Counting Down Cal's Top-50 Transfer Athletes: No. 19 Jackson Sirmon

We rank the mid-career arrivals in Berkeley who have had the greatest impact on the Golden Bears

Jackson Sirmon celebrates his touchdown in the 2022 Big Game | Photo by Darren Yamashita

The transfer portal era in college athletics seems like it’s been with us forever. Likewise, most fans can recall less turbulent times when transfers happened, they simply didn’t look like a stampede to the 1849 California Gold Rush.

We thought it was time to rank the best transfers Cal teams have attracted, most of them in recent seasons but also including a few OGs from yesteryear. 

We limited our ranking to transfers from four-year colleges.

Here is the next athlete in our countdown: 

19. Jackson Sirmon

Sport: Football 

Arrival year at Cal: 2022

Previous school: (At Washington, from 2018 to 2021, had 148 tackles, including 92 in 2021)

Contributions at Cal: 

— The 6-foot-3, 235-pound linebacker transferred to Cal to play for his father, Bears defensive coordinator Peter Sirmon.

— He led the Bears with 104 tackles, second-most in the Pac-12 in 2022. Sirmon was the only Cal player to earn first-team all-conference honors. He also had six tackles for loss, three sacks and four passes defended, including an interception, that season.

— Sirmon had four games with double-digit tackles, including 13 each vs. Oregon and UCLA and 11 vs. his former school, Washington. But Cal lost all four of those games.

— Sirmon’s second year at Cal was derailed by a season-ending injury at midseason. Through six games, he had 49 tackles, including three tackles for loss. He had a season-best 12 tackles in a win over Arizona State.

Standout performance: Sirmon delivered his most prolific game on a big stage when the Bears visited Notre Dame on Sept. 17, 2022. He had a career-best 15 tackles, including 1.5 sacks, and Cal took a 17-14 lead into the fourth quarter before losing 24-17.

Impact on his team: Nothing matters more to Cal fans than beating Stanford and Sirmon made thousands of friends for life when he returned a fumble 37 yards for a touchdown with 9:54 left in the fourth quarter to give Cal a lead it would not surrender in a 27-20 victory in the 2022 Big Game.

Previously on our list: 

No. 20: Ray Green

No. 21: Marta Suarez

No. 22: Hugo Gonzalez

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