Private Equity Burrows Deeper Into College Sports
Linebacker Cade Uluave was at practice, training with his Cal Golden Bears teammates for the big game against No. 8 Miami Hurricanes on Saturday. An intense situation, and yet Uluave had “Ott to Go,” a parody video of Chappell Roan’s blockbuster “Hot to Go,” running through his head “all practice, I’m not going to lie,” he told reporters Tuesday.
Star running back Jaydn Ott laughed when Uluave went up to him and started singing the song. A band of fervent Cal fans had hired a singer to produce the music video, which dropped a few days before.
“Ott to Go” is just the latest instance of Cal football Twitter becoming real life.
On the field, the Bears are 3–1. It’s a modest start, but a glimmer of hope after several years mired in mediocrity. Off the field, Cal fans have staked a claim to being one of the last fun things on Elon Musk–era Twitter, taking social media by storm with millions of views on their viral AI-generated memes.
The players are enjoying the jokes, and the fan base has been reenergized further by ESPN’s College GameDay coming to Berkeley for the first time ever Saturday. Players like Aaron Rodgers, Marshawn Lynch, Jared Goff, and DeSean Jackson have all gone through Berkeley, but none earned the coveted spotlight of college football’s famous traveling road show, leaving Cal as one of only six power conference schools GameDay had never visited. You could argue the “Calgorithm” did what those legends could not.
“All the Cal burners or whatever you want to call them, they’re doing a great job. The Calgorithm, I’ve seen that a few times on Twitter or X, and I think it’s great. I think it’s awesome,” Uluave said.
Broadly speaking, the memes lean in to the stereotype of Berkeley as a bastion for hippies and liberals. The 1988 Notre Dame–Miami game was famously “Catholics vs. Convicts.” Saturday’s matchup is “Woke vs. Coke.”
Being “woke” is at the heart of the Calgorithm. Posts before the Florida State game jokingly declared the game “Open Borders Night” with free tickets and beer for undocumented immigrants. Others showed the renamed “Woke Campbell Stadium” (actually called Doak Campbell) with pride flags, a gender neutral bathroom sign, and a Harris-Walz campaign poster.
Many threatened that courses about “critical race theory,” banned in Florida schools, would be taught at halftime.
“I think there was a stadium one, too, which had a Florida State seating chart, and I think it was color coded by rainbow and it had sections based off of your political agenda,” Avinash Kunnath, who runs the Cal football blog “Write for California,” tells Front Office Sports. “I think we’ve just played very deeply into the Berkeley stereotype.”
The memes are in part a byproduct of the realignment-induced oddity of Cal regularly playing schools from the South, which only heightens the contrast between the liberal Bay Area and schools in Ron DeSantis’s Florida. (Miami is traveling over 2,500 miles to play the Bears.)
“I think that fed well into creating interesting and hilarious images, Photoshops, videos, all that jazz that helped us lean way more in to the identity that made it really funny from a cultural perspective,” says Kunnath.
Plus, the school isn’t siloed off on the Pac-12 Network anymore, but instead enjoys national media distribution on ESPN. (That’s the very dynamic that led to the collapse of the Pac-12 in the first place.) The result is that national college football fans are more aware of Cal and its fan base. As a bonus, being in the ACC provides a bit of a breather from a football perspective, compared to a Pac-12 slate that included Washington, Oregon, Oregon State, Utah, and USC last year. “I think they’re probably better equipped to not be terrible, which is great,” Grant Marek, a Cal alum and editor-in-chief of SFGate, tells FOS.
One post in particular launched the Calgorithm into the national consciousness. In response to Auburn’s official football account posting the final score from its loss to the Bears, one user responded with a meme that read: “You just lost to the woke agenda,” overlaid with images including a rainbow, Cal football players, and vice president Kamala Harris. The post currently has five million views and close to 70,000 likes on X.
“That prompted us I think to get a little better organized and to try a little harder, but the Cal fan burner community online has been a thing for years,” says one member of the Calgorithm who goes under the pseudonym Admiral Bear.
Jokes are passed around between about 120 fans in a group chat called “Calgorithm Memes For Deranged Wilcox Teens,” a reference to head coach Justin Wilcox. Some of the most prolific members are alumni in their 30s and 40s, some of whom work in media, but many in tech or law, hence the pseudonyms. There’s also a smaller group called the “Council of Meme Distribution” that’s currently brainstorming, fundraising, and printing signs to be featured on the GameDay broadcast.
“So Oski is the mascot for Cal,” he says. “He’s a weird mascot. He’s a bear, but he’s not ferocious. He’s sort of just ominous. So we like to joke that we’re all just humble servants of the dark lord Oski. We’re doing his bidding. That’s what this is for. None of us want glory or credit. All glory goes to Oski.”
The Calgorithm had a field day with the Florida State game, but the community stayed consistent—and relevant—despite the loss and a bye week, with sights set on landing GameDay. The phrase #FightForCalGameDay went viral on X, accompanied by memes of ESPN’s crew with bear heads or driving a classic Volkswagen hippie van to Berkeley.
A representative for GameDay said that there are many factors that go into picking a site for the week, but “enthusiasm with Cal Football Twitter definitely didn’t hurt.”
ESPN isn’t the only company to join in on the fun. Safeway grocery stores in the area have started displaying a Calgorithm meme of a Cal Bear and Miami Ibis holding up peace signs at the GameDay desk (and a QR code for the school’s NIL fund). The public transportation system, BART, is displaying the same meme in its stations, and announced early-morning trains to accommodate GameDay with a meme of its own. (Being on the West Coast, GameDay starts at 6 a.m. local time, which is 13 and a half hours before the night game’s kickoff.)
As the Calgorithm has grown, its members have become friends with other fan bases, even flying a couple of them out to their tailgates. At one of the pregame parties largely filled with Calgorithm fans, everybody takes a shot of the niche Chicago drink Jeppson’s Malört before games. It’s a proven method: A victory on Saturday would be the 10th win in a row when the tailgaters drink Malört before a game in the state of California.
“On paper, I think it’s a tough matchup,” Admiral Bear says, “but we’re hoping that the vibes carry us to victory.”
