'College GameDay' in Berkeley belongs to the Cal Family forever
They can take wins from us. They can take conferences from us. They can never take that Saturday morning away.
It was all I ever wanted it to be.
It was chaotic. Creative. Hilarious. Uplifting. Communal. Spirited. Loving.
It was pure, unadulterated Cal.
It was everything.
Saturday morning was for the Fam.
The real ones. The sickos. The weirdos. The depressed. The creatives. The geniuses. The future makers and movers of this world. All of us who never thought we’d ever see a day like Saturday morning ever happen.
We had a chance to remind the world of what we are capable of when all eyes are on us. And all Bears of all types delivered, and took our culture worldwide.
Cal cares about football in ways you can’t even begin to fathom. We just needed a chance for you to see it.
There is so much we can learn from Saturday morning.
First and foremost—and something we should never forget—a small group of dedicated, insane, creative Golden Bears can move the cosmos.
Community does not take long to build. In just a month’s time, an individual band of self-driven Cal burners coalesced together into one of the most surreal and impressive fan-driven campaigns we’ve ever seen. They likely gave Cal that final push to finally get College GameDay in Berkeley, and then got called out on the ESPN telecast from start to finish as they so richly deserved to be.
All flowers have to go to everyone who drove this effort, from creating billboards, to making BART run early, to doing interviews with every local and national news outlet under the sun, to creating signs for students to use, to filming, reporting, and documenting every piece of that incredible Saturday morning. Our community moved mountains in ways not even I in my wildest dreams could have anticipated.
Their influence knows no bounds after Saturday. There are kids and Old Blues humming Ott to Go. There are retirees posting memes. The Calgorithm has spread over TikTok. Fans across the nation are adopting Cal as their second favorite fanbase as the content keeps coming.
To all those who thanked me on Saturday, I must emphasize that this entire effort belongs to this wider community. I helped get people to where they needed to be, but this took a village. You can read countless articles on what they’ve done. The contributors keep growing, week by week.
Nearly two decades ago, I started writing about the California Golden Bears, and dreamt of building a community of creative minds that could take our fanbase forward into the next generation. Saturday, I saw that dream realized.
And now the meme team is back at work against Pitt. The job never stops.
There are still so many fights left to win. The administration pulled it together and kudos to everyone in the athletic department for making College GameDay a generally flawless production. However, we know many more battles await on many fronts to keep things moving in the right direction. And of course, the football team needs to keep winning, or the power could ebb and fade.
But on our own, we can continue to make moves. If Cal isn’t going to build these communities, it’s on us to do it in our own space, on our own time.
Start small. Reach out to your Cal friend from college. Start or reboot your group chats from college. Rebuild friendships. If you don’t see any in your area, create watch parties for Cal vs. Pitt. Get those discounted tickets for NC State next week! Bring your signs to meetups and spread the Calgorithm offline! Everything starts small.
Keep building community everywhere. See problems worth solving and start building consensus to make it happen. Write For California will be along for the ride, trying to foster that spirit as much as possible.
College GameDay showed us the potential of our fanbase. Let’s realize it.
(I’ll put a more formal call to action up later, but for the real ones reading every word of my jibber-jabber who want to get a head start, for now I’m going to leave a link to this Google Form if you want to find a way to get connected to our growing community, and we will try and get you to the right people.
While we are terminally online, we’d love to continue to build on what we’ve done on this last month thoughtfully and empathetically. Nothing less is to be expected of the woke mob.)
Post-Game Thoughts: Miami Football
ROB CLAIMS HE TOOK THIS PHOTO BUT IT MUST BE FAKE. AI IS TOO GOOD NOW.
Kudos belong to so many in the Cal Family.
Saturday morning was a triumph for the Cal football team. It belongs to Jaydn Ott for coming back, to Fernando Mendoza for leading a heroic performance in Auburn, to the Takers like Nohl Williams and Marcus Harris for locking down the defensive side of the ball for four games and three quarters, to Jaivian Thomas and Nyziah Hunter stepping up where needed, to Cade Uluave, Teddy Buchanan, Xavier Carlton, Corey Dyches, Jack Endries, Trond Grizzell, and so so many others. The players got us to Saturday morning.
It belongs to the Cal donors who saw a path forward in an increasingly anarchical era of college football, raising NIL money (still $50,000 left in our fundraising goal needed to match a $1 million, $2 million matching goal) needed to reconstruct this squad from scratch, turning it into a team that could beat Auburn, nearly beat Florida State, and come mere seconds from holding off Miami. If you’d told me we’d gone 3-2, I’d have been mildly pleased. The fact that it’s a significant disappointment goes to show how far the expectations were raised.
