Cal football is about the hope

Keep the hope.

Photo via Rob Hwang.

Cal fans have to live in hope.

Every August, we take a look at our Bears. The team generally is patching together depth issues at multiple positions. With other schools fully engaged in the arms race, Cal is generally being ruthlessly outrecruited by its competitors with future NFL pros littering nearly every opponent’s roster. The Bears historically have rarely received full administrative backing of its university, so we know there are internal issues that will further put the team behind the eight ball. And the media is not counting on us to do anything.

And then despite all of that, against our better judgement, hope wins.

Many of us project eight wins. Ten wins. Rose Bowl. Title.

Some of it is in jest, but there is always a tinge of belief that THIS is the time it’s happening.

Cal puts up 58 points on a skelton North Texas defense? Sound the banners!

Cal sees one player explode for a career game. A Heisman is on the horizon!

Cal takes a double digit lead on USC! Is this where it all turns around?

Cal squeaks out four wins in a row! Is this the year?

Cal fans have to live on hope, because living in reality would crush us.

The Bears have had three winning seasons in 12 years. They have not had a winning conference record in 14 years. They have not won a Power 5 game outside the Bay Area in five years. They have let two winless teams get their only wins in back-to-back years. They have seen their conference disintegrate due to greed and incompetence, and will now be trekking cross-country the next decade on a lowball deal to try and stay alive in power college athletics.

If hope didn’t exist, we’d all be buried in our feelings.

No. Hope is better.

Hope is what keeps us coming back. Hope is what has to keep this whole thing going. Even when the cracks are as visible as the Hayward fault, the Bears must hope that Cal will figure it out and start winning again.

Hope is a dangerous thing.

But when hope hits, it can be a beautiful thing.

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Hope doesn’t even have to be grand. It can start with a simple promise, long echoed by our Cal community before every Big Game.

“See you on the 50.”

It has been our rallying cry, every year. That regardless if the odds are for or against us, no matter the quality of the opponent, we will find our people at the end of the day.

And so we meet again, on The Farm, three trips running:

sloane: why do you keep telling all your friends you’ll ‘meet them at the 50’? me: oh, because that’s where i’ll meet them
-Grant Marek

Big Games in Palo Alto have long become my favorite tradition of being a Cal fan, because they are basically a mini-home game for the Bears. The real ones all show up and show out. Stanford rarely plays well enough at home to ever truly feel comfortable, because Cal shows up and drowns out the tapping of phones from the Cardinal faithful.

And hope did deliver for Cal fans everywhere. This was a very workmanlike victory for the Bears, without many theatrics, with small hints of anxiety. But for the second trip to South Bay, it was mostly a very comfortable, relaxed, joyous experience in South Bay.

After weeks of promise, Fernando Mendoza finally authored his best performance as a California Golden Bear, nailing clutch throw after clutch throw in traffic, mostly to Trond Grizzell, as Stanford tried to clamp up the run game. Once he softened the defense, Jaydn Ott did the rest, punishing the Stanford defense until they could take no more. The Bears defense did not get Ashton Daniels down much, but the relentless pressure disrupted him enough to force desperation throw after throw.

Stanford fans were their usual quiet, dispersed, confused selves, checking their crypto wallets, Google Traffic reports, and dinner reservations, briefly cheering on the five to ten plays the Trees did something interesting. When Cal took a double-digit lead in the second half and the rain drizzled a little harder than usual, the Cardinal started trickling out into the night, ready to plan more white collar crime.

And thus the Bears started moving down the bleachers and stormed Bear Territory for the third time in a row.

These Cal players care a lot about beating Stanford. Justin Wilcox has struggled a lot in Berkeley, but he has understood at least that assignment, and imparted that lesson to his players. Cal has always put their best effort forward in Big Game, and given it their best every year. It’s paid off with three straight Axes.

Cal lost nine straight Big Games to Stanford. Some close, many disasters. It was two classes of Bear fans mostly lost, as many abandoned Cal football at the worst time for the program to be abandoned. Executing this assignment has kept the fans engaged, the alumni invested, the players excited. It produces hope.

The Big Game is our hopium machine, and it isn’t full consolation for otherwise underwhelming results. But if it delivers enough, it starts feeling bigger.

Nam described it well:

The pandemonium starts at zero. People deciding to climb over the fence; you, trying to slip the gap by the opening, running toward the fifty with no specific goal in mind. You almost knock your own glasses off your face somehow, as blue and gold start to surge onto the field, each person trying to capture the present in their own ways. You scream into open air to no one in particular, and it bleeds into the background of others’ memories; someone’s phone has surely caught you looking silly and disheveled in your hype, your euphoria.

Imagine if these Bears can learn to channel that hope week-to-week. Maybe we can translate that hope into a lot more.

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I cannot tell you what the future holds for the California Golden Bears.

They could be in the ACC for the rest of the decade making red-eye flights to Raleigh and Syracuse. The ACC could fall apart in a year and we could be scrambling for an even more bizarre eleventh hour deal. We could find new leadership devoted to remaking the California Golden Bears into something that’s trying to meaningfully compete. We could see some financial analyst crunch the numbers and tell everyone in charge to give up the game.

We are headed for uncharted waters come Sunday morning. What Cal will look like on the other side is uncertain.

So for now, all I can do is hold onto nights like Saturday. And hope.

I hope Cal can carry the momentum into its final Pac-12 game in UCLA, and finish its time in this conference right.

I hold onto the hope that one day, we can celebrate a full season of nights like this. Then many years. Then a decade.

I hope that Cal can learn from a brutal Pac-12 campaign where they competed plenty, and take those learnings into an ACC that is ripe for opportunity.

I hope Justin Wilcox can figure out the NIL situation, figure out the necessary tinkering to build the right coaching staff yet again, and make it work in his most crucial year yet.

I hope Mendoza and Ott become the QB-RB tandem we’ve lacked for almost two decades, and put it all together for a momentous 2024 campaign.

I hope Cal can land some impact players in the portal and really set us up for success in a year where everything is in flux and a winnable schedule is ahead of us.

I hope Cal can start winning a lot, because in all honesty they need to start winning a lot. Our survival depends on us being competitive in a way we haven’t been in a long time. The margin for error is zero.

And I hope I can see all of my people (and if you are reading this, odds are you my people) on the 50 again, one year from now, when Cal keeps the Axe for the fourth year in a row.

Go Bears. Always.

Keep the hope.