I’ll try to keep this quick.
I’m not sure if anyone here follows college football. It isn’t the typical progressive saturday activity. However, I’m pretty sure quite a few of you could get on board with this.
I went to UC Berkeley, from 2003 — 2007. I went there knowing little about college football, except that Cal (aka UC Berkeley) was bad at it.
During my freshman year, my first game was against top ranked (#3 i think?) USC. Somehow, Cal won a thriller of a game in triple overtime. And I was hooked.
We had many, many great moments. Of those:
Cal has been through a rough period. Since the relative glory years since I was a student, there have been a bunch of middling records, disappointments, and outright failures. Nothing approaching the energy that was there while I was.
Well, conference realignment came. Its a long story, but essentially, because of (guess what) money, teams have gone from regional, geographically linked conferences into national, coast-to-coast behemoths that make little practical sense. The Pac-10/12, which had existed in some form since basically WW1, ceased to exist. More valuable teams fled to the Big 10. Others were more or less exiled, including Cal, who was lucky to find a landing spot in the ACC.
What seemed like a death sentence has, after about a month and a half, been a godsend.
Cal is off to a good start, though not the best it’s ever seen. That’s not really the story here.
Cal’s twitter presence, on the other hand, is.
Starting with the Auburn game, the second week of the season on Sept 7th.
Cal has always been stereotyped as a lefty, hippy, communist, pot-smoking haven. Much of this is at least superficially true, but schools like USC and others have historically used it to drag us down.
But here we are, in a new conference, facing teams we’ve perhaps never played before. These opponents don’t know how to think of us yet. Which gives us an opening.
So Cal twitter embraced the stereotypes. We are the woke, communist, pro-pronoun team of the country. Type in #calgorithm into twitter, and prepare to lose your afternoon. I did not think there was a point to either twitter/x or AI generated art a month ago. I now know that there is. And that point is Cal twitter.
We invaded Auburn with messages like this, and emerged victorious, spreading images like the following:
www.reddit.com/...
We again travelled across the country to play Florida State, narrowly losing a frankly miserable game, but nonetheless spreading the good word.
And this Saturday, ESPN Gameday comes to Cal, as we play #8 Miami. It is the single most prominent platform in the sport.An unparalleled opportunity, starting at 9am est/6am pst.
And the Cal twitterverse has produced masterpieces, such as the parody of Chappele Roan’s “Hot to Go” about our running back, Jayden Ott.
It really is a banger. Enjoy:
It is impossible to capture all the creativity and humor of the last month. But (1), it got ESPN’s Gameday to Cal, something that has never happened in Gameday’s 30+ year history, or anything similar in UC Berkeley/Cal’s 100+ year long history (football wise). This is the kind of view we’re talking about:
Its beautiful. Its a massive reward for years of suffering at the hands of conference realignment, money and backstabs. And its going to be a damn fun day tomorrow.
And (2), it opened a platform to discuss issues important to the day. I cannot tell you how many fans from the teams we played in Florida and Alabama who have found the effort both entertaining and, in some cases, convincing. And it goes beyond that. Check the reddit threads.
Long story short, if you are in the Bay Area and free tomorrow (Saturday, 10/4, 730pm local) night, come join us and enjoy the fun! Go Bears!
