breakdown of this year’s roster, the full 2016 schedule with win projections for each game, and more.

Anytime you have your best season in eight years, it should be cause for celebration. Sonny Dykes took over in 2012 after Jeff Tedford had gone 15-22 over his final three seasons; Dykes burned the depth chart to the ground and went 1-11 in his first season, but his Golden Bears improved by four wins in 2014 and three more in 2015.

On paper, Cal has gone from 67th to 30th to 13th in Off. S&P+ and improved from 108th to 84th in Def. S&P+ last season as well. For a three-year rebuild at a non-traditional power, this is an unquestioned success. And a Dykes signee, Jared Goff, just got selected first in the NFL Draft.

There weren’t many good feelings this offseason, though. For one thing, the defense is still bad. Improvement basically meant allowing fewer than 400 points and 6,000 yards. A team with a tempo offense is going to give up points and yards, but adjusting for pace and opponent doesn’t really help Cal much.

And Dykes seemed to spend most of December and January trying to get out of town. He was linked to the vacant positions at Missouri, South Carolina, Virginia, and, if it had actually come open, Houston. It was mentioned as soon as early-November that Dykes’ return to Berkeley in 2016 would be “a surprise.”

Was this simply the machinations of an agent trying to get his client a bigger deal, or is Dykes really unhappy out West? There’s no question that he doesn’t have many long-term ties in the Pacific time zone. He went to school at Texas Tech; his coaching upbringing was limited mostly to Kentucky, Louisiana, and Texas.

Still, this felt mostly like machinations. The school went without a permanent athletic director nearly a full calendar year in 2014-15, and Dykes was pushing to get both a raise/extension for himself and a bigger salary pool for his assistants.

In mid-December, he got it. Dykes had to face more adversity when offensive coordinator Tony Franklin unexpectedly left to move back to Tennessee, but he made a solid replacement hire in Jake Spavital. And in May, he landed the biggest fish left in the 2016 recruiting class, receiver Demetris Robinson.

So ... the future’s bright and stable? Maybe? Hard to say. But if there are any sour feelings -- and there usually are when a coach so openly attempts to get out of town (or at least force his bosses to think he wants to leave town) -- then this fall might not sweeten them. Dykes must replace Goff, his top six receivers, a four-year starting guard, six of his top eight defensive linemen, five of his top seven linebackers, and two starters in the secondary.

Dykes has recruited pretty well, particularly on offense, and he has secured graduate transfer quarterback Davis Webb from Texas Tech’s QB-friendly offense. There are quite a few interesting pieces here.

But after their best S&P+ rating since 2008 and best record since 2009, one has to figure there’s a backwards step coming. The size of said step will probably dictate just how long he gets to move forward again.

There was one more reason for bad feelings: the tease of expectations. With Oregon falling into a funk and Stanford’s loss to Northwestern throwing us off the “Stanford is really, really good” scent, it seemed Cal could be a division contender.

The Bears started 5-0 with wins over Texas, Washington, and Washington State and a romp over what turned out to be an excellent SDSU. The defense was playing pretty well, aside from getting caught unawares when Texas’ freshman quarterback Jerrod Heard was having his coming-out party; allowing 44 points to UT was pretty gross, but that was the only time Cal had allowed more than 30. And with that offense, that’s really all you need.

Then the D allowed 30 points to Utah, 40 to UCLA, and 44 to Oregon. And the offense started to get in its own way a lot. And a 5-0 start begat a run of five losses in six games.

There was a rally -- the offense punished completely outmanned ASU and Air Force defenses in late-season wins -- but the funk was made worse by the promise that seemed to exist pre-funk.

The run game could have produced a few more big plays, and Cal could have started games a little more quickly. Those are really the only critiques you can come up with for an offense that ranked 13th in S&P+ and produced both high-class efficiency and explosiveness.

The Golden Bears were poster boys of sorts for a new way of measuring experience and continuity. On offense, it appears that returning your quarterback and pass catchers makes the biggest difference in your year-to-year improvement. Cal returned its passer and most of its catchers and thrived.

Great. So what happens when it loses those things?

Note: players in bold below are 2016 returnees. Players in italics are questionable with injury/suspension.

Cal’s list of positive assets is still pretty lengthy.

That’s a lot! Continuity matters, and it would be shocking to see Cal avoiding a drop-off, but it’s not hard to see the Bears still ranking pretty high. This isn’t going to be a total collapse by any means.

Cal’s offensive line was a spread stereotype: good at protecting the passer on passing downs, good at opening up running holes against defenses always fearing the pass, not great at short-yardage blocking.

