California misses back-to-back Super Bowls for the first time in over 50 years

Feb 12, 2023 - 11:25 PM

Despite the struggles of the California Golden Bears to be ranked or relevant in college football, we’ve had a puzzlingly rich history of success in the NFL. For instance, for the 21 NFL seasons from 1999–2019, 14 of those Super Bowls featured a Golden Bear on the winning team (two-thirds!). In that same timespan (which should be very generous for California as it features Jeff Tedford’s tenure as our all-time winningest head coach and cuts off Justin Wilcox at his peak performance in the Ripblix Bowl), we’re a perfectly bland 129–130 (which actually includes four wins from Tom Holmoe in the 1999 season that were vacated).

But, I digress. (After all, I’m quite rusty on writing and no longer familiar with how to present a cogent message.)

The Bears have been quite successful recently in Super Bowl–y things! Here’s a snippet from two years ago from when we last had a Bear—Mitchell Schwartz—playing in the Not–As–Big–As–The Big Game where we were in the midst of a streak in which 20 of the past 21 Super Bowls featured a Bear on the roster or on the coaching staff of at least one team. Little did we know at the time that this would be the end of the streak.

California has officially gone two consecutive Super Bowls without a representative.

This got my curiosity going and I started to wonder when is the last time we went back-to-back without a Super Bowl appearance. I figured there had to be something not too far back, right? I almost got tricked into thinking it was Super Bowls XXXIII and XXXIV—until I caught former California head coach, former California player, and Berkeley native Mike White was an offensive assistant in Super Bowl XXXIV for the 1999 St. Louis Rams, making him a Super Bowl champion.

By my research (with a big help from the utterly infallible Wikipedia and StatMuse.com), I think you have to go back to the beginning of time for the last time Cal failed his miserably. Or at least back to the beginning of the Super Bowl.

I can’t find any records of a Golden Bear on the rosters of the teams in any of the first three Super Bowls. Records from back then are shoddy, so it’s possible that a reserve player was a Bear who didn’t persist on rosters available today. Or maybe a Bear got cut before the final roster and wasn’t listed in modern records. Or maybe a coach (or assistant coach or assistant), which weren’t easily findable—let alone easy to search for alma mater.

The Bears started appearing in the Super Bowl in the 1969 season (Super Bowl IV) and missed a game here and there, but never missed consecutive games until Super Bowls LVI and LVII. In all, there seems to be been nine games without a California representative. We started with three misses and currently have two misses, so there were four single games without a Bear somewhere in between.

With a potential of four quarterbacks in league next year, a strong corps of talented contributors holding strong from the Tedford era, and a recent influx of defensive talent, let’s hope that we get back in the Super Bowl next year.