Former Cal Commit Chris Martin To Florida

Former Cal commit Chris Martin who recently  indicated his desire to transfer has found a new home,  the Florida Gators where he will redshirt and sit out a season before being eligible to play in 2011.   For Cal fans, the only sense of relief is that he did not decide to transfer to another Pac-10 school.  This was a major blow to the recruiting class and future prospects for the Bears.  Martin was already being groomed and looked at as a leader and had the charisma to do so. All I can say is that Cal fans will miss Martin even though he never played a down for the Bears.

Contrary to what some other bloggers and columnists are saying, Cal fans have the right to be somewhat irritated with Martin. Surely most Cal fans reacted with class and wished Martin the best on various message boards and they should not detract from those statements as Cal fans, coaches and media should wish Martin the best and  show that Cal is a classy University with a classy fan base. However, the timing and indecision on Martin's part has surely hurt Cal no matter how anyone wants to look at it.  The loss of Martin hurts Cal's depth at outside linebacker for the coming season.  Martin's commitment also meant that other highly touted defensive end/outside linebackers went elsewhere during recruiting.  A name that seems to be most frequent on message boards is  Owamagbe Odighizuwa who played the exact same position as Martin and chose UCLA after Martin committed to the Bears.  Now we will never know fully why Odighizuwa committed to UCLA and hopefully it had more to do with than just the fact that the Bears had already had a commitment from another highly touted player that plays the same position, but surely Martin's commitment to the Bears did not help in recruiting Odighizuwa and other defensive end/outside linebacker prospects.

Surely, most Cal fans, coaches and players wish Martin the best and realize that 18 year old kids make mistakes and indecision is just part of life at that age. However, I hope that Martin and Cal can learn from these mistakes and avoid these rather precarious situations in the future.