Losing guard Jordan Rigsbee hurts, but you’ve got 84 career starts returning among four players, and junior left tackle Aaron Cochran is a behemoth of a man (6’8, 350). If either Semisi Uluave or JUCO transfer Dwayne Wallace turns into a decent starting guard, the line should end up as good or better than last year.

One of the interesting questions for this year is, how often will they be asked to run block? Spavital’s version of the spread at Texas A&M was certainly pass-first but a little bit less so -- the Aggies rushed 53 percent of the time on standard downs, 32 percent on passing downs. Plus, if you’ve got all the components of your run game returning and a brand, spanking new passing game, your inclination might be to run more regardless.

Dykes is pretty Leachian in his commitment to the pass, but we might see at least a little bit less commitment this fall.

Art Kaufman is a glutton for punishment. The coaching nomad is entering his fourth year in a thankless job: defensive coordinator for an air raid coach. His unit is guaranteed to take on more possessions than almost any other defense in the country, and despite solid recruiting, the Cal defense is probably never going to have the depth it needs to properly counter that. Almost nobody does.

Still, you have to figure Kaufman enjoys actual stability. He hasn’t made it four years in the same place since the late-1990s, when he was David Cutcliffe’s defensive coordinator at Ole Miss. He was a D.C. for one year each at UNC, Texas Tech, and Cincinnati before landing in Berkeley.

There are two ways to approach defense in a situation like this: You can either take the Phil Bennett-at-Baylor approach and attack as hard as you can in the hopes of generating a turnover or three, or you take a more passive approach, going into bend-don’t-break mode, preparing yourself to take advantage of whatever mistake comes your way, and assuming that their offense will make more mistakes than yours. The former is more fun, but the latter work just as well (or work no less poorly) ... at least, as long as you’re not in a conference with a bunch of nearly flawless offenses.

The Pac-12 has quite a few good offenses, doesn’t it?

Cal indeed improved defensively but was still quite poor. The secondary was rather passive, and the run defense degraded significantly as attrition took its toll. Nine defensive linemen made at least 7 tackles in 2015, but only two of them played in all 13 games. There was no chemistry or continuity up front, and this was the primary reason why the D went from decent to less-than-decent as the fall unfolded.

Maybe the injury bug is kinder this time around, but there’s so much turnover in the front seven. Of the aforementioned nine linemen with seven tackles, only four are back. And most of the linebacker two-deep is gone as well. The line could get a nice boost from youngsters -- sophomores Cameron Saffle and Kennedy Emesibe and four redshirt freshmen could provide solid athleticism. But five players had at least two sacks for Cal last year, and the only one returning (Cameron Walker) plays nickel back.

As with a lot of Pac-12 defenses, if the front holds up, the back might be alright. This wasn’t the most disruptive unit in the world, but Walker appears to be well-suited for the nickel role, even at just 185 pounds, safety Damariay Drew can attack the line of scrimmage, and corner Darius Allensworth is solid. Plus, two four-star redshirt freshmen (Jaylinn Hawkins, Malik Psalms) and a JUCO transfer (Marioshawn Franklin) could be ready to contribute. This is easily the deepest unit on the Cal defense this year.

But if we assume the run defense regresses because of the turnover up front, I’m not sure the pass defense improves enough to make up the difference. If this defense improves again, it’s simply because the bar is pretty low.

Few things are more demoralizing for a team with a great offense and iffy defense than allowing a big kick return after a touchdown. But as Cal had the second-least efficient kickoffs game in the country, that was a common occurrence. Matt Anderson’s touchback rate was under 20 percent, and coverage was more abstract than concrete for the Bears. Things can change quickly in special teams, but that is a must-change.

Cal is projected to fall to around 50th in S&P+, and it’s pretty clear why: The Bears have no continuity on offense in exactly the places you need to have it, and any offensive regression might not be met with defensive progress.

That said, the offense has lots and lots of pieces. A new offensive coordinator might be able to come in and affect positive change with a new quarterback who really isn’t all that new and a receiving corps with mountainous upside. If things click, then another top-25 to 40 performance is very much on the table.

Regardless of whether we’re talking about the No. 30 or 60 team, the schedule is brutal. Five of the last six opponents are projected in the S&P+ top 20, and the first half of the schedule is tricky -- two decent opponents on the road (SDSU, ASU) and two good opponents at home (Texas, Utah). The result: After the weird season opener against Hawaii in Australia, Cal returns to the States with six consecutive games between 35 and 60 percent in win probability. That’s an incredible stretch, and the results will dictate whether we’re talking about this as a rebuilding year or another bowl campaign.