Weekly Writer Predictions: Cal vs. North Carolina Tar Heels Football 2025
Presented by Dokkaebier
Welcome to our weekly predictions post from our writers. You’ll see what they expect the score to be and any wacky or rational predictions they expect to see in each game!
Christopher_h
Scoreline: Cal loses 17-27
A bad team with a lame duck staff that hasn’t won a P4 matchup all season... come on, you’re all thinking it too.
Callie Wake
Scoreline: Cal wins 24-18
This is a must win for Berkeley, and I think Trond Grizzel carries the team on a fantastic 150-200 yard performance.
Rob Hwang
Scoreline: Cal wins 55-24
Why not. If we’re swinging for the fences this season we might as well start the season off with a bang.
TD_24
Scoreline: Cal wins 30-13
UNC is comically bad (sound familiar for some past opponents over the years?). This is a must win game, no bones about it. If Cal fails to win this, its another traumatizing loss in a laundry list of them.
Piotr T Le
Scoreline: Cal wins 31-14
Hot take: Oski will find a way to seduce Jordan and she will stay and become Mrs. Oski... to our demise
Berkelium97
Scoreline: Cal wins 31-21
There are so many things indicating that this is a DOOOOM game--UNC’s impending firing of Belichick, weird personnel dynamics in the UNC locker room, Friday night after-dark bizarro vibes, and Cal’s general struggles in October--that they’ll all cancel each other out and this will turn into a normal Cal victory. It’s like that scene in The Simpsons where the doctor tells Mr. Burns that he has so many diseases at once that they all crowd each other out and none of them can successfully infect him. Cal football is that version of Mr. Burns this week.
Ben
Scoreline: Cal wins 35-14
Does Bill get Tarmac’ed in Oakland? SFO? Buchanan Airport?
Nick Kranz
Scoreline: Cal wins 31-17
This game, more than any other, is an exercise in psychological analysis. North Carolina has had the news cycle from hell, and two weeks to stew in the idea that they are the laughingstock of college football. Will that galvanize them, or will they be checked out? It’s orders of magnitude less unique, but there’s also the question of how Cal bounces back from a really humbling defeat.
At the end of the day, North Carolina has been deeply dysfunctional on the field in a way that effort can’t really fix. They’re less talented than Cal, more poorly coached, and have nothing to play for. If Cal doesn’t win this game comfortably it might be a bigger red flag than any of the many other red flags we’ve seen this season.
Jesse Miller-Gordon
Scoreline: Cal wins 28-10
I would like to see Cal pile on the points and attempt a shutout, but fully expect SDSU to get up for this game, do their damndest on defense, get a field goal in the first half, and sneak in a garbage time TD.
Let us not forget that Cal should be 5-1, assuming there was no way they could hold off the Duke comeback and that there is no way to justify the loss to SDSU, except better coaching and preparation. This is it. If Cal can't recover from the devastating loss to Duke and beat a mediocre NC team kitted out with a truckload of dysfunction and a coaching circus that NC boosters have got to be thinking about sending on its merry way, then we are in for a longer season than we thought, and I don't mean because there is a bowl game in our future. If Cal loses to NC and Rivera doesn't fire Wilcox, then I guess Cal just doesn't want to spend the money to buy out Wilcox's contract or spend the bigger money on trying to get a better coach who can build a winning program. Given the coaching positions that we know of that are already open, Cal is going to have a very rough time convincing anyone good to come to Berkeley given the other options out there. And it's really got to be someone who understands the college game and the portal/high school recruiting strategy that today's D1 college football requires. There's no more student in the student/athlete paradigm anymore; it's all about the money, not the education. It is just brutal out there trying to attract talented players to Berkeley with a program history that is as dismal as ours. It will take finding a savvy coach who may be young but hungry and can relate to players in this NIL world and who is able to recruit guys who can be developed into a cohesive team that will be the nucleus of a rebuilding effort leading to repeated success. If Indiana can do it, why not Cal? It's all about coaching, and right now we do not have what it takes to compete in this cut throat business that college football has become.
We are not playing San Diego State.