The CardBoard
YouTuber reviews Stanford & Cal's gameday experience - Printable Version

+- The CardBoard (https://thecardboard.org/board)
+-- Forum: C-House! (https://thecardboard.org/board/forum-4.html)
+--- Forum: The CardBoard (https://thecardboard.org/board/forum-5.html)
+--- Thread: YouTuber reviews Stanford & Cal's gameday experience (/thread-26294.html)


YouTuber reviews Stanford & Cal's gameday experience - cctop - 09-11-2026

A YouTuber who claims to have seen every college stadium in the country attended Stanford v. Miami and Cal v. UCLA last weekend.

I thought his opinions were fair:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnVVz40snOo

There are no surprises there, but it's interesting to hear the thoughts of an outsider.

If you don't feel like watching the whole thing, his conclusions are exactly what you'd expect: Stanford is physically a great place to watch a game but the lack of fans kills the energy.  While the atmosphere is better at Cal, a brobdingnagian game for them felt like just a regular gameday at schools with better fanbases.

EDIT: He also feels that Cal has the most potential among the California schools to have a great college gameday experience, with a nod to Fresno State. His theory is that you need to be a public school with an on-campus stadium.

RE: YouTuber reviews Stanford & Cal's gameday experience - Mick - 09-12-2026

Makes sense to me. If you arguably consider New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco Bay Area and the DC Metroplex to be the five major intellectual regions of the country, then you have an interesting sociological phenomenon:

1. Statistically speaking, large metro populations ( New York 20M, Chicago 9.4M, Boston 5M, San Francisco Bay Area 6.6M and the DC Metroplex 6.5M)
1. Intense interest in pro football (49ers, Bears, Patriots, Giants/Jets, Commanders)
3. Relatively little interest in college football with sparse attendance for Cal, Stanford, Rutgers, Northwestern, Boston College, Northern Illinois, Maryland. All are sub-45k on average.

RE: YouTuber reviews Stanford & Cal's gameday experience - marchballer - 09-13-2026

I've followed GFed for the last year. I think some of his comments around Stanford were fair but also it was a Friday evening game at 6pm. I for one didn't tailgate since I came straight from working to the game. 

But he's right as the team gets better we need to figure out how to appeal to more people in the Bay Area and especially the penisula/SF/San Jose. When I talk to people 60+, I see way more Stanford fans than the under 40 crowd. Under 40 unless people went to Stanford, they aren't really fans. We gotta figure out how to replicate what used to be in the 70s and 80s.

For Cal, they benefitted from playing another California school and a coach that did a good job of hyping up the season. Now that it seems they are average to mediocre, I suspect the aura around them will die down again and they'll return to the average. I think GFed drank too much of the Call Kool-Aid on that one.