Cal and UCLA are back on the same field Saturday night, and with them comes a rivalry that has been around since 1933, a matchup that once felt like a permanent part of West Coast college football before the two schools were separated in 2023. The game also opens an annual series that runs through 2029.
The reunion lands in a strange place. Cal is now in the Atlantic Coast Conference, UCLA in the Big Ten, and the path that split them traces back to former Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, whose media strategy and the underwhelming Pac-12 Networks helped create the revenue gap that pushed the conference into collapse. In 2022, UCLA and USC announced they were headed to the Big Ten, and once the Los Angeles TV market was gone, the Pac-12’s value took another hit.
UCLA, though, was not done paying for the breakup. In 2024, the UC Board of Regents voted to require the Bruins to pay Cal about $10 million a year for three years in what became known as “Calimony.” So when UCLA shows up in Strawberry Canyon on Saturday, it will do so with a Big Ten patch on the jersey and a big check attached to the visit.
On the field, the night brings back the Joe Roth Memorial Game for the first time in four years. Cal will wear the classic 1970s royal blue uniforms Roth wore in 1975, the season he helped the Golden Bears upset No. 4 USC and snap the Trojans’ 18-game winning streak.
Roth’s place in Cal lore goes far beyond one signature win. He arrived from Grossmont College in El Cajon as a backup, then took over at quarterback in Week 4 and led the Bears to a Pac-8 co-championship in 1975.
Cal finished with the nation’s best offense that year and ended up ranked No. 14.
By the start of the 1976 season, Roth was the Heisman favorite. Then his year was overshadowed by a terminal melanoma diagnosis that he kept private so it would not affect the team. He still pushed through the season, earned consensus All-American honors, and kept his commitments to play in both the Hula Bowl and the Japan Bowl.
Former coach Mike White later described one moment from the trip to Tokyo in California Magazine:
“When the time was up at one autograph-signing session, he noticed that hundreds of kids were still waiting. So he kept signing until every one had an autograph.
He just smiled and thanked them. Then he went outside and vomited in the bushes.”
Roth died weeks later on Feb. 19, 1977, at 21. His No. 12 remains the only retired jersey in Cal football history, and his memorial patch from 1977 carried three words that still define his legacy: faith, humility and courage.
That history is part of what gives this game its edge. Cal and UCLA have produced their share of memorable moments over the years, from Cal ending a 12-game skid against the Bruins in 1990 to Aaron Rodgers lighting up Pasadena in 2004 and Marshawn Lynch and DeSean Jackson taking over Memorial Stadium in 2006.
Cal also stunned No. 25 UCLA during the Joe Roth rededication in 2012, and the Bears closed out 90 years in the Pac-12 with a 33-7 win in 2023.
Those games carried the kind of regional pride and grit that used to define college football, long before realignment and settlement checks started shaping the sport’s calendar. Saturday gives that old rivalry another run, and Cal gets three more chances after that to try to beat its sister campus and keep Roth’s story woven into the game.
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