How did Cal Twitter enter the zeitgeist of college football culture?

A combination of memes, wit, and trollery have powered the online fans of the California Golden Bears into the middle of the discourse.

Credit: Dalmcm

If you are not terminally online, you might not be aware that there is a revolution stirring online, and Cal Twitter is entirely at the heart of it.

These are statements from actual top people covering college football.

By yesterday, Cal Twitter had become so powerful, it had filtered its way to the newspaper of choice by many intellectuals hungover Londoners who just spent all night betting away their Christmas bonuses, the Daily Mail.

What exactly happened? It all really exploded with one tweet after Auburn.

That Tweet has generated FIVE MILLION views, 4K+ retweets, and 67K+ favorites. It is the Inside Out 2 of Cal Twitter this year, except instead of a heartwarming story, you have the college football world joining in a Hugh Freeze haterade pour.

From there, it snowballed.

Mainstream writers were quickly converted.

We became a community for all of college football to embrace.

How did this takeover happen so quickly?

Brief product explainer: The new Twitter algorithm is very susceptible to high engagement from a subset of users that attract attention and interest from a large crowd.

Brief vibes explainer: Cal fans are demure, mindful and great at Photoshop and AI art prompting.

Twitter became the center of younger Cal fan discourse

Cal fans online have always kind of been like this.

At California Golden Blogs back in the day, inanity was a way of life. There were memes being generated annually, with Cal fans of all ages participating. Of course, that was mostly isolated to 1000 comment sections.

Sadly (and perhaps happily for the sake of my professional career), we had to leave Golden Blogs, and onto Twitter everyone went, and a new age of Cal memes emerged.

However, the Bears stayed in isolation, ensconced from the greater college football world, because…

New paradigms

No one could watch the Pac-12

Cal has essentially been isolated in the Pac-12 for most of the Internet era. And Cal has often been an afterthought, as they stumble to early conference losses, and are then immediately forgotten.

This year? Cal is in the ACC, a conference that people east of the Mississippi generally pay attention toward. They landed one of the most impressive early wins of the year at Auburn. They will have three of their first four games broadcast to a national audience.

The Bears typify the very strange landscape of 2025 college football, and that has led to all sorts of new and interesting connections we previously didn’t have.

Turning stereotypes on its head

The Bay Area has been a bit of a punching bag in some outlets of the political spectrum. It’s not hard to project that a lot of the vitriol directed toward Cal and Stanford in realignment discussions was because of the region they originated from, and the general political leanings of those who went there.

Instead of running away from the stereotypes, Cal Twitter has run headfirst into them and embraced them wholeheartedly, with a playful and lighthearted spirit.

Nothing to lose

With Cal sitting on the precipice of being left behind in college football, “tweet through it” has become the way of the game. If the Bears are going to be playing an existential game of risk year after year, go down tweeting!

Obviously, we are in the nascent stage of Cal Twitter’s popularity, so who knows what it will evolve into as it becomes more mainstream. And of course there will be memes that step on or cross the line, so we will also have to learn and evolve as the community grows.

But for now, Cal Twitter appears to be the highlight of the college football world. And we have to ride with it while it lasts.