An all UC clash ends the Pac-12 regular season football era
UCLA hosts Cal in the last game on the docket before the championship. And perhaps their last meeting ever.
The last regular season Pac-12 game kicks off Saturday night, November 25 at 7:30 pm at the Rose Bowl. UCLA (7-4) will host its elder sibling Cal (5-6). Not much is at stake for this game as neither team is winning the conference. The championship game in Las Vegas will match Washington against either Oregon or Arizona. Cal can become bowl-eligible with a win and possibly earn a trip to Shreveport for the Radiance Technologies1 Independence Bowl. UCLA could be headed to Las Vegas too, but only for the SRS Distribution2 Las Vegas Bowl.
For two schools that are part of the same university system, where one of them was borne out of the other and went by “Southern Campus” or “Southern Branch” for a time, where the teams have similar nicknames3, and similar fight songs4, the rivalry on the football field is not quite as heated as you would think.
The two teams didn’t play each other in football until 1933. By that time, UCLA had played every other member of the current Pac-12 with the exception of Colorado and Arizona State, although UCLA’s first game against Utah was earlier in the 1933 season.
UCLA fielded its first football team in 1919, but didn’t play any college varsity teams until 1920. The Bruins (at that time, the Cubs) had two straight winless seasons against local college varsity teams in 1920 and 1921 and would not beat a college varsity team until they started the 1922 season with a win over San Diego State.
In 1924, UCLA upgraded its nickname from Cubs to the more fearsome Grizzlies. But, in 1926, UCLA wanted to avoid confusion with future Pacific Coast Conference member Montana, who were also the Grizzlies, and switched the nickname to Bruins.
Once UCLA joined the Pacific Coast Conference, the progenitor of the Pac-12, there were some growing pains. In its initial season in 1928, the Bruins lost all four conference games. They didn’t win a conference game until they beat Montana in the final game of the 1929 season.
As for why it took a while for UCLA and Cal to play each other, the historical record is unclear. In this era, football scheduling was still done in a much less rigid fashion than it is today. Although the PCC had ten teams, schools played varying number of conference games. My guess is that the people in Berkeley were not eager to give their little brother in Los Angeles a chance to beat them, although the two schools had already played each other in baseball and basketball.5
However, college basketball was a very minor sport in the 1920s and college baseball was just a handful of games each season. College football however was a very big deal with the NFL many decades removed from becoming the sporting behemoth it is now.
By 1933, Cal finally decided it was time to take on the upstarts in Los Angeles. The game was scheduled for November 4, 1934. UCLA came in to the game with a 4-2 record, but both losses were shutout losses to conference opponents in Stanford and Oregon. Cal was 4-2-1.
The weekend was set up as the homecoming game for both schools. Cal alums living in Southern California held a party as did the much smaller group of actual UCLA alums.
UCLA’s offense was led by two guys with very cool names: Chuck Cheshire and Pants Livesay. The Los Angeles Times used a photo of Cheshire breaking up a pass play as its top illustration on the first sports page. Livesay was also on the coverage.
At the time, UCLA and Cal wore pretty much the exact same color with UCLA wearing a much darker shade of blue than it wears now. UCLA wouldn’t switch to its current shade (which has been tweaked a bit) until Red Sanders started coaching the team in 1949. For this game, UCLA wore gold uniforms and Cal wore blue.
The game ended 0-0, which would be the only tie that UCLA and Cal would play in their history. There was only one scoring chance in the entire game. UCLA’s Mike Frankovich6 tried a drop kick field goal from the Cal 18, but missed. Aside from that, the two teams could not get near the end zone.
The LA Times ran a play by play in the paper which details lots of 3 yard runs followed by 5 yard losses. UCLA was penalized in the game once for throwing two incomplete passes in one series of downs. It was a five yard penalty at the time and that rule would soon be removed from the rule book.
UCLA finished with 136 yards of offense. Cal had 228 yards. UCLA completed just one of ten pass attempts with two being intercepted. Cal was 4 of 17 on passes. Cal would finish the season with a 6-3-2 record and UCLA would end up 6-4-1.7
The two schools then made it a point to play every year. They didn’t miss any games during World War II. But in 2020, COVID-19 looked like it would end the streak of games played.
The Pac-12 was hesitant to start its season amidst the pandemic and didn’t schedule games until November. Cal’s first scheduled game at home against Washington was canceled because of COVID cases on the Cal squad. The Bears’ next game against Arizona State got scratched because too many Sun Devils were sick. That same week, UCLA’s game against Utah got canceled.
Cal was eager to get its first game in and asked to schedule a game at UCLA on Sunday, November 15, 2020. UCLA decided “what the heck?” and the game kicked off at 9 am before an empty Rose Bowl. UCLA, who had already played one game, easily dispatched the very rusty Bears 34-10.
For the most part, this has never been a huge rivalry game despite it being L.A. vs the Bay Area or a battle to decide who the best team in the University of California System is. The Cal fans tended to take it more seriously than the UCLA fans.
In my lifetime, UCLA and Cal both competed for the conference title just once. That was back in the 1975 season when the two schools tied for first in the Pac-8 with 6-1 records. UCLA received the Rose Bowl berth because it had won the head-to-head matchup earlier in the year.
On October 21, 1978, UCLA and Cal met in Berkeley with both teams sporting 5-1 records. Cal’s quarterbacks threw a conference record TEN interceptions, three of which were returned for touchdowns, and UCLA won 45-0. Cal also lost two fumbles in the game and committed 14 penalties. UCLA, which ran the wishbone offense at the time, completed two of nine passes.
The biggest winning margin in the rivalry came in the 1965 game when UCLA won 56-3 with UCLA outgaining Cal by a 619-148 margin.
Cal’s biggest win in the series came in 1992 in Berkeley when the Bears won 48-12. Neither team was particularly good that season, but UCLA was going through a period where it lost three starting quarterbacks to injury and were forced to start walkon John Barnes.8
Saturday’s game may just be two Pac-12 teams playing out the string, but it will be the last time for this guy who is UCLA, B.A., History, 1987 and UC Berkeley, MLIS, Library and Information Studies, 1988 to pretend that he has divided loyalties.9
Radiance Technologies appears to do a lot of “stuff” in cybersecurity.
What do they distribute? Construction supplies!
This bothers the people in Berkeley.
This REALLY bothers the people in Berkeley.
Cal and UCLA first played each other in basketball in 1921.
Frankovich would become more famous after college when he entered the film business, eventually becoming a successful producer and winning the Jean Hersholt Award at the 1983 Oscars.
Stanford shared the PCC title with Oregon at 4-1 in conference play, but got the Rose Bowl bid because of schedule strength. Under Rose Bowl rules at the time, the PCC champ picked its opponent for New Year’s Day and Stanford chose lightly regarded Columbia, who pulled off a stunning 7-0 upset.
Barnes would famously lead UCLA to wins in its last three games including an 38-37 season-ending upset of USC when he threw for 385 yardss, 263 of the yards to J.J. Stokes.
I almost never root for Cal in these games unless it were a situation where UCLA was terrible and Cal had a chance to win the conference. So, in other words, I don’t root for Cal often or at all.
"UCLA was penalized in the game once for throwing two incomplete passes in one series of downs."
Were incomplete passes penalized or having two in one series of downs?