An artificially-generated photo of a bear wearing a tie-dye Cal shirt standing next to an ibis wearing a Miami Hurricanes jersey in front of ESPN's "College GameDay" desk (Photo courtesy of @AdmiralBear01)
The fuse was lit on Sept. 7 at 4:03 p.m.
Cal had just gone into SEC territory and beat Auburn on the road, transforming Jordan-Hare Stadium into Bear Territory. Moments after the clock hit zero, a Twitter/X account with the handle @golDonbear quote-tweeted Auburn’s final score graphic with a photo featuring Cal football players, Kamala Harris, a rainbow, an electoral map and Oski, the team’s mascot. The seven-word caption set off a revolution.
“You just lost to the woke agenda.”
“That’s the one that put us on the map, and then everything else followed after that,” said Rob Hwang of Cal blog Write for California. “That was our entry point into the mainstream algorithm, and then it exploded from there.”
Over the last month, there has been no force more powerful in college football than the Calgorithm, the catch-all term for the Cal fanbase’s ubiquitous presence on social media. Led by alumni, fans and an army of AI-wielding burner accounts, the Calgorithm has weaponized stereotypes about Berkeley and used them as a mechanism for self-aware humor. It’s a collective that not only helped bring ESPN’s College GameDay to Cal for the first time, but had a hand in influencing BART schedules, lowering ticket prices and producing an award-deserving anthem.
“We’ve been accomplishing a lot of tangible things,” said burner account @AdmiralBear01. “It’s pretty amazing to see all of that coming from what really originated as this core group of nerds on Twitter who are way too interested in a middle-of-the-road football team.”
Cal’s fanbase has always had a presence on social media, but primarily on an “if you know you know” basis (The Daily Californian’s Maria Kholodova detailed the subject last year). To Avinash Kunnath of Write for California, Cal never really entered the mainstream due to the Pac-12’s diminutive status compared to other power conferences. The program’s inability to consistently play meaningful football past September didn’t help, either.
The transition to the ACC, then, provided the Bears and their fanbase with a new East Coast audience, one unfamiliar with Cal’s game. Where the Calgorithm really gained its power was in its win against Auburn — and what transpired afterward.
Taking the lead from @golDonbear, Cal fans have fully leaned into the stereotypes about Berkeley. The memes touch on subjects such as social justice; critical race theory; pronouns; decolonization; socialism; communism; and, of course, wokeness. Oski, the team’s mascot, has been a central, diety-like figure. Many have dubbed Saturday’s matchup against No. 8 Miami as “Coke vs. Woke,” a nod to the infamous “Catholics vs. Convicts” game when Miami played Notre Dame in 1988.
Key to the Calgorithm are several group chats, some of them featuring over 100 burner accounts, that allow members of the community to share ideas. Some burners have even banded together to raise money and help fly fans out to Saturday’s game.
“What our posters did really well was lean heavily into our identity, which was been an object of ridicule for a while in terms of Cal not caring about football, Berkeley liberals, Berkeley hippies, Berkeley woke, stuff like that,” Kunnath said. “We just leaned into that identity and we owned it. By owning that identity, it kind of took the power away from all the things people made fun of us for. We also made fun of ourselves a little bit, too. Those things lend themselves well to everyone else understanding what Cal Twitter is all about.”
The Calgorithm’s influence only begins with bringing GameDay, which will have Marshawn Lynch as its guest picker, to Berkeley. BART announced on Tuesday that it would have early trains at select stations to ensure that fans could arrive in Berkeley by 5 a.m. for GameDay’s 6 a.m. start time.
“When I got that news, I was genuinely emotional,” said @AdmiralBear01, who created advertisements that have popped up around the Bay Area. “Like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe what we’re doing.’”
There has also been an effort by the fanbase to ensure that fans won’t just go to GameDay, but to the game itself. Mike Davie, otherwise known as “The Hot Dog Mayor,” and the Oakland 68s worked with Roger Kristof, a premium account executive at Cal, to set up a discount code for tickets to get A’s fans to Berkeley. The initial batch of tickets sold out, but Kristof added 80 more.
Of all the memes, the crown jewel of the Calgorithm is arguably “Ott to Go,” a Jaydn Ott-inspired remix of Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go” that released hours before ESPN’s GameDay announcement. As far as sports-related parody songs go, this one is deserving of a Grammy.
The main architect was @nyt_wordle_bot, who commissioned a singer and wrote the original draft. @AdmiralBear01 wrote the bulk of the final lyrics,@atomsareenough tweaked some lines, @wokemobfootball created the music video and @TwistNHook helped ensure the song was released at the best possible time.
The vocals were performed by Micky Hage, a songwriter, producer and singer based in Stockholm, Sweden who partially grew up in Santa Monica. Hage took on the gig for a couple hundred dollars while working on her self-titled debut album. In an absolutely bizarre coincidence, the nickname of Hage’s boyfriend is “Oski.”
“We decided that that was a sign from Oski — the Dark Lord himself — that this was fated, that this was meant to be all along,” said @nyt_wordle_bot, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 2004. “Hage didn’t even mention this until after the song was complete and given to us. We decided that was surely a sign from the heavens, that it was all meant to be.”
And, yes, Ott knows that the song exists.
“I actually saw it this morning and it was stuck in my head all practice,” linebacker Cade Uluave said on Tuesday. “I went up to Jaydyn and I was like, ‘O-T-T-T,’ singing the song. He was laughing. I think a few guys have seen it. All the Cal burners or whatever you want to call them, they’re doing a great job.”
To be sure, Berkeley wouldn’t get the GameDay treatment if the game itself wasn’t compelling. Cal vs. Miami isn’t Georgia vs. Alabama, but the Bears’ first ACC home game certainly has juice.
Both teams enter Saturday night with one combined defeat, that being Cal’s frustrating loss to Florida State in Tallahassee. The Hurricanes are a top-10 team, and quarterback Cam Ward could be a top-10 pick. ESPN could’ve easily opted for No. 10 Michigan vs. Washington, a rematch of last year’s national championship, but that game lost its allure when the Huskies lost to Rutgers last Friday.
The Bears and the Hurricanes made the game interesting enough to even be considered for the GameDay treatment. The Calgorithm handled the rest.
“The Cal football program almost died 14 months ago with the realignment,” said burner account @GhostofGarbers, who didn’t attend Cal but grew up as a fan of the team. “We’ve survived this round, but I think there’s a shared sense among the administration, the team, the fans, the boosters that we’re not out of the woods yet when it comes to the next round of realignment that could look a lot different than anything we’ve ever seen before.
“There’s a shared sense of urgency and a shared sense to change the narrative among the fans. It’s just really inspiring to see people take things into their own hands.”
Originally published at Justice delos Santos