BERKELEY — After a nine-month incubation that has had Old Blues of every generation on edge, Cal football will give birth to the Tosh Lupoi coaching era on Saturday night.
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A defensive lineman for the Bears a quarter-century ago, Lupoi will make his head-coaching debut at UCLA. The 45-year-old declines to make this about himself.
“This is a really cool opportunity to showcase our program, our university, our rockin’ fan base,” he said this week, looking ahead to the 7:30 p.m. game that will be broadcast nationally on ESPN.
To meet the swell of interest, Cal has removed the tarps covering two sections above the south tunnel of Memorial Stadium. Only 3,500 tickets remained as of Thursday morning and Cal officials were projecting a capacity crowd of 54,283, a total that would be nearly 20,000 above the average attendance a year ago.
“I’m so excited,” sophomore quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele said. “You can feel the anticipation in the locker room. Everyone’s excited to just go out there and play for each other.”
Sagapolutele aside, this will be an almost unrecognizable Golden Bears team a year after they went 7-6 in coach Justin Wilcox’s final season.
Lupoi brought in a highly rated class of 32 transfers last spring, hired first-time coordinators with NFL experience and set the bar high for a program that hasn’t finished better than one game over .500 for seven years and hasn’t posted a winning conference record since 2009.
Cornerback Ricky Fletcher, a transfer from Ole Miss, said Lupoi set the tone from the start.
“Just trying to piggyback off the energy that coach Tosh puts in,” Fletcher said. “He’s a very high-energy guy so we’ve just been buying into the energy and approaching everything with relentless effort.”
The first Cal alum to coach the Bears since Joe Kapp was hired in 1982, Lupoi comes aboard as the college football landscape continues to shift.
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The Bears are entering their third season in the ACC after the breakup of the Pac-12, but no one believes realignment is complete. It’s on Lupoi and Ron Rivera, the football general manager and athletic director, to make sure Cal is positioned as a relevant program when the next wave of change arrives.
Lupoi has no doubts about his ability to make that happen. “This place is fully capable of being one of the elite, premier college environments,” he said, reflecting on his years playing under Jeff Tedford, when the Bears routinely drew big crowds.
The Week 1 opponent won’t be easy. UCLA was just 3-9 in 2025 but made its own offseason coaching change. Now steering the ship is Bob Chesney, who guided James Madison to a 21-6 record the past two years and into the College Football Playoff last season.
Lupoi, who was Oregon’s defensive coordinator the past four years, got an up-close look at Chesney when the Ducks outscored JMU 51-34 in their first-round CFP game.
“Basically every great player who was on a playoff team joined him at UCLA,” Lupoi said.
Foremost among those 10 transfers is running back Wayne Knight, who rushed for 1,373 yards last season, including 105 vs. Lupoi’s Oregon defense.
“This is an NFL running back,” said Cal defensive coordinator Michael Hutchings, whose Bay Area roots include a playing career at De La Salle High School.
The Bears and Bruins first squared off back in 1933 and this will be their 95th meeting. But it’s the first since 2023 because of the Pac-12 dissolution, which sent UCLA to the Big Ten Conference.
This matchup also is designated the Joe Roth Memorial Game, honoring the popular All-America quarterback who died in of melanoma following the 1976 season.
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