Cal beating Stanford is still everything
Go Bears Forever.
Being a Cal fan means you have to be a bit crazy.
It’s a deeply involved concoction of hope and despair, tradition and conflict, dysfunction and disorder, talent and wasted talent, self-inflicted wounds and sudden treasures, accidental wins and unexpected losses. Being a Cal fan is about push and pull, disengagement and reengagement. It’s a constant balance.
Cal’s greatest moment in modern college football is Cal football in a nutshell: A happy accident of a game where Stanford decided to bizarrely squib it 20 yards, and Cal suddenly threw the most perfect set of laterals in football history. Awesome and incredible, but that’s probably all anyone not from the Bay can tell you about their Cal football knowledge.
Cal is a fandom of what-ifs and what-could’ve-beens. It’s hoping that the dealer throws the perfect sixes, only to see a snake eyes wipe out everything in an instance. Cal will give you hope only to steal it away.
Being a Cal fan isn’t glamorous. It will increase your alcohol budget. You can develop anti-social behavior that isn’t life-affirming. It will lead you to lash out at loved ones, shout at random strangers, and ponder the very nature of existence on Saturday nights.
You have to really, really want to be a Cal fan.
But when it culminates in something like 98 yards to glory, you finally know what it means to be a Cal fan.
Everything.
Being a Cal fan is preparing for the worst.
For two and a half hours on Saturday in Berkeley, we were Cal fans to our very deepest, darkest selves.
Imagine culminating this disappointing 2024 campaign by losing to THIS Stanford team, this awful, muddled, sputtering Stanford team, due to our glaring limitations holding us back yet again.
Cade Uluave being out again threw the Cal defense out of rhythm for much of the first two Stanford drives of the first and the second half, as the Cardinal did enough tinkering and ball moving to get the lead up to 14-0.
But after that, on Senior Day, the defenders in their last Big Game stood up.
Craig Woodson, Teddye Buchanan and Nohl Williams led the Bears with 26 combined tackles, with Woodson breaking up the final Stanford pass of the Big Game.
David Reese forced a fumble that ended a drive and remained an absolute terror.
There was Xavier Carlton and Miles Williams, tag-teaming Ashton Daniels for a sack to end another drive.
Hunter Barth and Liam Johnson stepped up with Buchanan and plugged up the run game to the mark of 2.9 yards per carry.
Lu-Magia Hearns had a huge pass breakup on a deep throw.
There were so many defensive heroes yet again, with 19 Bears logging tackles, eight registering hurries on Daniels, the Cal defensive line mostly having their way on one side, and the constant barrage of hits wearing down a beleaguered, playing over their heads Stanford offense.
It wasn’t glorious, but it was enough.
But for 57+ minutes, Cal was still trailing. And we were letting the intrusive thoughts win.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Being a Cal fan is a tragicomedy, and 2024 exemplified it.
There is hope when you see us roll to 3-0. There is an incredible feeling of relevance in a new conference. There is a groundswell of new blood and fresh faces. There is the transfer portal and a robust NIL.
There is the Calgorithm. There is cultural victory. There is fantifa. There is College GameDay. There is always College GameDay.
And after all of that, we were back at 5-5.
Bad luck, depth attrition, questionable decisions, bad line play, fatigue, travel—all of that culminated in the most unfortunate stretch of Cal football I can remember since 2007. Every game was in our grasp. Every game was lost in a similarly inexplicable way.
Glory was possible so many times. We thought we saw the mountaintop. We never left basecamp.
And it looked as if Stanford was ready to send us tumbling into the abyss.
Being a Cal fan requires expecting the unexpected.
For the entire year, Cal’s entire M.O. was not being able to close a game. The offensive line was not good enough. The defense was exhausted. The kicking was the kicking.
Florida State. Miami. Pitt. NC State. Syracuse. The graveyard of dreams. Even our nice wins like Auburn (five turnovers, seven point win) and Wake Forest (Cal was scoring at will, and yet they had the ball with a chance to win) exposed our limitations. We had yet to prove ourselves fully as a team in the clutch.
So for Cal to find itself again in a winnable game in the 4th quarter against Stanford invited all the bad jokes. How would we lose it this time. How would we not come through.
But something funny happened on the way to defeat. Down 21-7, Fernando Mendoza completed 16 of his final 20 passes.
Trond Grizzell pulled up big in his final Big Game, grabbing the first touchdown.
Jack Endries caught every pass that came his way, with Corey Dyches also finding success in two tight end sets.
