I love that people underestimate us. There is so much bias against us that an opponent like Auburn doesn't just lose against us, their fanbase gets massive cognitive dissonance and they turn against themselves. I've been reading/watching a lot of their tweets, bulletin boards, video comments, and media reactions and their tears are so so so delicious.
Nick, I have always enjoyed your very even keeled critiques of our beloved Golden Bear football team. Today I sensed deep pride and satisfaction from you and a hope that our team has finally turned the corner toward a much better future. Instead of the hard reality of the past you pumped sunshine for the future...welcome to the sunshine pumpers!!! Go Bears!!
The Bears still have major steps to take. Each win means that they’ve rounded the corner that much more. Right now, they are just peaking around the corner. Until more Cal fans are collectively saying the team has turned the corner, the Bears are still probably the next loss away from possibly playing to another 6 or 7 win season and continued mediocrity.
Having home game attendance regularly exceeding 50k could be another benchmark.
"....for the die-hard Cal fans who have stuck with this program through thick and mostly thin, this one will stick in the memory for a while regardless of what comes next."
There are a few games that will forever stick to my mind (good and unfortunately bad) and this is one of them. It's not just the game, but the whole experience that just elevates it to another level.
You have stated it well. We have reason to believe a good season and maybe a program upgrade is in progress. Saturday’s solid win in SEC territory where college football is a religion (Call for a ‘white out’ heeded by virtually 100% of 80k+ fans, young and old. Vs. How well does a ‘gold out’ call play in Strawberry Canyon?) was beyond satisfying. Good stuff in all four phases of the game (coaching included).
I sat in the alum season ticket section with (obviously) all these old Tigers fans. Beautiful seats at the 50 with backs and in the shade the whole game. As I chatted a little with the folks around me, they didn’t seem to know “Cal” had a football team or football history. Some recalled last year’s game as a fluke or travel issue. They immediately knew who Marshawn and Goff are but didn’t know where they played! A little eye opening to me. It wasn’t like that on Evanston (my last game).
A lot of Auburn fans keep putting us in the same box as NMSU and think we have no history. But they're the same ones cheering for Cameron Jordan, Jared Goff, Rodgers, Marshawn, etc.
That seems crazy to me. As an old college football fan with season tickets, how could they not know Cal and where some of the most famous NFL players played college ball: Tony Gonzalez, Aaron Rogers, Marshawn Lynch, DeSean Jackson, Goff? They don't know The Play? I don't know every college team in the country, but as a college football fan you should a least know all of the Power 5 Teams. Even as an SEC fan, they should remember the Cal win over Tennessee in 2007 with Desean and his video game-like paly in the game that launched him onto the national stage and into the NFL. These are NOT real college football fans or are SEC fans really this narcissistic?
Ah this again - and you are right. Outside of the state of California (and even inside), people don’t know that UC Berkeley is Cal. A massive waste of two awesome brands.
In Vermont and the East, I often go through the University of California, California, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal progression after I say "Cal". One of the things I look forward to when getting back to California is being able to just say "Cal".
hmmm, on Sunday at a golf course in Florida I wore my Cal visor. I got many, many, many comments about Cal's beat down of Auburn. And those same peeps knew where Rogers, Goff, Marshawn and DeSean went to college. In fact, I was surprised at the depth and breadth of knowledge about Cal and it's players here in the South.
I used to lament this but now I just accept it as reality. Even on this board, other than most (not all) people acknowledging this as an issue, we can’t agree on what the solution should be. What I don’t get is some people here and elsewhere thinking that the problem is not with our marketing, but other people’s ignorance.
Games like this, along with the East Coast exposure will go a long way towards fixing that. Sustained program success is there for taking, as evidenced by our relatively strong competitiveness in NIL and the transfer portal.. we just have to keep it up and build momentum, with support from the administration and fan base.
Speaking of games, I think CFB25 will also help. I've seen a lot of references to people finding out about Ott or how great our jerseys and stadium are from the game.
And thinking back the old NCAA games, I know a lot of people that had Cal as a second favorite just due to the games.
The “problem” is not poor branding or using the wrong moniker for our beloved university, but clearly there is a dearth of available media outlets such as consumable YouTube Cal punditry compared to other P5 schools. For example I follow Locked On ACC, Locked On Canes, Locked On NC State Wolfpack etc. and watched Locked On Auburn daily podcasts leading up to the game. Cal needs a presence in the Locked On vein. There must be some entertaining folks among us who could operate that.
