There's Something Real in the Calgorithm

I like that we can joke about politics now

I wanted to write about Cal football, and was going to do so earlier, but then they had to lose in such a heartbreaking fashion on Saturday night. By coincidence, I was staying at Berkeley’s Claremont Hotel that weekend, where much of the ESPN Gameday crew happened to be. It was a festive atmosphere Saturday afternoon and the area seemed energized by the newly relevant Bears. That night, for the first time in years, probably not since the days of Jahvid Best, I allowed myself to have my emotions negatively impacted by a Cal game.

But enough about me, lapsed Cal fan and overall apathetic alumni guy (they really do treat you like a number at a big state school). There’s just something particularly intriguing about the ironic manner in which Cal fandom has sprouted up on the Internet.

Last week, ESPN’s Kyle Bonagura wrote a comprehensive article on this emergent phenomenon titled, “How the Calgorithm has become CFB's newest obsession.” For those not following, Cal Twitter has really taken off by comedically adopting the institution’s fish out of water status in the ACC. Fans of these big Southern schools mocked the “woke” stereotype of Berkeley, and so the Cal fan reaction has been to embrace that label with hilarious irony. Bonagura retells the story of how first year Berkeley grad school student Miles Goodman got this all started:

"I was like, 'OK, well this thing that you are pushing both Cal as a team and as an institution, why not take it on from a satirical lens?'" Goodman said.

He cobbled together a few poignant photos, slapped on a rainbow and completed his meme with the phrase, "You just lost to the woke agenda."

When the official Auburn football account posted a final score graphic on X, Goodman reposted it with his work of art. The post went viral, and in the weeks since has been viewed more than 5 million times.

The meme art is so good.

I’m not going to recapitulate Bonagura’s whole piece or explain the genesis of “Ott to Go.” I’d recommend reading it in part because it’s a difficult article to pull off at a mainstream outlet. Somehow, the story is about a sports culture celebrating progressive politics and ironically mocking progressive politics. I mean, there’s a lot going on here. There’s an aspect of lampooning the left and an aspect of lampooning conservatives for fearing the left. This isn’t an easy topic to digest for an ESPN audience and yet Bonagura does an excellent job.

As a side note, the national reputation of UC Berkeley student politics has long been conflated with the city’s lib boomer bastion politics. There is some overlap, but at least when I went there, the university’s ultra lefty reputation was a bit of a misnomer. To be clear, the student base is far from Republican. They’re also not exactly a population of perpetually galvanized radicals either.

Cal, in part due to location and relative affordability, is disproportionately comprised of second generation kids engaged in pragmatic majors. This is not to say that the children of Asian immigrants always eschew activism. It is to say that the college is more an incubator of business school hopefuls than a place for kids who wish to re-run the Weather Underground.

A friend of mine noted that ESPN wouldn’t go all in on celebrating a conservative version of the “Calgorithm,” and that’s probably true. In legacy media, even sports media, the Democrats remain more favored than Donald Trump’s party. At the same time, the Calgorithm’s popularity is illustrative of a general political thaw that’s taken place.

In the heady days of the post 2012 Great Awokening, concepts like “DEI,” “BLM,” and the trans flag weren’t to be joked about in liberal quarters. There’s a lot of denial and retconning on this recent reality. Many of the media people who were most humorlessly obsessed with the aforementioned causes effectively stopped talking about them in public.

After Elon Musk took over Twitter, the noise around certain activist fixations died down. There’s a bit of “speak no evil” about the hysteria that gripped institutions in 2020. The tacit understanding is that we “all” (Not I, in my opinion!) went a little crazy back then, and we’re best served by moving on.

Some of us do remember the days when Current Thing causes were deadly serious concerns. One wrong word and you were ostracized or even fired at many institutions for expressing a lack of reverence. It’s possible that this is still the case for, say, UC Berkeley faculty, and maybe at CBS News, but in much of America, you can now relax a bit. The era of Zoom struggle sessions has given way to more humor.

Many adherents to the Calgorithm are also nominal supporters of the aforementioned causes, even if they’re not as obsessed with them in 2024. The average Cal football fan is probably liberal, even if that’s not true of most NCAAF watchers. It’s nice that lefty fans can find a home within with archetypically Red State ACC, even if it’s a redoubt defined by difference. Additionally, it’s good that we can joke about this political division in a way that’s amusing for all sides. It’s a genuinely beautiful moment when Red Coded Pat McAfee can sit in Memorial Glade and say:

I had some questions about coming out to Berkeley, but after experiencing it, it is very evident that this is one of the best cities in this here United States of America!

Pat followed up that crowd pleaser with a, “U-S-A!” chant that the student crowd heartily joined.

It’s more evidence that the sports culture war has waned, even with the election so imminent. How would I characterize a transition from totalizing earnest politics to lightly ironic humor? I’d call it “progress.”