Is this the lowest point for California college football ever? There were no California teams in the AP preseason top 25 and only USC managed to even receive votes in the most recent one. Doing an eyeball survey of the preseason AP Top 25 polls archived in wikipedia it took going back to 1965 before I could find a poll without a California team. In 1965 the poll was only ten teams long. By season’s end UCLA was at #4 and USC at #10. Somehow I don’t see that happening this year.
Fortunately for us we have the Mythical California Cup. As long as a few teams are still playing ball (against each other) we’ll get to award the golden trophy as though the age really is still golden. Never has this blog been more relevant! Let’s a run a preview now that we have some Elo values to play with.
2025 simulation with Elos
$ python3 ./mcc_schedule.py -v
California at San Diego State on Sep 20, 2025
San José State at Stanford on Sep 26, 2025
San Diego State at Fresno State on Oct 24, 2025
San José State at San Diego State on Nov 21, 2025
California at Stanford on Nov 21, 2025
UCLA at USC on Nov 28, 2025
Fresno State at San José State on Nov 28, 2025
Full Enumeration Simulation:
San Diego State 28 [22%]
San José State 28 [22%]
Stanford 20 [16%]
California 20 [16%]
Fresno State 16 [12%]
No Winner 16 [12%]
Monte Carlo [Sampled Home Margin Predictor] Simulation:
San Diego State 2309 [23%]
Stanford 2209 [22%]
San José State 2011 [20%]
Fresno State 1917 [19%]
California 1553 [16%]
No Winner 1 [0%]
Monte Carlo [Elo Predictor] Simulation:
California 3529 [35%]
San José State 2773 [28%]
Fresno State 2629 [26%]
San Diego State 595 [6%]
Stanford 470 [5%]
No Winner 4 [0%]
There are no standings, possibly because no games were completed.
2025, 7, ,
Quick reminder: the Full Enumeration shows mathematical possibilities to the Bayesian tree only: That’s more useful as the season goes on and you want to see who’s eliminated. Monte Carlo with sampled home margins uses a crude simulation that only takes into account home field advantage. That’s useful when you don’t know very much about the teams. Monte Carlo with Elo uses the College Football Database current Elo power rank score to simulate the season’s games 10,000 times. Obviously the better the Elo is the better the sim is. Since it’s so early I’d say grain of salt to all but it gives us some idea.
Not a bad schedule considering how bad everything else is. All the teams are in a fairly even band except for Stanford, which looks like it really stinks. Cal can escape with a 2-0 title as long as one of the state teams playing 3 games don’t go undefeated.
Once again, neither UCLA nor USC play another California team except for each other, so by virtue of the “minimum two wins” rule in the sacred charter of the MCC they are not eligible for the cup this year. The old logic of the Pac-12 was “they play so many games against each other, they cannibalize themselves, the conference won’t produce a national champ.” But at least that conserved a certain amount of wins within the ecosystem of the west coast. Now with full atomization it’s possible to have high variance seasons where historically bad Stanford, USC and UCLA teams don’t have any wins at all. At least we hope that’s a variant. Might be the new normal.
Let’s check in with Sagarin and his venerable rankings:
Sagarin ranks
21 USC
59 California
65 UCLA
82 Stanford
83 Fresno State
97 San Jose State
117 San Diego State
He clearly thinks that it’s more like “Everyone stinks, only Cal is a tiny bit better, and San Diego State really stinks.”
Either way, Cal is the favorite to defend their title but real MCC romantics root for San Diego State to end their 50-year drought. (Full historical results here.)