Naming the Top 'Villains' of Cal Football

ESPN recently named the biggest archenemy for every Power Four conference football team, and the pick for Cal was obvious: Mack Brown. Golden Bear fans' disdain for him my never subside after he publicly politicked Cal out of the Bears' rightful place in the Rose Bowl following the 2004 season.

A dozen years later, Aaron Rodgers, the Golden Bears quarterback that season, still hadn’t forgiven Brown.

Aaron Rodgers is coming at Mack Brown's neck #Texas #GameDay pic.twitter.com/RpFgNekrTE
— Saturday Blitz (@SaturdayBlitz) September 3, 2016

Brown is not the only villain of Cal football, though. Here are six others:

The Rose Bowl

Cal fans have a love-hate relationship with the Rose Bowl. For many years, Cal supporters would have preferred a berth in the Rose Bowl to a spot in a national championship game, but the bowl in Pasadena did not oblige, frustrating Cal die-hards time after time.

That missed chance in 2004 was just one of the Bears’ Rose Bowl heartbreaks.

Cal tied USC for the 2006 Pac-10 title, but the Trojans went to the Rose Bowl instead of Cal because they beat the Bears in the regular season.

In 1975, Cal and UCLA tied for the Pac-8 title with 6-1 conference records, but the Bruins got the Rose Bowl nod because they had defeated Cal during the season. UCLA clinched the Rose Bowl berth by beating USC in its final regular season game even though the Bruins lost eight fumbles in that 25-22 Bruins victory, depriving Cal of its Rose Bowl.

The Golden Bears got to the 1959 Rose Bowl, their only Rose Bowl berth since the 1950 season. But they were embarrassed by Iowa when they got there, a 38-12 victory for the Hawkeyes, who rolled up 516 total yards, including 429 rushing yards.

Pappy Waldorf’s Golden Bears went undefeated in the regular season in three consecutive years from 1948 through 1950, but Cal lost in the Rose Bowl all three years.

Cal lost the 1929 Rose Bowl to Georgia Tech 8-7 when Roy Riegels ran 69 yards the wrong way to set up the deciding safety.

Heavily favored Cal tied Washington & Jefferson 0-0 in a muddy, water-drenched 1922 Rose Bowl, then declined invitations to play in the 1923 and 1924 Rose Bowls despite undefeated regular-season records. The Cal student body voted to decline the invitations, but Cal coach Andy Smith had complained that Washington & Jefferson had used “ringers” in the 1922 Rose Bowl.

The only way Cal could get to the Rose Bowl now is to qualify for the College Football Playoff and play in one of the postseason games designated for the Rose Bowl.

Curt Cignetti

Indiana’s coach snatched Fernando Mendoza out of the transfer portal from Cal and turned him into a Heisman Trophy winner, a national championship quarterback, and the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft.

Mendoza would have been Cal’s quarterback in 2025 if he hadn’t gone to Cignetti’s Hoosiers.

It’s difficult to cast Mendoza as a villain since he graduated from Cal and even showed up in Berkeley to receive his Cal diploma in person.

UCLA

Cal fans were stunned when UCLA shocked the college football world by announcing in 2022 that it and USC were leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten.

Not only could the Bruins not take their sister University of California school and long-time football rival with them to the Big Ten, UCLA also did not let Cal folks know what it was doing until the deal was made public.

The UC Regents’ approval of UCLA’s move, and the subsequent move by Washington and Oregon to the Big Ten, destroyed the Pac-12 and left Cal to scramble to find a spot in a Power Four conference thousands of miles away on the opposite coast with a reduced revenue share in the ACC.

Bruce Snyder

After leading Cal to a final No. 8 AP national ranking in 1991, still the Bears’ highest final ranking since 1950, Bruce Snyder left as the Golden Bears’ head coach. To make matter worse, he left to become the head coach at another Pac-10 school, Arizona State, which finished in fifth place in the conference standings that year, well behind the Golden Bears.

Cal had just one winning season over the next 10 years.

Stanford

The Cardinal will always be a villain for Cal, and Stanford became a bigger enemy after last year’s game, when the 6-4 Golden Bears lost to 3-7 Stanford 31-10, leading to the firing of Cal head coach Justin Wilcox the next day.

There’s a reason Oski and the Stanford Tree mascots have been involved in fights with each other during games over the years.

On the other hand, ESPN named Kevin Moen as the archenemy of the Cardinal, referring to the Cal player who scored the winning touchdown and slammed the Stanford trombone player on The Play in 1982.

USC

Although Washington had a 19-game winning streak against Cal from 1977 to 2001, it was the Trojans’ dominance over Cal that seemed to annoy the Golden Bears more.

Cal’s 15-14 road victory over USC in 2018, which ended the Trojans’ 14-game winning streak over the Cal, was met with more Cal celebration than would be expected from a midseason game.

There’s a reason Cal purposely ran up the score on USC in 1991, a 52-30 Cal victory.

This passage from the Los Angeles Times' game story tells you what you need to know about that 1991 game in which Cal rolled up 601 yards of offense.

Perhaps venting years of frustration against USC, which is 11-2-1 against Cal since 1977 and 26-5-2 since 1958, the 10th-ranked Golden Bears seemed to revel in the lopsidedness of the score, pointing and posturing throughout and seemingly pouring it on until the middle of the fourth quarter, when Cal Coach Bruce Snyder finally pulled his starters with a 52-14 lead.

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