Football Site’s Bold Prediction on Cal’s Win Total in Final 6 Games

College Football News, a respected site published by Pete Fiutak, this week predicted the wins and losses of every ACC team over the second half of the season, and Fiutak’s projection for Cal made me stop and reread it to make sure I saw it correctly.

Fiutak projected that Cal (4-2) will win five of its final six games, which would give Cal a 9-3 record, a 6-2 mark in the ACC and presumably a berth in a significant bowl game. It wouldn’t quite put the Bears in the ACC title game, but it would be close.

Fiutak predicted that Cal would beat Noth Carolina, Virginia Tech and Stanford, which is not hard to accept, but he also believes Cal will win a November 1 home game against Virginia, which is 5-1 and ranked 18th in the country, and a November 29 home game against SMU, a preseason top-25 team that is now 4-2, including 2-0 in the ACC. The lone Cal loss he projected was a November 8 defeat at the hands of Louisville on the road.

Fiutak, who is based in Chicago, has been doing this a long time, so we asked him how he arrived at this projection for Cal.

Generally speaking he said it has a lot to do with the schedule late in the season and the travel involved. And he was impressed by Cal’s win over Minnesota, which improved Cal’s record to 3-0 heading into the road game against San Diego State.

“Before the San Diego State game I thought Cal was an honest-to-goodness contender to get to 10-2 and at least be in the College Football Playoff discussion SMU way,” he said referring to SMU’s path to the CFP last season. “Not that they were some monster program that’s going to do some damage in the national championship chase, but only because the win over Minnesota, which, I live in Chicago and this side of the country, ended at what, 2 a.m. East Coast time, 3 a.m., so nobody really watched that game. But they had a great performance. It looked like JKS [Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele] was about to be the next big thing.”

But the 34-0 loss to San Diego State tempered his expectations.

“But this [prediction for Cal] is mostly about the schedule, the timing, it’s late in the year, and by this point, if you got to make . . . I mean, a two-hour or a four-hour plane ride is not that terribly different but it is a long way to go for a team like Virginia, a team like SMU. Duke was able to get past it obviously and looked great against Cal [in a 45-21 Duke victory], but for later in the year, I think these teams are going to have a little bit of problem, I think Cal needs these games and they’ll be a little more amped.”

He notes that Cal’s ACC schedule is favorable, because the Bears do not play Clemson, Georgia Tech, Florida State, Miami and Pitt.

“So basically this is more of a schedule, timing and everything else play,” Fiutak said of his prediction, adding that if Cal were playing Virginia and SMU on the road, he would not pick the Bears.

He acknowledges that a 9-3 record for Cal is “a little bit ambitious” but says 8-4 or 7-5 is “right on the table for the Bears.”

All six of Virginia’s games this season have been played on the East Coast, and it has not played a game in the Pacific time zone since 2016 when the Cavaliers lost to Oregon 44-26 in a September contest.

SMU will cross only two time zones for its game at Cal, and made two trips to the West Coast last year, beating Nevada in a closer-than-expected 29-24 victory in the season opener and winning at Stanford 40-10 in mid-October.

Since joining the ACC last season, Cal is 0-4 in games in which its opponent had to travel from the East Coast to play the Bears in Berkeley. However, those three such losses in 2024 were by a combined margin of 10 points, and included a near upset of eighth-ranked Miami, which beat the Bears by a point after overcoming a 25-point, third-quarter deficit.

Fiutak’s reasoning makes sense, and if he’s right, or even close to being right, Cal will have its first winning season since 2019 and its first winning conference record since 2009.

First, it must face North Carolina (2-3), which is traveling across the country to face the Bears in Berkeley Friday night.