Nyziah Hunter learned the art of many Wilcox WRs past, drawing flag after flag to keep our drive alive, then grabbing the huge catch late to put Cal in scoring position.
Mikey Matthews made the sneaky important catches in the middle of drives, keeping them going by working inside.
Ryan Coe kicked a critical field goal that made the difference late.
Jaydn Ott squeaked across the goal-line for the final two points of the Big Game.
Chandler Rogers came in and put the game on ice.
And then Jonathan Brady, a new Big Game hero in lore, pulled down two 4th quarter grabs that will be remembered forever.
There was a sadness to Cal’s start, a malaise that feels like it’s hung over the team since Miami, dreaming of what might had been.
But eventually everyone woke up and locked in, and they were ready to fight until the end. And for one day, our one score game demons were exorcised, and Cal made its dreams reality.
Being a Cal fan means beating Stanford.
Justin Wilcox has been disappointing for much of his regime here. As Cal slogged through that first half,
And despite all of that disappointment, Justin Wilcox has won four Big Games in a row, and five straight Big Games in front of football fans.
Have these Stanford teams been not good? Of course, but it is HARD to beat your rival four times in a row. Only four classes of Cal students have known total victory over Stanford. Two of them came during the post/pre-World War eras, when Cal captured its national championships. The third was honored in the first quarter, when Papa Bear came home with his sons and gave them hug after hug.
That this team of transfers, forgotten recruits, walk-ons, student-athletes and portal stars, that went 5-7, 4-8, 6-6, and now 6-5, STILL denied an entire class of Stanford football players the Axe is deeply meaningful. These are our dudes. They kept going forward, when all seemed lost.
Wilcox understands what this game means to the community, and his players stepped up and delivered. He will always get credit for that. He created a treasure trove of memories against the Trees, and that might be his legacy here.
Being a Cal fan means waiting for moments like “98 yards with my boys.”
If Jaydn Ott exemplified what we wanted a California Golden Bear to be, Fernando Mendoza made us see a UC Berkeley student athlete. Sometimes you see flashes of the player who might be a possible pro prospect. Sometimes you see a kid who is balancing a full Haas Business School workload with his duties as QB1.
It’s hard to understate how much Fernando Mendoza means to the Cal football community. We want him to succeed so badly because we know this man wears his heart on his sleeve. His struggles are our struggles. When he gets smacked in the backfield, we feel the pain. In him, we see us.
This was not supposed to be all on Fernando, but with our offensive line the way it was and Ott completely not himself this year, it did fall on him to carry. And for those final 98 yards, he ran, and threw, and got hit, and threw again, and got hit, and got sacked, and threw, and got sacked, and threw AND got hit, and then Cal was beating Stanford.
Seeing Mendoza have the first 4th quarter game-winning drive for Cal since Chase Garbers in the 2019 Big Game, in Berkeley, in front of 50,000 screaming Cal fans…that will be seared into our memories forever. To then have that catharsis postgame was the moment we want all our players to feel, all our people to feel. To bleed blue and gold like that is a gift.
And did that man bleed to get us all to the 50.
Being a Cal fan is everything. It requires everything.
We have been in the desert. We find an oasis of a good season, and dream of revisiting it one day. In our one day of general community revelry against the Trees, an atmospheric river poured down Saturday morning in an attempt to spite us of our joy. The metaphors are sometimes too obvious.
We had it all this year as a fanbase, and we barely had anything to show for it. We have realigned to the silliest possible arrangement of schools and are unclear as to our future. We have a fandom ready to support these Bears whole-heartedly, but the financials still aren’t quite aligning.
It was a special season many of us will never forget. It was unhinged. It was emotional. It was heartbreaking. It was fulfilling. It was communal. It was wonderful.
Which is why you saw Golden Bears like Mendoza break down on Saturday. For one afternoon in Berkeley as the clouds parted and the sun shined, for every Cal fan on the planet, Cal football righted itself. It was perfect again.
It was so Cal. For better or for worse, it’s always Cal.
And it’s our Axe again.
(If this looks familiar, this is an abbreviated remix of my column of the 2019 Big Game, since the 2024 Big Game was essentially a remix of the 2019 Big Game.)
On the field yesterday you said you din't know what to write. So what do I find today? Re-mix though it may be, you fashion this masterpiece. Nobody gets being a Cal fan better than you. And none of us write about it any better. Go Bears!!!!
Avinash Kunnath has written some GREAT stuff over the years about Cal football and what it means to be a Cal fan, which he deeply, deeply understands as well or better than anyone. …But he outdid himself with is piece. I literally cried when I read this.