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

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?