Cal’s Memorial Stadium is set for a rare football marathon on September 25-26, with a Friday night college showdown and a Saturday high school doubleheader all packed into roughly 21 hours.
The stretch begins at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, September 25, when Cal hosts Clemson in what could be the Bears’ biggest measuring-stick game of the season. Clemson enters ranked No. 23 in the preseason coaches poll, and the AP poll is scheduled to come out Monday, August 17. For Cal and head coach Tosh Lupoi, the matchup offers a chance to push into the national conversation on their home field in the fourth game of the season.
There’s also a scenario that would make the game even louder: Cal could arrive at 3-0, which the source material says seems possible.
Then the focus shifts to high school football on the stadium’s artificial turf, which makes the venue ready for back-to-back showcase games on Saturday, September 26. De La Salle has branded the slate the 151 Football Showcase, a nod to the Spartans’ national-record 151-game winning streak from 1992 to 2004. Lupoi was a star at De La Salle in the late 1990s, right in the middle of that run, and the school remains a major part of his story.
The Saturday action opens at 11 a.m., about 12 hours after the Cal-Clemson game ends, when Saint Mary’s of Stockton faces Marin Catholic of Kentfield, California. Marin Catholic has its own Cal ties: former Bears and current Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff played there, and Cal quarterbacks coach Nick Rolovich also was a quarterback at Marin Catholic in the mid-1990s before later returning as an assistant coach at his Marin County alma mater.
Marin Catholic won the Division 4-AA state championship in 2021 and the 3-A state title in 2023, though it finished 5-6 last season. Saint Mary’s comes in with more recent hardware after winning the state Division 2-AA championship last year while going 13-2 and finishing 17th in the final On SI California rankings.
A little more than an hour after that one wraps up, another heavyweight matchup takes center stage at 2 p.m. as De La Salle meets Centennial of Southern California. Centennial went 11-2 last season and finished No. 2 in the final On SI California rankings, trailing only state champion Santa Margarita.
Santa Margarita beat De La Salle in the Open Division state championship game last year, giving the Spartans their only loss in a 12-1 season in 2025. Even so, De La Salle and Centennial both sit inside the top 10 of the Rivals/On3 2026 preseason state rankings. Centennial is No. 11 in the Rivals/On3 preseason national rankings, while De La Salle is unranked - an unusual spot for a program that has been named national champion 12 times since 1994.
That puts De La Salle in the rare position of underdog against a Corona, California, powerhouse from the CIF Southern Section, which the source describes as probably the best high school football region in the country.
When the final whistle blows on that game, the weekend’s 21-hour football run will be complete - a Bay Area showcase with Cal, De La Salle and Marin Catholic all sharing the same stage. The only thing missing, as the source puts it, is an NFL game involving the San Francisco 49ers.
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