Cal Football: OMG, a Traditional Starting Time for Cal-Stanford Game
The Big Game between Cal and Stanford is a traditional rivalry, and believe it or not this year’s Big Game will be played at a traditional time.
It was announced Monday that the 122nd Big Game on Saturday, Nov. 23, will kick off at 1 p.m. at Stanford Stadium and will be televised by Pac-12 Network.
It’s rather amazing that a game – any game – would start at the time that virtually all college games started back in the day before television ruled everything.
Cal has played only one game this season that started at the time college games are supposed to start on Saturday afternoon. That was the home game against North Texas that began at 1:15 p.m.
This Saturday’s home game against USC begins at 8 p.m., and with the Trojans’ pass-happy offense likely to prolong the game, it may not be over until close to midnight. How many people on the East Coast will be watching that game on TV at 2:30 a.m.?
For Cal’s first 11 games, the Bears will have 10 different starting times. The starting times for the Washington and Arizona State games were both 7:30 p.m., which is the only duplicated kickoff time, although the Washington game was a Saturday night contest and the ASU game was a Friday night game.
Here are the starting times of Cal’s games this season, with each starting time listed in Pacific time.
--Cal-UC Davis – 3:30 p.m.
--Cal-Washington – 7:30 p.m.
--Cal-North Texas – 1:15 p.m.
--Cal-Mississippi – 9 a.m.
--Cal-Arizona State – 7:30 p.m.
--Cal-Oregon – 5 p.m.
--Cal Oregon State – 11:30 a.m.
--Cal-Utah – 7 p.m.
--Cal-Washington State – 4 p.m.
--Cal-USC – 8 p.m.
--Cal-Stanford – 1 p.m.
Cal and Stanford first played each other in 1892, and it is now tied for the sixth-longest active running series between Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) teams.
Stanford holds a 64-46-11 all-time advantage and has a current winning streak of nine in a row, which is the longest by either team in the series.
At the moment Cal has a 5-4 record and Stanford is 4-5.
