Cal football has no shortage of enemies, but ESPN’s pick for the program’s biggest one was an easy call: Mack Brown. Golden Bear fans have never really let go of the anger from the 2004 season, when Brown publicly politicked Cal out of what Bears fans still consider their rightful place in the Rose Bowl.
Even Aaron Rodgers was still holding a grudge a dozen years later, and the source material points to that lingering resentment as proof that Brown’s name belongs near the top of any Cal villain list.
But Brown is only the starting point. The Rose Bowl itself has delivered plenty of pain to Cal over the years, and the scars run deep.
The Bears tied USC for the 2006 Pac-10 title, only to watch the Trojans go to Pasadena because of the regular-season head-to-head result. A similar story played out in 1975, when Cal and UCLA finished tied atop the Pac-8 at 6-1, yet the Bruins got the Rose Bowl invite after beating Cal during the season and then clinching the berth by defeating USC in their finale, despite losing eight fumbles in a 25-22 win.
Cal’s Rose Bowl misery goes back even further. The Bears reached the 1959 Rose Bowl, their only appearance there since the 1950 season, and Iowa hammered them 38-12 while piling up 516 total yards, including 429 on the ground.
Before that, Pappy Waldorf’s teams had gone undefeated in the regular season three straight years from 1948 through 1950, only to lose every Rose Bowl. And the heartbreak stretches back to 1929, when Georgia Tech beat Cal 8-7 after Roy Riegels ran 69 yards the wrong way and set up the decisive safety.
There’s also the strange and muddy chapter from 1922. Cal, favored heavily, tied Washington & Jefferson 0-0 in a waterlogged Rose Bowl, then declined invitations to the 1923 and 1924 games even after undefeated regular seasons. The student body voted to turn those bids down, and coach Andy Smith had already complained that Washington & Jefferson used “ringers” in the 1922 game.
If Cal ever makes it back to the Rose Bowl now, it will have to do it through the College Football Playoff, since that’s the path to the postseason games designated for Pasadena.
Another name that has landed in the villain conversation is Fernando Mendoza, though the fit is awkward. Indiana’s coach pulled him out of Cal’s transfer portal and turned him into a Heisman Trophy winner, a national championship quarterback, and the No. 1 overall pick in the NFL draft. Mendoza would have been Cal’s quarterback in 2025 if he had stayed, but it’s hard to paint him as the enemy when he graduated from Cal and even returned to Berkeley to receive his diploma in person.
UCLA, meanwhile, gave Cal fans a different kind of betrayal in 2022. The Bruins and USC announced they were leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten, and Cal supporters were stunned.
UCLA did not bring its long-time rival and fellow UC school with it, and Cal people were not told about the move until after it was already public. The Regents’ approval of UCLA’s move, followed by Washington and Oregon heading to the Big Ten, wiped out the Pac-12 and left Cal scrambling for a place in a Power Four conference on the opposite coast, with a reduced revenue share in the ACC.
Bruce Snyder also earns a spot on the list. After leading Cal to a No.
8 AP national ranking in 1991 - still the program’s highest final ranking since 1950 - he left for Arizona State, another Pac-10 school that finished fifth in the conference standings that season, well behind the Bears. Cal then endured only one winning season over the next 10 years.
And then there’s Stanford, the eternal one. The Cardinal will always be a villain for Cal, and last year’s 31-10 loss to 3-7 Stanford only made that rivalry sting more.
The defeat came in a 6-4 season for Cal and led to the firing of head coach Justin Wilcox the next day. The animosity is baked into the rivalry, down to the mascots - Oski and the Stanford Tree have even fought during games over the years.
ESPN named Kevin Moen as Stanford’s archenemy, pointing to The Play in 1982, when the Cal player scored the winning touchdown and slammed the Stanford trombone player. Washington’s long winning streak against Cal from 1977 to 2001 also gets a mention, but the source makes clear that USC is the program that has seemed to irritate Cal the most.
That showed up again in 2018, when Cal beat USC 15-14 on the road and snapped the Trojans’ 14-game winning streak over the Bears. And it wasn’t just relief; it looked like celebration with an edge. Cal had already made its feelings obvious back in 1991, when it beat USC 52-30 in a game the Bears seemed to relish from start to finish, rolling up 601 yards of offense and continuing to pour it on until Bruce Snyder finally pulled his starters with a 52-14 lead in the fourth quarter.
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