Rich Lyons was awake closer to midnight and dawn on Oct. 5, 2024, got dressed and headed out the door. He picked up a friend on Scenic Avenue in Berkeley at 3:30 a.m., then drove a few blocks to campus. Along the way, they could hear music blasting, courtesy of students who had been up all night.
“Uh, oh,” Lyons thought, “the neighbors are going to be mad.”
After parking, the 12th chancellor of UC Berkeley strolled over to Memorial Glade and was stunned at the sight unfolding in front of him: The ESPN “College GameDay” set was positioned in front of Doe Library, its column lit in blue and gold, with The Campanile soaring in the background.
The Glade itself was bustling with students and fans as college football’s most popular pregame show prepared for its first-ever broadcast from Berkeley.
“I looked around, and it’s like, ‘It’s 3:45 in the morning, and I’m late,’” Lyons recalled. “It was a festival atmosphere.”
Soon, he was approached “by a fellow of my vintage” — Lyons is 64 — who proceeded to introduce himself to the chancellor. Despite the music blaring and the crowd buzzing, Lyons made out every word.
“He looked me right in the eye and said, ‘You know, this is my Rose Bowl.’
“We’ve all been waiting for Cal to be in the Rose Bowl,” Lyons added. “But the symbolic significance of (the ‘GameDay’ broadcast) was that big. Having been an undergraduate and everyone saying we’re going to get to the Rose Bowl one day” — Cal’s last appearance in the Granddaddy was in 1959 — “I understood immediately what he meant.”
One year later, the “GameDay” experience continues to resonate across the university community. On multiple levels, it has helped change Cal at precisely the right time.
As coach Justin Wilcox, now in his ninth year, works to make the Bears relevant — not for a single ESPN broadcast or even a few games but for a full season and many seasons.
As the Bears adjust to life in the ACC, with all the competitive and logistical challenges therein and a membership agreement that leaves Cal (and Stanford) with partial shares of the conference’s annual media rights revenue.
As college football undergoes structural and economic changes that place exponentially greater stress on campus budgets.
Those changes, with NIL and revenue sharing atop the list, require immense resources.
The resources require strong institutional commitments.
Institutional commitments require sweeping buy-in from stakeholders and a deep well of hope — hope that a program defined by mediocrity for the past half century can gain, and retain, relevance.
“GameDay” was just one step on that path, but it infused Cal’s journey with energy that didn’t previously exist.
“I have been at Cal for 34 years,” said James Rector, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who serves on the Faculty Athletic Council, which advises the Academic Senate.
“And the last time I remember students coming together like they did for ‘GameDay’ was on 9/11, for the group meditations.”
Rector was on Memorial Glade before dawn, part of the throng that so impressed Lyons and ESPN’s on-air talent. (One week later, longtime host Rece Davis noted: “I don’t know in my 10 years of doing this that anybody has done it better than Cal.”)
“The feeling was, ‘This is what we can be,’” Rector said of the “GameDay” experience, which took place on Homecoming weekend, hours before Cal lost a thriller to eighth-ranked Miami.
“The students are much more into it now,” he added. “Post-COVID, the interest has been growing every year. I don’t look at ‘GameDay’ as a catalyst. It was an accelerator in the student experience.
“Cal football has been a shell of what it can be. We hired some bad coaches, but more than anything, the administration has been … a party pooper. It was anti-sports for a long time. But that’s changing.”
That change starts with Lyons, who was in Memorial Stadium for “The Play,” the famous five-lateral kickoff return to beat Stanford in 1982.
Lyons is an unabashed Cal football fan whose passion has created a permission structure for others to embrace the program without fearing that support — in whatever form it takes — will leave them shamed, ostracized or excommunicated from the campus community.
But matched against a century-old bureaucracy that requires five levels of approval to get the lights turned on in lecture halls, Lyons needed an assist.
It arrived in the form of a pre-dawn party on Memorial Glade, with Pat McAfee leading the cheers.
“You know it. What? You tell the story. What? You tell the whole damn world this is Bear Territory.”
How has the “GameDay” experience impacted Cal football?
— On a practical level, it laid a vital footprint. The Bears have turned Memorial Glade into a gathering spot on game days. Oski’s Village, as the fan fest is called, features entertainment, food, drink and various levels of hospitality.
“There was no center of gravity, and they created it,” Lyons explained. “Most people associate that with Ground Zero for ‘GameDay.’”
— “GameDay” helped convince Bears legend Ron Rivera to return home and become general manager — a change many believe has transformed the program.
The former All-American linebacker and two-time NFL Coach of the Year oversees every aspect of Cal football, reports directly to Lyons and is a prime driver of the fundraising success that underpins the Bears’ NIL and revenue sharing efforts.
“It shows what our potential is,” said Rivera, who attended the “GameDay” festivities. “I had a great time and felt the energy, and it’s still there. People appreciate that we have gained momentum. Now, we need to follow through.”
— The “GameDay” broadcast, which began at 6 a.m. (Pacific), averaged 2 million viewers nationally on ESPN and peaked with 2.5 million for the final hour.
The effect was instantaneous. Cal’s website had thousands of new users that day, and the most-viewed pages were the UC Berkeley homepage, the “Apply To Berkeley” page, and the “Majors” page.
— The Bears recently announced a record fundraising haul of $82 million for the 2024-25 fiscal year, shattering the previous mark of $58.3 million in 2005.
The majority of that haul, as is often the case with philanthropy, took the form of pledges. In terms of cash on hand, the Bears collected $17.3 million, which can be spent on any sport and any type of resource. The amount represents an increase of 26 percent from the total raised ($13.7 million) in the 2024 fiscal year.
Lyons is hesitant to draw a direct line between “GameDay” and fundraising success, but it’s not difficult to spot a connection.
“It’s not 100 percent causal,” he said, “but we began the last academic year with zero sports fully endowed, and it ended with five sports fully endowed. And we set an ambitious goal to do three more in each of the next three years. That’s 14, almost half of our varsity sports.
“I’m not saying ‘GameDay’ triggered all of that, but a lot of people felt like Berkeley sees the value and importance of athletics, including for advancing its academic mission as a public research institution.”
Rector, a member of the Cal Grid Club of San Francisco, is well-versed in the challenges presented by NIL and revenue sharing and recognizes the importance of winning sooner than later given the likelihood of more conference realignment — or the rise of a super league — in the early 2030s.
“I think the foundation is finally in place,” he said. “The transformation under Ron Rivera has blown me away. The (in-game) experience for fans used to be amateur hour. Now, even that’s changing.
“If we do this right, money isn’t a concern. But it’s kind of an experiment before whatever comes next.”
And “GameDay” provided just the right alchemy, it appears.
“There’s a faculty member who has been rationally critical of what he sees as overinvestment in athletics,” Lyons said, declining to name names.
“But he put a post on one of the blog sites and said, ‘But I have to admit, that “GameDay” was really fun.’”
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