Cal-Stanford Game Survives Amid College Football’s Disappearing Traditions

Oklahoma and Oklahoma State faced each other every year for 114 consecutive seasons from 1910 to 2023 in a series simply called Bedlam. They didn’t face each other in 2024, and won’t play each other this season.

Cincinnati and Miami-Ohio have played each other 128 times, the fifth-longest football rivalry between FBS teams, and they have played each other in each of the past 116 years. This season, for the first time since 1903, they won’t compete for the Victory Bell.

TCU and SMU, located 40 miles apart in the adjacent cities of Fort Worth and Dallas, played each other for the 101st time this season, but they won’t meet in 2026. The Iron Skillet will lie unclaimed.

Washington and Washington State have played each other 117 times, and they found a way to keep that rivalry going, but the Apple Cup was Washington’s third game of the 2025 season. Oregon and Oregon State played each other for the 129th time this year, but in the teams’ fourth game of the season.

The Pac-12 will be rebuilt in 2026, but it will be nothing like the version people remember. Cal football general manager Ron Rivera still can’t understand it.

“That to me, that’s a crime as far as I’m concerned, for college athletics to let something like that happen,” he said this week, “and for something like that to be as dismissed as it has been.

“There were a lot of guys when it all came crumbling down, we were crushed about it.”

Next season Cal will renew its rivalry with its University of California sister school, UCLA, that began in 1933. But they won’t meet this year.

The restructuring of conferences that resembles the gerrymandering going on in some states has forced many traditional football rivalries out of existence.

The Big Game between Cal and Stanford remains intact. It’s not usually the last game of the regular season anymore as it was for years, but it’s there, near the end of the season, standing like a beacon of light for college football tradition.

Is this the final frontier of tradition?

“I think it is to some degree,” Rivera said. “I think the thing we’ve got to do as schools, as universities, we’ve got to look at – that was a great question to ask about traditions – we’ve got to find ways to preserve them.”

He is pleased that Cal and Stanford have maintained a partnership – a kind of love-hate relationship that has included a rivalry football game between the two Bay Area schools every year since 1892, excluding four years during World War I and three years during World War II.

“I’m very proud of that [partnership], I really am,” Rivera said. “When I first got here [as GM], one of the things I talked about with them, partnering with them, we got to own the Bay Area. And that’s something we need to focus on like we’re trying to do.

“I mean this is one of those games that you’d love to have as many Cal-Stanford folks out there at the game this week, and really make this the type of game that deserves not just local exposure but national exposure. That’s what I’d love to see it create.”

Big Game tradition will be resumed for the 128th time on Saturday afternoon at Stanford Stadium. The Axe will be present.

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