Tosh Lupoi didn’t wait long to get to the point.
With UCLA coming to town Saturday at 7 p.m., the Cal football coach used his game-week press conference to push more than a football message. He wanted students in the building, especially the Greeks on campus, and he made that clear by calling for “butts in seats” by kickoff. Lupoi said he met with chapter presidents over the summer, and he pointed to a new extra student entrance as part of the effort to make Memorial Stadium easier to fill.
The timing matters to him. The tarps are off the south end, the crowd energy has already been stirred back up, and Lupoi spoke as someone who can picture the place packed again. That doesn’t feel like a stretch coming from a coach who left a venue that was regularly at capacity.
Lupoi also spent part of the session on something smaller, but very much in line with the tone of the day: details. He admitted to getting a little too deep into game-day prep when he was thinking about red challenge flags, only to be corrected by equipment manager TIm Feaster, who reminded him there are no red flags in college football.
Lupoi’s takeaway was simple: “I think we have the best equipment staff in the nation, I’ll go on record. No stone left unturned.
That idea - process first, details first - ran through nearly everything that followed. Offensive and defensive coordinators, along with all three team leaders, Keawe-Sagapolutele, Fletcher, and Mohammed, all landed on the same theme.
Defensive Coordinator Michael Hutchings put it bluntly: “How did we get to those results? Did we do it the right way, did we check every box that we were supposed to check each and every play?”
He added, “I don’t think we’re going to be results oriented or results driven, always process driven. Success and failure can both be imposters, we don’t want our guys to get caught up in that, so did we get to the result in the correct way?”
That same mindset has shaped the week inside the building. As late as the start of this week, the focus was still on Cal’s own offense and skill work, not on the outside noise. On game day, OC Jordan Somerville will handle play-calling from the box, while QB coach Nick Rolovitch will be on the field.
Even with all that internal focus, nobody in the room was pretending UCLA was a mystery. The Bruins’ Wayne Knight was described as a known quantity, and the message around him was clear: contain him, not stop him. He is expected, and he is coming.
There was also some perspective in the way Cal’s staff talked about the matchup. Lupoi noted that he and a portion of his staff coached one of their last games at Oregon against a team that later transferred heavily to UCLA.
He said, “Chesney as well as Dean Kennedy, and Colin (Hitschler) their DC, I’ve got a lot of respect for what they accomplished there together. Coming over to this place, leaving James Madison, I think they do a great job.”
For all the film study and familiarity that comes with facing players who were in different uniforms a year ago, Lupoi kept steering the conversation back to Cal’s own lane. The expectations around both programs are high, but he said the Bears are keeping their attention on the work in front of them: “(I think we’re) dialed into what matters, Us, how we’re playing, our opportunity to display our culture, kick off a new era of football, and don’t put a lot into what other people’s expectations are.”
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The matchup carries the extra edge of a duel between new coaches, and it has already drawn enough interest to make the atmosphere feel bigger than a September opener. With the Bruins favored by a slim margin, the stakes are less about the betting line than the early read on how Cal handles a rivalry test that could set the tone fast for how its ACC journey is viewed. [Read more 🡒]