Analysis: Why Stanford-Cal 'Big Game' is losing prestige

Ten years ago, the NFL created a stir in the Bay Area when it was learned that the league wanted to trademark the term “The Big Game.”

Too many advertisers were using it as a generic bypass to “Super Bowl,” which can’t be named in an ad without permission - or due payment - to the NFL.

The football folks at Stanford and Cal were aghast and affronted by the news. Longtime broadcaster and Stanford statesman Bob Murphy, with his usual razor wit, sliced it up as ludicrous.

“It’s like copyrighting ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye,’?” Murphy said.

Over at Cal, its former star, head coach and legendary Old Blue-blood, Joe Kapp, was even more incensed.

“What’s next?” Kapp bellowed. “The game between the two greatest universities in the world is the Big Game.”

Say it ain’t so, Joe, but you wonder anymore. You wonder if Cal and Stanford care enough about this once-colossal football clash they’ve called “The Big Game” since 1902 to retrofit it like they did their venerable old stadiums.

Even if old-timers in Berkeley and Palo Alto resist the notion, they know the truth: The Game is not nearly as Big it once was, and its once unrivaled lofty position on the Bay Area sports landscape continues to shrink in the 21st century with few signs that the demise is abating.

What has happened to diminish the Big Game? Short answer: Way too many negative trends that have been going on for far too long.

The games themselves have been largely one-sided, predictable and terrible for a generation now. The schools, the Pacific-12 Conference and television networks continue to do too much screwing around with the game’s date and time placement on the schedule.

Finally, many of the game’s most notable traditions are dead or simply fading into the background, and so are some of its most noteworthy figures. To wit, the rivalry lost “Mr. Stanford,” the colorful ambassador and?storyteller Murphy, just before this 2017 football season started in August. Murphy, who died at age 86, had more choice Cal zingers than anybody and circulated them all at various annual luncheons. He was a Big Game fixture, and the event could use some of Murph’s Golden Bear roasting right about now.

As for Kapp, now 79, the tough, larger-than-life Cal icon has receded a bit from public view, living in the South Bay as he continues to battle Alzheimer’s disease. His presence is so sorely missed, too. If nothing else, The Big Game needs a good, old-fashioned Kapp kick in the butt.

Rumor has it the NFL is eyeing “The Big Game” name again as ripe for theft, and perhaps it is. Maybe Cal and Stanford need to get together and trademark the moniker before some entity does successfully steal it and the universities wind up having to pay somebody else to use it.

Either that, or maybe they just need to start thinking harder about how to repair it, so no one disputes where the name belongs.

The popularity of certain sports and big events goes in cycles, but there’s little question The Big Game is in a down cycle, and a pretty deep one at that. Will it ever climb out? You have to examine the most glaring issues and draw your own conclusions. Of course, we could probably just blame the nut-bags in the Stanford Band, but for once, it doesn’t appear to be their fault.

Here’s a more thorough checklist:

Competitive imbalance, and lately, all red: As Big Games go, Saturday’s 120th renewal seems a decent match. At least there are stakes for both teams.

Stanford still has a shot at the Pac-12 championship game with a win, and Cal can become bowl eligible in coach Justin Wilcox’s first season, a development few thought possible at season’s outset.

Then again, the Cardinal is favored by more than two touchdowns to win its eighth consecutive Big Game, which would set a record for consecutive victories. Moreover, the past five Stanford beatdowns of Cal have been by double digits, to the cumulative score of 202-86. That’s no fun, even if you wear red.

Worse yet, the rivalry has been one-sided one way or the other since the mid-1990s. Stanford won seven in a row from 1995 to 2001, although the games were a lot closer than this current streak. Then Jeff Tedford arrived at Cal and the Bears won seven of the next eight, including five in a row at one point.

Now we’re on this eight-game game stretch started by Jim Harbaugh in his final season in 2010 and sustained by David Shaw ever since.

