College Football World Praises Cal Twitter for 'College GameDay' to Berkeley Role
No one knows at this time the exact reason why College Gameday picked us, but if the media is giving us props, we're happy to take credit.
Look, I’d love for our crazy online Golden Bear community to take credit for the reason that College Gameday is in Berkeley at Memorial Glade this Saturday.
So I will. Because that’s what the world is telling me.
When The Stanford Tree has nice things to say about the fans of the California Golden Bears, you know it’s been a special week for our online fans.
How do you even begin to process our new conference using the hashtag our little community cobbled together midweek to get this College Gameday campaign in high gear?
At some point, we will really have to dive deep and understand everything that just transpired. Because I’ve never seen anything like it.
The media reaction around the country was beyond positive.
Joe Lago, The Big Lead (and Cal grad!)
Amy Trask, CBS Sports (Cal grad)
Ashley Adamson, Big Ten Network
Jessica Smetana, Dan LeBetard Show
Andrea Adelson, ESPN
Nicole Auerbach, NBC Sports
Stewart Mandel, The Athletic
Jane Coaston, The New York Times
Kyle Bonagura, ESPN
Allen Stiles, Sactown 1140 Radio
Adam Rittenberg, ESPN
Rodger Sherman, sports journalist at large
You’ve earned your flowers, Cal Twitter. They’ve bloomed to a degree we couldn’t possibly realize.
It’s been a remarkable few weeks, and the most remarkable of all the weeks is now underway.
Amidst all of the conference realignment and the expectation that we are heading to some kind of a "super league" of the top 40 teams or so, there's been one niggling detail that it seems people always leave out: that somebody will have to lose. Won't there be cellar-dwellers in the "super league" too? And who will it be?
Everybody wants to win. But you can't win 'em all. Losing sucks, period. But we are only interested in teams that win it all, right? Can a team, or a program, be interesting in and of itself, not because of winning, but despite winning, or even in a loss?
It would seem to me that THAT is what Cal has always been to its own fans. Not the cliché "lovable loser", but something more than that. I think what Cal Twitter has done, or hopefully is in the never-ending process of doing, is that it is telling its rich story in this new way. And it's doing it very very well by mastering the medium.
Other teams have perhaps just been letting their W-L record do the talking for them. That's great if your W-L record and your (recent) football excellence can do that. But what happens when the wins dry up and nobody wants to talk about you anymore? Thankfully, social media has an answer to that. The Sickos Committee were an early example, and the Burners have now elevated and focused that kind of energy into their own beloved team.
Cal fandom had to look deep into that dark question, deep into itself over the last decade and a half. And then most deeply into the darkest part of the dark last year, contemplating its own death. Somewhere in that darkness these fans, these leaders of the collective, these burners, found a spark, a spark in that deep, deep darkness. And someone said, "Fiat Lux."
Wilcox if you win this one I’ll never say anything bad about you again promise