When you think of a one-score Cal game, what kind of game do you envision? For most of us, it’s probably some low-scoring rockfight not unlike the Auburn or ASU games from earlier this season. Since Wilcox took over, Cal teams do not get into high-scoring Sonnyball shootouts. In 2021 the 32-34 loss to TCU felt like something out of the Bizarro World after watching the Bears struggle to break the 30-point barrier over the previous several years. The only Cal game remotely close to this was the 44-45 loss to Arizona in 2017, and that game was aided by a couple overtime periods that inflated the score well past the 31-31 tie at the end of regulation. And at that point we were only eight games removed from the Dykes era, so high-scoring affairs were still quite familiar. Saturday’s game was an odd excursion into some uncharted territory. How will it fit into our usual taxonomy of game types?
The Good, the Bad, and the Rock Fights: Cal vs. USC Football
In which our final matchup against USC turns into the most epic pillowfight of the Wilcox Era
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