The most recent decent game? Eight years ago in 2009, when Michael Mohamed intercepted an Andrew Luck pass at the Cal 3 with 1:36 to go to preserve a 34-28 Cal upset against a 14th-ranked Cardinal team. And the last truly wild Big Game affair? That starred a guy named McCaffrey - no, not Christian but Ed, his dad, in Stanford’s 27-25 last-second “Revenge of the Play” upset in 1990. Long time ago. Too long. Today’s Cal and Stanford students weren’t even born.

No longer the ultimate regular-season finale on a late November Saturday afternoon: Stanford hasn’t played Cal as the last game of its regular-season schedule since 2008, and that year, the Bears played Washington in their own finale.

So much for the epic season-ending showdown between rival schools.

You used to count on Cal and Stanford playing the last game of every season, excluding bowls, against each other. That alone made the Big Game special. It almost always started between noon and 1 p.m., too - time to tailgate in the morning and celebrate victory with nice dinner afterward.

Those days are gone. Cal will play its final regular-season game next week against UCLA for the second year in a row. Stanford, meanwhile, will be hosting Notre Dame in what has become the school’s real Big Game - more prestigious, more competitive and more compelling. Sorry, Bears, you just don’t rate anymore as a climax.

The Big Joke, of course, came in 2012, when the Big Game was slotted for Oct. 20, just the seventh game of the year. That seemed to signify that the conference and the TV networks could do just about anything they damn well pleased with this once-ultra-prestigious contest. And they pretty much have.

In recent years, or since the conference has been at the mercy of broadcast partners ESPN and FOX, it’s been about varying start times, often on short notice. The 2017 game marks the fourth consecutive year kickoff time is different - it’s 5 p.m. Last year, it was 2:30 p.m. The year before that, 7:30 p.m. In 2014, it was 1 p.m.

In short, you can’t set your watch to the Big Game anymore. What next, Thursday night?

More competition for the sports audience: Go Warriors. Before 2011, that wasn’t an issue for the Bay Area college football scene. The two-time NBA champions were horrible and nobody’s talking point, and now they’re a legit wonder of the world. Here in the Bay Area, they dominate interest at this time of year.

It didn’t help that the baseball Giants went deep into the postseason in 2010, 2012 and 2014, and the A’s at least got there a couple of times, thus luring more eyes away from Strawberry Canyon and Stanford Stadium. The 49ers, although on hard times now, also went to three consecutive NFC?title games and a Super Bowl when Harbaugh moved just down the freeway from Stanford to Santa Clara.

There’s just not as much buzz about college football as there once was in the Bay Area, and that’s surprising, as stellar as Stanford has continued to be under Shaw. It gets very little attention on sports talk radio, and in the social media world, it’s a veritable ghost town. If there no chatter, no buildup to the Big Game, then how do you have a real Big Game?

The general demise of tradition: There used to be a bona fide Big Game WEEK. There would be a Monday press conference luncheon featuring both coaches, a handful of key players and a horde of media.

Then there was the annual midweek Guardsmen Luncheon at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, in which high-powered alums from both schools gathered for a joint celebration of the Big Game that generated big bucks for charity.

Somehow, despite it being for such a worthy cause, even that has withered away. The 2015 Guardsmen event, the 66th annual, was the last held at the Fairmont. It moved to the Julia Morgan Ballroom in 2016, and this year, it simply didn’t come off at all. Sad. Cal has blamed Stanford’s lack of active participation for sucking the spirit out the event, and apparently, now the life.

Other long-standing traditions are now committed to history. Of course, the monolithic old Stanford Stadium, which at one time routinely sold out its 90,000 capacity for the Big Game, also met the wrecking ball in 2005. Its more modern and comfortable replacement, which holds a shade over 50,000, still has a sizeable number of tickets available for Saturday’s game.

That development, by itself, says it all. The Big Game has, in too many ways, become a big shame. What might save it? How about a competitive, exciting game for starters? You have to begin the big comeback somewhere.