It belongs to the ungovernable Cal students who showed up early, who tore down the gates early to storm Memorial Glade because they knew how momentous the experience would be. It belongs to the general Cal student body who showed up later and cooled down the vibes. It belongs to Cal Band and Cal Spirit for answering obscenely early wake-up calls to bring the noise. It belongs to an army of early morning volunteers serving donuts and breakfast burritos and water bottles and soft serve bong hits. It belongs to the Cal alum who power napped their way to a 2 am wakeup call to see a day they never thought would unfold, bringing signs that could only be dreamed of in a Berkeley brain, teaching Pat McAfee the chants that will roar in our heads to eternity.
Everyone brought their best, from Daniel in Vans, to Marshawn on the cart, to the Olympians in the stands, to Justin Wilcox breaking down defensive wins on film, to Chancellor Lyons greeting us at 4:30 in the morning, to Rece Davis and Nick Saban throwing off their red ties. The Berkeley Fantifa could not be stopped.
All of us did our part. The burners got all the pub, but we are a small portion of the community that came and brought the passion and energy for hours on end. You showed the nation what Cal can be like at its best.
It’s been hard to write about this one. It’s still so raw. It took days to get enough emotion out of my body to write this without the words dissolving into gibberish. Saturday morning was so close, so personal, so deeply etched in my soul.
I wanted this day to happen for so long. I wanted it to be as perfect as possible.
We divided and conquered, took every interview, chatted with every burner, answered every fan question I could, and tweeted, tweeted, tweeted away. Our team went back to posting every day on every GameDay topic possible. Our Write For California crew put all hands on deck and gave instructions, sign ideas, and passed information across multiple chances.
I just knew there was a non-zero chance we’d never experience this again, and there is only a first time for something one time. I wanted our community to show up loud and proud to bring as many of our fans back home on the pilgrimage back to Berkeley.
And they exceeded my wildest dreams.
I teared up many times on Saturday, from when Rece Davis used my “live in the weird” quote in his GameDay opening monologue, to when the Bears broke out in their fifth Bear Territory chant as Pat McAfee amped himself up yet again, to seeing children with “Woke vs. Coke” signs and burners wearing Calgorithm t-shirts, to seeing variations of the sign ideas we circulated in our posts show up on the Glade over and over and over.
So many people came up to me whom I’ve never met before, thanked me (Again, not just me! It was everyone!) and told me how they felt. There were fans who hadn’t watched a Cal game in person in years, posting up at 4 in the morning. There were several fans who texted with me about whether they should book last minute flights to get here who I saw posted up near the Doe steps. There were older alum who had given up on seeing a meaningful Cal football experience, telling me this was one of the greatest moments of their life. There were friends messaging me overwhelmed by the experience on TV, telling me how impressed all their non-Cal friends were. There were fans walking happily with their Cal hats.
And then my beloved California Golden Blogs sickos, all of them, the original Calgorithm, the ones who had been there long before anyone paid attention to us, posted up right in the middle of it, there and everywhere. The ones I’ve been with for years, dreaming of a day we could all celebrate together with the nation.
Here we were, getting a chance to bask at the center of the college football world, for the first time in a long time.
For one beautiful sunrise, we found ourselves seen and heard, loud and clear. We connected our voices with the world.
Yes, Cal lost. That game is going to hurt for a very long time. But it hurt because we cared.
For the first time in a long time, all of us really, really wanted our perfect morning to become the perfect day, perhaps the greatest in modern Cal football history. The noise from GameDay carried into Saturday night, echoing into those final desperate seconds when victory was just snatched away.
Cal still won so much on Saturday. They proved they cared to a world that was ready to let us go. That caring was the first big step toward rebuilding what we thought was lost. Perhaps it can be a wake-up call that there is so much left for us to do, to get back to where we once were.
Not too long ago, Cal stood among the powers of college football. For over a half-decade, we belonged, we battled with the best, we won as much as anyone out there, with far less investment and far less buy-in from our community. Without the latter, it eventually faded.
We don’t have that team quite yet, but they are moving in the right direction. But we have a focused, growing, and organized community roaring to go, ready to make noise. And I’ll do my best to keep them moving that way.
Keep caring. Take action with your caring. Keep showing others how much you care, so maybe they start caring too.
This is how we survive. This is how we thrive. Let’s build on one of the greatest College GameDays ESPN has ever seen, and show how we can win in abundance yet again.
Go Bears. Together. Always.
Forever.
Beautiful writing, Avi. I am very grateful for you.
I cried for the first 15 minutes of GameDay. It was so awesome. I live in Ohio now and it was great to get many texts from my friends here who wrote to say, "I get CAL now and I get you too! Go Bears!"
Hope lives. Football has to keep winning, sure, but the hope generated by GameDay last week will last a long while.
Go Bears.
Thank you so very much, for all you do and have done to give voice to so many of us and rally us toward a better place. Leadership. That's what I'd call what you do. Thank you.