We do. It’s called the California Golden Bearcast. The highest rated and most listened Cal Bears podcast. Also. Signed to a major podcast network called BlueWire. People are saying…
welp, BI paid for Cal billboards in the South and while here in the South several have commented on this G(r)EAT marketing. Of course Markisha our marketing rep in Cal's AD refused to take part in this initiative.
I get that bad marketing has cause there to be confusion between Cal and UC Berkeley, but as a college football fan, you should at a minimum have heard of Cal or University of California as a Division I team. Most of the people I talked to this past weekend in Northern California, didn't even know what state Auburn was located in, but they at least had heard of it and knew that they had a D1 college football team. It's not like we're getting Auburn marketing campaigns here either. If you watch college football, you just know, (or have heard of) the P5 teams. I bet the majority of Big 10, Big 12, and (now) ACC fans know Cal.
Say what you will about the on-field results, Wilcox has always loved and been loyal to Cal. Nice to see an emotional win for him in the face of conference realignment. And hey, maybe the ACC will bring and end to our traditional mid-season swoon.
I’m just leaving Auburn now. Every Auburn fan I have met has been effusive in saying we kicked their butts and that Mendoza is special, which is extra satisfying. There is a scenario where that Auburn db jumps that short out and makes that grab for an easy 6 the other way and the game flips. Their crowd could never really get going. Despite more or less dominating them, the margin was still that close.
Am I the only one who was not impressed with how loud their 88k could be? Maybe it’s stadium design, maybe we just bummed them out, but it did not sound as loud as other ~90k stadiums that I’ve been in.
That's what my son and I thought. Rob did say on the field it was loud, so maybe it's just that it's focused on the field and not where we were sitting? But I did think it wasn't as loud as OSU, ND, Texas.
Not who you asked, but I a 100% agree with him. Auburn fans were to a person incredibly nice and gracious. I had so many people come up to at the bars and restaurant saying "congrats you kicked our asses". Side note, how do you respond to that? I just said "thanks" lol.
The food is decent, but not the best I've had. But to be fair I ate the entire time in and around Auburn only. I'm sure there are tons more hole in the wall places that are a must not miss. But I enjoyed the smoked pulled chicken sandwich at Moe's (pulled pork is good but not as good as the chicken) and the lemonade was great at Toomer's Corner but a little too sweet for me. But of course, Atlanta is nearby and I've probably put on the freshman 15 in the 24hrs I've spent here lol.
I’d return for sure. It’s a great college town that swells to the brim on game day. Momma Goldbergs, Big Blue Bagel and Toomers Corner were all as good as advertised. The fans couldn’t have been more welcoming (literally only had one drink college kid that was borderline rude) and it was a very walkable campus/town.
The Auburn blog says we are ACC bottom feeders!!! How can we be bottom feeders before we’ve played a game in the damn league?!?! Count us out, world. The Bear doesn’t care.
Yes, this was a memorable game for those of us who chose to travel to Auburn. I'm sure most hoped Cal would play well even if we didn't win. But credit the Bear's preparation, the coaching strategy, and the overall execution. Now if we can build on this achievement, stay healthy and return some players we need to improve our run game, then this could be one of "the big C teams of yore". Let's hope so for the players, coaches and all of us long-suffering fans.
This is the type of win you can hang your hat on for the season, especially now that we are in the ACC and have such little history with our new conference mates.
With that said, I don't think this is a good Auburn team. The Auburn fans and media bought into the hype on the new WRs, but it was apparent last year that the QB was a weak link, and better WRs aren't going to make up for that against non-FCS competition. I think they are a 6-6 team again this year. The main difference between this year and last is we have a slightly better QB and seem to have cleaned things up a little bit on special teams. If we can sustain that throughout the season I think we are in line for a 7-8 win season, which would be awesome. I think Wilcox and Co. will manage to lose a game or two that we shouldn't have any business losing (as they seem to do every year). And I think some of the teams on our schedule are going to turn out to be better teams than we expected, as it is a bit early in the season to predict this stuff, and the ACC as a whole seems to be taking football a little more seriously after all this realignment chaos.
I think the one major potential weakness that I see is that it seems Mendoza doesn't handle hits too well. He bulked up a little in the off-season, but it still seems like as the hits pile up throughout the game, he seems to drop off in performance. If we can keep him protected, we should be good, but I worry whether he can make it through the full season intact.
I would add that Auburn's first win of the season gave them a false sense of being a "good/great team". Playing a patsy and blowing them out hurts the bully more than the bullied in this instant case.
Auburn may be a top half of the sec team if they improve their qb play. That would have been a really close game had they had a better qb than Thorne in there.
