California Golden Bears football

The California Golden Bears football program represents the University of California, Berkeley in college football as a member of the Pac-12 Conference at the NCAA Division I FBS level. The team plays its home games at California Memorial Stadium and is coached by Justin Wilcox. Since beginning of play in 1886, the team has won five NCAA recognized national titles - 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, and 1937 and 14 conference championships, the last one in 2006. It has also produced what are considered to be two of the oddest and most memorable plays in college football: Roy "Wrong Way" Riegels' fumble recovery at the 1929 Rose Bowl and The Play kickoff return in the 1982 Big Game. History 1880s through 1940s University of California fielded its first American Football team in 1882. In March 1892, the school played it first game against Stanford University. This was the first instance of the annual rivalry match – The Big Game, one of oldest college rivalries in the United States. In 1899, coached by Princeton alumni Garrett Cochran, Cal played a home against future legend Pop Warner and the emerging power of that period the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Warner took up Cochran's challenge that his undefeated team could beat any East Coast opponent. The game took place in San Francisco on Christmas Day of that year. Even though Carlisle dominated the majority of its season's opponents, it could only beat Cal 0–2, via a second-half safety. It was after that match that Cal became considered a worthy opponent to the East Coast teams. The 1900 Big Game is associated with the Thanksgiving Day disaster. The match took place in San Francisco, with between 500 and 1,000 men watching the game from the rooftop of an operating glass factory next to the sold-out city stadium. During the game, more than 100 fans fell through the factory's roof with the majority falling onto the factory's massive, operational furnace. In total 22 men, mostly boys were killed, with others severely injured.