Cal Football Is Keeping Berkeley Weird—and It's Good

Back in April, a California college football coach with Southern roots made a startling admission: his adopted hometown had turned him from a staunch Republican into an Obama Democrat. "I'm a weirdo and I don't feel weird here," Tony Franklin, Cal's offensive coordinator, told CBS Sports' Jon Solomon. Really, it's the kind of thing that could only happen in Berkeley, epicenter of the radically weird for more than 50 years.

It's always a little strange when Cal fields a good football team: given football's martial roots, and the sport's historical tendency to stand at odds with progressive thought, it almost feels like a betrayal of both Berkeley's leftist tradition and its academic credentials as the best public college in America. Is it possible for these things to coexist in one town?

Only here are the Bears, standing at 5-0, with a crucial game at Utah this Saturday night. It's not that Cal hasn't been here before in recent years: the best quarterback and the best running back in the NFL, Aaron Rodgers and Marshawn Lynch, both played at the school; in 2004, the Bears were just a few plays away from reaching the national championship game under former coach Jeff Tedford. There's something about this Cal team that feels appropriately nonconformist for a community that tends to revel in such things.

A large part of it is the coaching staff. There is Franklin, a genuine weirdo who was temporarily blackballed from coaching after he was accused of providing information that the NCAA used to put his former employer, Kentucky, on probation for rules violations under coach Hal Mumme, another weirdo. (Franklin later sued the school and Mumme, and wrote a book about his experience.) There is also Franklin's boss, Cal head coach Sonny Dykes, who studied the Air Raid offense under Mumme and Mike Leach, college football's most prominently fascinating weirdo, whose Washington State Cougars Cal narrowly beat last Saturday to remain undefeated. Dykes is from Lubbock, Texas, where his father, the alliteratively named Spike Dykes, was one of the most successful football coaches in Texas Tech history. Nearly every job Dykes fils held before coming to Cal (with the exception of a short stint at Arizona) was in the South. If there is a more unlikely pair to show up in Berkeley, I have no idea who they would be.

And yet it seems to be working. Dykes and Franklin have installed the up-tempo offense on which they both made their names. They went 1-11 in their first year, due to an influx of youth and a dearth of defensive talent. Last year, the Bears went 5-7 while enduring some of the wildest and most freakishly compelling games in the country last season, and this year, still trending upward, they've already matched that win total with an improved defense and an offense that is a humming model of progressive efficiency. The Bears are fast and loose and entertaining, and they're inherently liberal, at least in the football sense of the word, which, really, is the way every Cal football team should be.

This renaissance is centered around the quarterback Dykes and Franklin unearthed shortly after they arrived, the son of a former major-league baseball catcher from nearby Marin County who was lightly recruited coming out of high school, a quarterback who has now elevated himself to perhaps a top-five pick in next year's NFL draft. While Franklin and Dykes never dreamed they'd wind up at Cal, Jared Goff grew up attending Cal games, idolizing Rodgers and Lynch and tailgating on the hill that slopes upward toward the stadium. He told me this summer that he'd been dreaming of this moment since childhood: the instant Cal football became relevant again. Now that his dream on the verge of fruition, it can be said that it wouldn't have happened without him.

If not for the overwhelming presence of LSU running back Leonard Fournette and the fact that many of Goff's games (like this Saturday's game against Utah) don't end until deep into the night on the East Coast, Goff would be a Heisman Trophy frontrunner. You watch him play, and there is a smoothness that cannot be taught. He is not particularly fleet, but his footwork and his pocket presence is preternaturally brilliant. He can make every throw, and he never gets rattled.

"I always tell him you've got to have an incredibly short memory to be a quarterback," Franklin told me this summer. "He's one of the best at that."

The real test for Goff begins this weekend. Cal's best win so far this season was a 45-44 road victory over an increasingly terrible Texas team that shanked an extra point in the final seconds. The Bears have yet to face an opponent of Utah's caliber; even if they manage to survive, a brutal three-game stretch of UCLA, USC, and Oregon follows. Running the table would be a lot to ask of any Cal team, but maybe there's something at work here. Maybe Franklin and Dykes, as Southerners transplanted into a foreign universe, have found a way to tap into the culture of their adopted home in a way no previous coaching staff was able to manage.

"Having coached in the South, and seeing the way our players' entire lives were put under a microscope, that pressure can get to you," Franklin told me. "I tell our guys all the time when I meet with them, 'I'm so proud of you that you're going to change the world. My age group has screwed the world up, and you guys get to fix it.' Our guys understand how lucky they are to be here in Berkeley."