The apparent interception return for touchdown on the second play of the game reminded me of the Jackson Sirmon fumble return for what looked like a TD on Auburn's first series last year, especially omen wise, but being a very numbers oriented omen kind of guy, when we were driving up 14-7 in the fourth I thought if the Bears could run one in, things would align quite well, as Gary Fowler ran in Cal's final TD I believe in the fourth of the '68 opener at Michigan, and I thought a 21-7 victory at the home of a storied opponent would be a good sign for this season. Ref interference ruined that, but still a great win.
I went through a lot of different sites looking at the ACC power rankings. The above was the best. Others had Cal around 7 or so on average.
I read a few comments stating it was Cal's first win vs SEC since 2019. But it's not like we are an East Coast team that regularly plays an SEC opponent. We did lose to Auburn last year, but we had won the previous 3 games vs SEC prior to that. And those 3 games took a span of 13 years. 2007~2019.
I love that people underestimate us. There is so much bias against us that an opponent like Auburn doesn't just lose against us, their fanbase gets massive cognitive dissonance and they turn against themselves. I've been reading/watching a lot of their tweets, bulletin boards, video comments, and media reactions and their tears are so so so delicious.
It’s like they didn’t remember almost losing to us last season
Schadenfreude!
Couldn’t agree more
Nick, I have always enjoyed your very even keeled critiques of our beloved Golden Bear football team. Today I sensed deep pride and satisfaction from you and a hope that our team has finally turned the corner toward a much better future. Instead of the hard reality of the past you pumped sunshine for the future...welcome to the sunshine pumpers!!! Go Bears!!
The Bears still have major steps to take. Each win means that they’ve rounded the corner that much more. Right now, they are just peaking around the corner. Until more Cal fans are collectively saying the team has turned the corner, the Bears are still probably the next loss away from possibly playing to another 6 or 7 win season and continued mediocrity.
Having home game attendance regularly exceeding 50k could be another benchmark.
"....for the die-hard Cal fans who have stuck with this program through thick and mostly thin, this one will stick in the memory for a while regardless of what comes next."
Couldn't have been said any better.
100%
There are a few games that will forever stick to my mind (good and unfortunately bad) and this is one of them. It's not just the game, but the whole experience that just elevates it to another level.
Thank you Nick!
You have stated it well. We have reason to believe a good season and maybe a program upgrade is in progress. Saturday’s solid win in SEC territory where college football is a religion (Call for a ‘white out’ heeded by virtually 100% of 80k+ fans, young and old. Vs. How well does a ‘gold out’ call play in Strawberry Canyon?) was beyond satisfying. Good stuff in all four phases of the game (coaching included).
Thanks again.
Go Bears!
Beat SDSU!!
I sat in the alum season ticket section with (obviously) all these old Tigers fans. Beautiful seats at the 50 with backs and in the shade the whole game. As I chatted a little with the folks around me, they didn’t seem to know “Cal” had a football team or football history. Some recalled last year’s game as a fluke or travel issue. They immediately knew who Marshawn and Goff are but didn’t know where they played! A little eye opening to me. It wasn’t like that on Evanston (my last game).
Cal has had a historically bad time marketing the team and athletics. I'd argue that is a huge reason we didn't get the BIG bid.
I agree with this. I chalk it up to administrative mismanagement and incompetence when it comes to athletics.
1952 continues to influence our direction in athletics.
see me comments above.
Win and that goes away. I cannot tell you how many people I've talked to don't know where Auburn or Clemson or heck even Notre Dame is.
But if you win it just doesn't matter.
Yep. It would seem people see us as no-account cupcakes. Given our record since 2007 or so, I can see why they see us that way.
A lot of Auburn fans keep putting us in the same box as NMSU and think we have no history. But they're the same ones cheering for Cameron Jordan, Jared Goff, Rodgers, Marshawn, etc.
Oh, the irony if we should ever play Michigan and they shout “Jarod Goff” to taunt us. 😆
That seems crazy to me. As an old college football fan with season tickets, how could they not know Cal and where some of the most famous NFL players played college ball: Tony Gonzalez, Aaron Rogers, Marshawn Lynch, DeSean Jackson, Goff? They don't know The Play? I don't know every college team in the country, but as a college football fan you should a least know all of the Power 5 Teams. Even as an SEC fan, they should remember the Cal win over Tennessee in 2007 with Desean and his video game-like paly in the game that launched him onto the national stage and into the NFL. These are NOT real college football fans or are SEC fans really this narcissistic?
