Cal Golden Bears woke memes Credit: Write for California, Liberal Calgoritm
College FootballTwitterBy Sean Keeley on

The woke agenda has finally taken over college football.

This Saturday, ESPN’s College GameDay will touch down in Berkeley, California for the first time before the Golden Bears host their “bitter” conference rival, the Miami Hurricanes, at Memorial Stadium.

ESPN doesn’t send GameDay to any old campus just for fun. They take into account plenty of factors, including the importance of the game, the traditional aspects of the host school, and what it says about the show and its goals. It turns out, however, that Cal’s fanbase may have played a role in putting them over the top as this weekend’s selection.

A representative for GameDay told Front Office Sports that “enthusiasm with Cal Football Twitter definitely didn’t hurt” when it came to picking Berkeley.

This “enthusiasm” can be summed up with a phrase: The Calgorithm.

In case you haven’t been on X (formerly Twitter) this college football season, the Calgorithm made its mark after Cal’s road win over traditional SEC power Auburn to start the season. Before the game, Tiger fans joked about how there weren’t likely to be many Bears fans showing up at Jordan-Hare Stadium.

“Cal fans are likely too busy thinking of a new woke topic that hurts their feels to travel to Alabama,” said one Auburn fan on X.

Sentiments such as that, playing up Cal’s liberal reputation versus the more traditionally conservative Alabama school, seemed to be exactly the kind of thing that made the Calgorithm what it is.

After the win, Cal Twitter started flipping conservative messaging and stereotyping on its head by playing up things like the “woke agenda” and “preferred pronouns” as the reasons they defeated Auburn.

“Pretty quickly it went from just like small California or Alabama stereotypes to just full on ‘We’re going to make fun of you for being quote-unquote “out of touch,” and then at the same time, we’re going to make fun of ourselves a little bit for going a little too far into the woke ideology,’” the person who runs X account @wokemobfootball, or “Liberal Calgorithm,” told KQED. “I think by the time we had won, all hell had broken loose, and the ‘Antifa Stadium’ [meme] had been dropped.”

By the time Cal visited Florida State for their first ACC football game, the memes were flowing freely. Tallahassee’s Doak Campbell Stadium was now “Woke Campbell Stadium,” Florida State fans were shown in full LGBTQ rainbow colors, and a “Stripe-Out” in FSU’s stadium called for sections such as “Marxist Red” and “Capitalism is a Crime Green.”

“The Bay Area has been a bit of a punching bag in some outlets of the political spectrum. It’s not hard to project that a lot of the vitriol directed toward Cal and Stanford in realignment discussions was because of the region they originated from, and the general political leanings of those who went there,”  wroteAvinash Kunnath on Cal football Substack Write for California. “Instead of running away from the stereotypes, Cal Twitter has run headfirst into them and embraced them wholeheartedly, with a playful and lighthearted spirit.”

It’s no coincidence that all of this is taking off this season. It’s Cal’s first year as a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, which remains deeply weird. The fanbase finds themselves playing in primetime on ESPN and other national networks instead of being siloed off on the Pac-12 Network or at 10 p.m. on ESPN2. They’ve got a schedule full of traditional (and Southern) football schools like Auburn, FSU, and Miami, all while overperforming with a 3-1 record.

While so much attention during the Pac-12’s break-up was on the schools that jetted to the Big Ten or Big 12, Cal and Stanford kinda just hung out in the background, slinking over to the ACC after almost everyone else was gone. In a way, this season has been a revival of sorts as Cal fans figure out their place in a college football landscape that is seemingly indifferent to them.

So, they’re having some fun with it, all while throwing some jabs at the bad-faith actors who peddle in “anti-woke” screeds, many of whom probably don’t have the mirth within themselves to enjoy the bit.

“I think one of the best ways that we have of ensuring that we toe the line is that we do have a very diverse group of people in our community who all have very wildly different experiences and can kind of jump in,” @wokemobfootball told KQED. “What we aim not to do is punch down on people, whether they’re people of color or gay or trans — the point of the joke is mostly specifically to make fun of the other person’s ideology.”

The Calgorithm has even inspired other local businesses and entities to get in on the action. BART is meme-ing about how they’ll have early trains running for College GameDay. Local Safeway stores seem to be in on the joke.

Defeating Miami on the field might be a tall order for the Bears football team, but there’s no doubt that their fans are already cooking up some solid memes that speak to the stereotypical differences between the two schools and programs.

Case in point, referring to it as the “Woke vs. Coke” game is making the rounds mid-week. Lord knows what the signs will say at GameDay this Saturday.

[Front Office Sports, KQED, Write for California, wokemobfootball]

About Sean Keeley

Along with writing for Awful Announcing and The Comeback, Sean is the Managing Editor for Comeback Media. Previously, he created the Syracuse blog Troy Nunes Is An Absolute Magician and wrote 'How To Grow An Orange: The Right Way to Brainwash Your Child Into Rooting for Syracuse.' He has also written non-Syracuse-related things for SB Nation, Curbed, and other outlets. He currently lives in Seattle where he is complaining about bagels. Send tips/comments/complaints to sean@thecomeback.com.

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