Why are Cal and Oregon State football playing? Former Pac-12 foes square off in Week 9

For more than 100 years, Cal and Oregon State facing off against one another on a football field, as they will on Saturday, wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows.

The Golden Bears and Beavers were longtime members of the Pac-12 and its various forerunners. Saturday’s matchup will be the 77th between the two schools, who played their first game against one another all the way back in 1905.

This weekend’s meeting between Cal and Oregon State at California Memorial Stadium in Berkeley won’t exactly be normal, though.

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For the first time since 1960, when Oregon State was briefly an independent, the two programs will be competing against one another as members of different conferences, with the Golden Bears in the ACC and the Beavers one of two schools still remaining in the Pac-12.

With the two no longer in the same league, how did this year’s matchup come to be? Here’s what you need to know about why Cal and Oregon State are playing:

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Why are Cal and Oregon State football playing?

In 2023, the Pac-12 became a four-team conference after Oregon and Washington joined USC and UCLA in leaving for the Big Ten while Colorado, Utah, Arizona and Arizona State bolted for the Big 12.

Half of the league’s remaining membership didn’t wait long for their own move, either, with Cal and Stanford opting for the unconventional arrangement of joining the ACC, a partnership that was made official in September 2023.

Though the Golden Bears were leaving behind a conference of which they had been a member since 1915, they weren’t entirely severing ties with it.

Last December, Cal announced it had agreed to a home-and-home series…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/why-cal-oregon-state-football-103038796.html

Author : USA TODAY Sports

Publish date : 2024-10-26 10:30:38

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