BERKELEY - The wait is almost over at Memorial Stadium, where Cal is bracing for a loud opening night as the Tosh Lupoi era begins Saturday against UCLA.
Lupoi, a former Bears defensive lineman who is taking over as head coach at 45, has spent the buildup trying to keep the spotlight off himself. His first game on the sideline arrives at 7:30 p.m. and will be shown nationally on ESPN, but he framed the moment as a showcase for the entire program.
“This is a really cool opportunity to showcase our program, our university, our rockin’ fan base,” he said this week.
The anticipation has already shown up in the stadium plan. Cal removed the tarps from two sections above the south tunnel, and with 3,500 tickets still available as of Thursday morning, officials were projecting a crowd of 54,283. That would be nearly 20,000 more than the average attendance from 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.”
The Bears will look very different from the team that finished 7-6 in Justin Wilcox’s final season. Lupoi arrived with a highly rated transfer class of 32 players, brought in first-time coordinators with NFL experience and set an aggressive tone for a program that has not finished more than one game over .500 in seven years and has not had a winning conference record since 2009.
Cornerback Ricky Fletcher, a transfer from Ole Miss, said that energy has been obvious 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.”
Lupoi is the first Cal alum to coach the Bears since Joe Kapp was hired in 1982, and he arrives while the college football map keeps shifting around him. Cal is entering its third season in the ACC after the Pac-12 breakup, but the realignment picture still feels unfinished. Lupoi and Ron Rivera, the football general manager and athletic director, are the ones tasked with keeping Cal relevant for whatever comes next.
Lupoi is convinced the ingredients are there.
“This place is fully capable of being one of the elite, premier college environments,” he said, pointing back to his playing days under Jeff Tedford, when the Bears were regularly drawing big crowds.
The challenge starts immediately. UCLA went 3-9 in 2025 but made a coaching change of its own, bringing in Bob Chesney after he went 21-6 over the last two seasons at James Madison and led the Dukes into the College Football Playoff last season.
Lupoi saw Chesney’s team firsthand when Oregon beat JMU 51-34 in the first round of the CFP. He also knows the Bruins have added serious talent, including 10 transfers. At the top of that list is running back Wayne Knight, who ran for 1,373 yards last season and had 105 against Lupoi’s Oregon defense.
“Basically every great player who was on a playoff team joined him at UCLA,” Lupoi said.
Cal defensive coordinator Michael Hutchings, whose background includes playing at De La Salle High School, offered his own blunt assessment of Knight.
“This is an NFL running back,” said Cal defensive coordinator Michael Hutchings.
Saturday’s game will be the 95th meeting between Cal and UCLA, a rivalry that began in 1933. It is the first matchup since 2023, with UCLA having moved to the Big Ten after the Pac-12 dissolved.
The game is also being played as the Joe Roth Memorial Game, honoring the popular All-America quarterback who died of melanoma after the 1976 season.
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