See my comment below. We do a historically poor job of increasing awareness.
Ah this again - and you are right. Outside of the state of California (and even inside), people don’t know that UC Berkeley is Cal. A massive waste of two awesome brands.
In Vermont and the East, I often go through the University of California, California, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal progression after I say "Cal". One of the things I look forward to when getting back to California is being able to just say "Cal".
After our first season in the ACC, you will be able to just start and finish with, "Cal".
On the shuttle, I think it was, to the game from the parking lot, we talked with a guy that didn't know Cal was UC Berkeley.
hmmm, on Sunday at a golf course in Florida I wore my Cal visor. I got many, many, many comments about Cal's beat down of Auburn. And those same peeps knew where Rogers, Goff, Marshawn and DeSean went to college. In fact, I was surprised at the depth and breadth of knowledge about Cal and it's players here in the South.
I used to lament this but now I just accept it as reality. Even on this board, other than most (not all) people acknowledging this as an issue, we can’t agree on what the solution should be. What I don’t get is some people here and elsewhere thinking that the problem is not with our marketing, but other people’s ignorance.
Games like this, along with the East Coast exposure will go a long way towards fixing that. Sustained program success is there for taking, as evidenced by our relatively strong competitiveness in NIL and the transfer portal.. we just have to keep it up and build momentum, with support from the administration and fan base.
The new chancellor was at the Cal tailgate and he is a breath of fresh air. Dude knows that building the brand starts with athletics
Yeah that’s probably the only way
Speaking of games, I think CFB25 will also help. I've seen a lot of references to people finding out about Ott or how great our jerseys and stadium are from the game.
And thinking back the old NCAA games, I know a lot of people that had Cal as a second favorite just due to the games.
The “problem” is not poor branding or using the wrong moniker for our beloved university, but clearly there is a dearth of available media outlets such as consumable YouTube Cal punditry compared to other P5 schools. For example I follow Locked On ACC, Locked On Canes, Locked On NC State Wolfpack etc. and watched Locked On Auburn daily podcasts leading up to the game. Cal needs a presence in the Locked On vein. There must be some entertaining folks among us who could operate that.
We do. It’s called the California Golden Bearcast. The highest rated and most listened Cal Bears podcast. Also. Signed to a major podcast network called BlueWire. People are saying…
welp, BI paid for Cal billboards in the South and while here in the South several have commented on this G(r)EAT marketing. Of course Markisha our marketing rep in Cal's AD refused to take part in this initiative.
Go Bears!!
I get that bad marketing has cause there to be confusion between Cal and UC Berkeley, but as a college football fan, you should at a minimum have heard of Cal or University of California as a Division I team. Most of the people I talked to this past weekend in Northern California, didn't even know what state Auburn was located in, but they at least had heard of it and knew that they had a D1 college football team. It's not like we're getting Auburn marketing campaigns here either. If you watch college football, you just know, (or have heard of) the P5 teams. I bet the majority of Big 10, Big 12, and (now) ACC fans know Cal.
BI has marketed Cal in the South, w/o the help of Cal's AD.
And remember how they tried to fix it this year? I already forgot but I remember it was some stupid idea
That’s an understatement
Say what you will about the on-field results, Wilcox has always loved and been loyal to Cal. Nice to see an emotional win for him in the face of conference realignment. And hey, maybe the ACC will bring and end to our traditional mid-season swoon.
I’m just leaving Auburn now. Every Auburn fan I have met has been effusive in saying we kicked their butts and that Mendoza is special, which is extra satisfying. There is a scenario where that Auburn db jumps that short out and makes that grab for an easy 6 the other way and the game flips. Their crowd could never really get going. Despite more or less dominating them, the margin was still that close.
Am I the only one who was not impressed with how loud their 88k could be? Maybe it’s stadium design, maybe we just bummed them out, but it did not sound as loud as other ~90k stadiums that I’ve been in.
That's what my son and I thought. Rob did say on the field it was loud, so maybe it's just that it's focused on the field and not where we were sitting? But I did think it wasn't as loud as OSU, ND, Texas.
I wasn’t at UT, but it was def quieter than ND, tOSU and Tennessee (which admittedly had 20k more)
Oh I did forget about Tennessee. That was loud. And, as I type this, Mecham beat SQT for another TD.
Sad bear.
Thanks for supporting the team. Would you go back to Auburn if we had another game there? Ie was food, hotels etc all good, things to see etc?
