Cal's Weird 2025 Season: 'It Was a Bumpy Ride, Man'

“It’s been a bumpy ride this season, man.”

With those eight words. Cal wide receiver Jacob De Jesus described the Bears’ day, their week and their season.

Teams typically have highs and lows during a season, but 2025 for Cal has been Mount Everests and Death Valleys.

After 12 regular-season games, we still don’t know whether this is a mediocre Cal football team that outperformed its talent in a few amazing exhibitions or a gifted group that too often did not play up to its potential. And it's unlikely that Cal's bowl game will provide any conclusive answers.

Saturday night’s 38-35 win over No. 21 SMU captured Cal’s 2025 season in a 60-minute snapshot:

Cal outplayed its more highly touted opponent for three quarters, taking a 17-point lead six seconds into the fourth quarter, then slid into a malaise in which the Bears’ defense and offense simply went to sleep for 12 minutes. SMU scored touchdowns on three consecutive drives while the Bears offense did not get beyond its own 36-yard line on its two possession amid the Mustangs scoring.

When SMU scored with 2:22 left to take a 35-31 lead, it felt exactly like last year’s game against eighth-ranked Miami, when Cal took a 35-10 lead in the third quarter, but threw it all away.

It was on the same Cal field, the main difference being that more than 52,000 people were on hand for tlast year’s Miami game, while fewer than 29,000 people were in the stands for Saturday’s game with students gone for the Thanksgiving holiday.

But this time, now trailing and with all the momentum on SMU’s side, Cal somehow put together an amazing 75-yard drive directed by freshman quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, who completed all five of his passes for 61 yards during the possession. Cal scored the dramatic touchdown with 43 seconds left to take the lead, then watched SMU’s potential game-tying 52-yard field goal attempt with three seconds left sail wide.

It was a bumpy ride indeed.

But Cal’s whole season was like that – inexplicably falling flat when optimism reigned but producing outstanding performances when least expected.

Cal won seven games, and the Bears have not won more regular-season games than that in 16 years. Yet the Cal head coach got fired for lack of success.

Cal started the season 3-0, including an impressive victory over Minnesota in Game Three, only to turn around in the next game and suffer its first shutout loss in 10 years, a 34-0 beat down by San Diego State, which was a 14-point underdog to Cal.

Cal pulled off major upsets against 15th-ranked Louisville and 21st-ranked SMU in two of its final three games, but between those two highlights was the Bears’ most distressing loss to archrival Stanford in recent memory, a mistake filled 31-10 loss that led to the firing of Justin Wilcox.

The final win came following a week that shook the Cal players and coaches when its admired coach got dismissed.

Have Cal players ever had a three-game sequence with such emotional ups and downs?

“Never,” said De Jesus, a fifth-year senior.

Of course, nobody would have expected that the 5-foot-7 De Jesus, who has no scholarship offers coming out of high school, would be one reception shy of tying the Cal single-season record for receptions of 100 set by Dameane Douglas in 1998 when Tom Holmoe was the Bears’ head coach.

There’s little about this Cal football season that has gone as expected.

Picked to finish 15th in the ACC in the preseason media poll, the Bears (7-5, 4-4 ACC) wound up tied for seventh with preseason favorite Clemson among others while using that final touchdown drive to avoid a 16th straight losing record in conference play.

Cal was the betting underdog in eight of 11 games against FBS opponents this season, and the Bears went 5-3 as the underdog, including 2-0 in games in which Cal was a double-digit-point-spread underdog. They beat Louisville when the Bears were 18.5-point underdogs, and SMU, when Cal was a 13.5-point underdog.

Cal was favored in three games against FBS teams, and went 1-2 in those games, including 0-1 in which it was a double-digit favorite. The Bears’ lone win as a favorite came when a North Carolina player fumbled at the Cal half-yard line when he was about to score the go-ahead touchdown in the closing moments.

(Most betting sites did not post a point spread for the Bears’ game against FCS team Texas Southern, but one marginal site made Cal a 45.5-point favorite. The Bears led just 3-0 until the closing seconds of the first half and did not pull away until the fourth quarter, not really living up to its heavy favorite status.)

Cole Boscia, who arrived at Cal as a walk-on and made his third career Cal reception with a remarkable touchdown catch that gave the Bears a 24-7 lead, put a positive spin on the weird final three games.

“It speaks the to the type of players and coaches that we have on this team,” Boscia said. “To lose your head coach in the midst of that as well and just to keep going and go beat a ranked opponent again after a big loss, it speaks to how strong the players and coaches are.”

Mount Everest scaled.