Cal to Host Weekend Tripleheader Featuring Bears and De La Salle Football

Cal will play a critical ACC game and De La Salle, Tosh Lupoi's alma mater, will play a game less than 20 hours later on the same field

Cal's Memorial Stadium | Photo courtesy of Cal Athletics

The weekend of September 25-26 will feature a major college and high school presentation of Bay Area football at Cal’s Memorial Stadium.

The Cal football team, the De La Salle High School squad and Marin Catholic’s team will be part of three significant games on those two days, all on the Golden Bears home field. The three games will cover a span of about 21 hours from start to finish. De La Salle is the alma mater of Cal head coach Tosh Lupoi, and the Spartans never lost a game while he played there.

On Friday night, September 25, Cal will host Clemson, which might be the Bears’ most telling game of the season.  The Tigers are perennial national powerhouses, and they are ranked No. 23 in the country in the preseason coaches poll. (The AP poll will be released Monday, August 17.)

This 7:30 p.m. game against Clemson offers Cal and Lupoi an opportunity to break into the national picture, and there is reason to believe the Bears can do just that on their home field in their fourth game of the season. 

The contest will draw even more attention if Cal comes into the game with a 3-0 record, which seems possible.

The field at Memorial Stadium is an artificial turf surface, so it will be ready to host two elite high school football games on Saturday, September 26. De La Salle has labeled that high school doubleheader the 151 Football Showcase, in honor of De La Salle’s national-record 151-game winning streak achieved from 1992 to 2004. Lupoi was a star at De La Salle in the late 1990s, the middle years of that winning streak.

About 12 hours after the completion of the Cal-Clemson game, Saint Mary’s of Stockton will take on Marin Catholic of Kentfield, California, in an 11 a.m. game on Saturday at Cal’s Memorial Stadium.

Former Cal and current Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff played his high school ball at Marin Catholic, which went 39-4 in his time there. Cal quarterbacks coach Nick Rolovich also played quarterback at Marin Catholic in the mid-1990s and was later an assistant coach at his Marin County alma mater.

Marin Catholic won the Division 4-AA state championship in 2021 and the 3-A state title in 2023, but slipped to 5-6 last season.

Saint Mary’s won the state Division 2-AA championship last year when it went 13-2 and was ranked 17th in the final On SI California rankings.

About an hour after that game is completed, two California powerhouses will clash when De La Salle of Northern California takes on Centennial of Southern California at 2 p.m. on September 26, This matchup was reported on our site back in June, but it is worth noting again. Lupoi's strong showing in his years at at De La Salle led him to attend Cal and play for head coaches Tom Holmoe and Jeff Tedford.

Centennial went 11-2 last season and was ranked No. 2 in the final On SI California rankings, behind only state champion Santa Margarita.

Santa Margarita defeated De La Salle in the Open Division state championship game last year, handing the Spartans their only loss in a 12-1 season in 2025.

Both Centennial and De La Salle are ranked in the top 10 of the Rivals/On3 2026 preseason state rankings. Centennial is No. 11 in the Rivals/On3 preseason national rankings, but De La Salle is unranked. That is unusual for the Spartans, who have been named national champions 12 times since 1994.

De La Salle will have the unfamiliar role of underdog in its game against Centennial, which is located in Corona, California, and represents the powerful CIF Southern Section, probably the best high school football region in the country.

The final horn of that game will signal the end of 21 hours of pivotal football featuring top Bay Area college and high school teams.

The only thing lacking is an NFL game involving the San Francisco 49ers.