Not who you asked, but I a 100% agree with him. Auburn fans were to a person incredibly nice and gracious. I had so many people come up to at the bars and restaurant saying "congrats you kicked our asses". Side note, how do you respond to that? I just said "thanks" lol.
The food is decent, but not the best I've had. But to be fair I ate the entire time in and around Auburn only. I'm sure there are tons more hole in the wall places that are a must not miss. But I enjoyed the smoked pulled chicken sandwich at Moe's (pulled pork is good but not as good as the chicken) and the lemonade was great at Toomer's Corner but a little too sweet for me. But of course, Atlanta is nearby and I've probably put on the freshman 15 in the 24hrs I've spent here lol.
I’d return for sure. It’s a great college town that swells to the brim on game day. Momma Goldbergs, Big Blue Bagel and Toomers Corner were all as good as advertised. The fans couldn’t have been more welcoming (literally only had one drink college kid that was borderline rude) and it was a very walkable campus/town.
The Auburn blog says we are ACC bottom feeders!!! How can we be bottom feeders before we’ve played a game in the damn league?!?! Count us out, world. The Bear doesn’t care.
Scientific logic is not a strength in Alabama.
Mendoza looked awesome. Nickname suggestion: Nando CalRizzin
damn I think our defense ended payton thorne's career
*goose bumps and tears of joy.
Yes, this was a memorable game for those of us who chose to travel to Auburn. I'm sure most hoped Cal would play well even if we didn't win. But credit the Bear's preparation, the coaching strategy, and the overall execution. Now if we can build on this achievement, stay healthy and return some players we need to improve our run game, then this could be one of "the big C teams of yore". Let's hope so for the players, coaches and all of us long-suffering fans.
This is the type of win you can hang your hat on for the season, especially now that we are in the ACC and have such little history with our new conference mates.
With that said, I don't think this is a good Auburn team. The Auburn fans and media bought into the hype on the new WRs, but it was apparent last year that the QB was a weak link, and better WRs aren't going to make up for that against non-FCS competition. I think they are a 6-6 team again this year. The main difference between this year and last is we have a slightly better QB and seem to have cleaned things up a little bit on special teams. If we can sustain that throughout the season I think we are in line for a 7-8 win season, which would be awesome. I think Wilcox and Co. will manage to lose a game or two that we shouldn't have any business losing (as they seem to do every year). And I think some of the teams on our schedule are going to turn out to be better teams than we expected, as it is a bit early in the season to predict this stuff, and the ACC as a whole seems to be taking football a little more seriously after all this realignment chaos.
I think the one major potential weakness that I see is that it seems Mendoza doesn't handle hits too well. He bulked up a little in the off-season, but it still seems like as the hits pile up throughout the game, he seems to drop off in performance. If we can keep him protected, we should be good, but I worry whether he can make it through the full season intact.
Mostly agree.
I would add that Auburn's first win of the season gave them a false sense of being a "good/great team". Playing a patsy and blowing them out hurts the bully more than the bullied in this instant case.
Auburn may be a top half of the sec team if they improve their qb play. That would have been a really close game had they had a better qb than Thorne in there.
deleted
The apparent interception return for touchdown on the second play of the game reminded me of the Jackson Sirmon fumble return for what looked like a TD on Auburn's first series last year, especially omen wise, but being a very numbers oriented omen kind of guy, when we were driving up 14-7 in the fourth I thought if the Bears could run one in, things would align quite well, as Gary Fowler ran in Cal's final TD I believe in the fourth of the '68 opener at Michigan, and I thought a 21-7 victory at the home of a storied opponent would be a good sign for this season. Ref interference ruined that, but still a great win.
Wow! Gary Fowler, 1968, running back. There's a blast from the past
Also Burrell really stood out to me. Clearly the qb of that line.
Cal is #4 in this ACC power rankings
https://www.on3.com/news/acc-power-rankings-updated-after-week-2-of-college-football-massey-ratings/
I want to believe but that ranking having Miami #3 is insane
I went through a lot of different sites looking at the ACC power rankings. The above was the best. Others had Cal around 7 or so on average.
I read a few comments stating it was Cal's first win vs SEC since 2019. But it's not like we are an East Coast team that regularly plays an SEC opponent. We did lose to Auburn last year, but we had won the previous 3 games vs SEC prior to that. And those 3 games took a span of 13 years. 2007~2019.
This is why statistics can be dangerous. It's all in the choices and framing.
Yeah, we could say Cal has lost to an SEC opponent only once in the last 18 years.
Statistics are not dangerous, but some "analysts" are.
Bill Shannon deleted his Twitter account, so there's that.