Kingston Lopa stepped in front of a Ben Newman throw in the third quarter Saturday and returned it 27 yards to the Wagner 2, his fifth interception of the season and the most of anyone in the country. Cal won 49-7, which surprised nobody. What should hold a Berkeley fan's attention is who made the play. It was a safety who followed Tosh Lupoi out of Oregon and into the transfer portal, a Sacramento kid out of Grant High who arrived alongside new safeties coach Connor Boyd. Two weeks earlier at Syracuse, Lopa picked off Steve Angeli three times, a 53-yard return that set up a touchdown, a 24-yard return for the go-ahead score, and a last one at Cal's 44 with 54 seconds left. Cal fired a coach and rebuilt a roster in one offseason, and the single most productive thing it got back is a defensive back almost nobody here had heard of in January.
That matters more than it would on most 2-1 teams, because Cal cannot yet run the football. Against Wagner, Adam Mohammed went 13 carries for 91 yards and two touchdowns and added a 78-yard receiving day with another score. The three backs behind him combined for 15 carries and 43 yards. Golden Bears on SI's quarter-season review ranks Cal last in the ACC in rushing at 106.7 yards per game, with backs other than Mohammed averaging 2.8 a carry, even while the offensive line has allowed only four sacks in three games after giving up 32 all of last season. Protection is fixed. Push is not.
So the passing game keeps doing the heavy lifting, and Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele has held up doing it. At Syracuse he went 21-of-34 for 182 yards and two scores without a turnover, and stayed in through the kneel-downs. The remaining question is whether he can be that clean against a defense that can actually make him move.
What Friday can and cannot settle
Clemson comes to California Memorial Stadium on Friday at 10:30 p.m. ET, 7:30 in Berkeley, on ESPN, favored by a point and a half in a game the simulation gives Cal a 33% chance of winning. It is the first conference game Clemson has ever played on the West Coast, a 2,596-mile trip for what registers as a late-night kickoff on their body clocks. That is a real, if modest, thumb on the scale.
The defensive evidence is genuinely encouraging and genuinely thin. Cal held Wagner to 198 yards, 10 first downs and 3.4 yards per play, and Aaron Hampton blocked a fourth-quarter field goal. Clemson is the first offense in three weeks capable of telling you whether it is scheme or opposition.
Which is why the honest thing to root for Friday is not a shootout. It is two or three Cal possessions that start inside Clemson territory. The ground game is not going to grind out four-minute drives against these people; Mohammed can break one, and Sagapolutele can throw for 300, but the margin almost certainly comes from Lopa's group taking the ball away again and the offense converting short fields. The corollary matters too. QuaRon Adams muffed two punts against Wagner, Wagner ripped off a 51-yard kickoff return, Cal missed a field goal, and Lupoi said afterward that phase was "most likely the first thing I'm going to be watching." Free possessions are the whole plan. Giving them back is the fastest way to lose.
Why the night is worth the trouble
Lupoi asked for the building. "It's our full expectation (that) this stadium is sold out on Friday night, and I'm going to be extremely disappointed if it's not," he said after 35,586 showed up for Wagner. He is a Cal alumnus and former player who spent four years running Oregon's defense before taking this job in December with no head-coaching record of his own, and he inherited a program that let Justin Wilcox go in his ninth season at 48-55 with three straight bowl trips. That was the ceiling Cal decided it no longer wanted, good enough for late December, never more. Beating Clemson at home would be the first result of this era that the old ceiling could not have produced.
A loss would not settle anything either way; there are nine games left to find out. Full game details are here, and the methodology explains where the numbers come from.