Cal has a puzzling situation at quarterback, which seemed impossible when the season began.
Quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, the face of the Cal football program and the team’s presumed star, was available for Saturday’s game against Wake Forest, but Jackson Brousseau was the Bears’ starting quarterback. We know Sagapolutele was available because he entered the game in the third quarter with the Bears hopelessly behind 41-0.
None of it looked good in a game in which Cal lost to Wake Forest 41-7 after trailing 34-0 at halftime. It dropped Cal to 3-4 overall and 2-2 in the ACC.
Brousseau said he was told on Monday, two days after the win against Virginia Tech, that he would be the starter against Wake Forest, and there could have been some good reasons for that decision.
Perhaps Cal wanted to settle on a starting quarterback early in the week so it could game plan around that quarterback’s strengths. Sagapolutele was listed as questionable most of the week, and it didn’t become clear until Friday that he would be available against the Demon Deacons.
Perhaps Cal head coach Tosh Lupoi was reluctant to put Sagapolutele on the field with lingering concussion concerns and his absence from game competition since getting knocked out of the October 3 game against UNLV in the second quarter.
But Lupoi did not say that after the 41-7 loss o Wake Forest, which moved up to 17th in the AP rankings released Sunday.
“I think Jackson sparked us obviously and led us to a huge win last week and earned that right,” Lupoi said of his decision start Brousseau, who was instrumental in Cal’s 25-20 upset of Virginia Tech the previous week. “And as Jaron restored his health, became available here, that [Sagapolutele replacing Brousseau in the third quarter] wasn’t any negative reflection as far as Jackson.
“Going to go in, watch the film, see exactly where we went wrong, where we went right but that was the first opportunity for Jaron to play under Pat [McCann] calling the plays, so that’s why I put him in there.”
In effect, Sagapolutele had been relegated to the backup spot.
To be honest, Brousseau’s performance in his three halves of game activity had been better than Sagapolutele’s showing in the first four and half games. But Brousseau’s three halves coincided with the first three halves in which Pat McCann was the Bears’ offensive play-caller.
Furthermore, Sagapolutele is considered a solid pro prospect, somebody projected as a first-round pick in the 2028 NFL draft. That projection may have changed after his early-season showing, but his arm talent is not in question. Cal is paying him $3 million in NIL deals, according to an August report by the San Francisco Standard, and he was being touted as one of the nation’s top quarterbacks in 2026 after a standout true freshman season in 2025.
If nothing else it took courage for Lupoi to start Brousseau instead of Sagapolutele, although it did not work out.
Wake Forest’s weakness is its pass defense. Even after clamping down on Cal’s passing game, the Demon Deacons rank 98th in the country and 12th in the ACC in pass defense and 86th in the country and 12th in the ACC in passer rating defense. The former stat is skewed because Wake Forest’s run defense is so good and because the Demon Deacons have been playing with the lead, both things forcing opponents to pass often. But that does not account for the latter stat regarding passer rating defense.
So Cal needed to try to win the game through the air. Brousseau passed for just 81 yards in nearly three quarters of action.
Sagapolutele’s statistics were much better – 15-for-18 for 110 yards, one touchdown and no interceptions – but those numbers must be taken with a grain of salt because Wake Forest, knowing the victory was safely in hand, played a loose, unaggressive defense with a lot of backups in the game at that point.
So what now? Who will be the Bears’ starting quarterback for next Saturday morning’s road game against SMU, which is 5-1, ranked 23rd and hasn’t lost a conference home game since it joined the ACC along with Cal and Stanford prior to the 2024 season?
You’d have to assume Sagapolutele will return to the starting role, although it was assumed he would start against Wake Forest when he was no longer on the injured list a few hours before the game. Lupoi was non-committal about next week's starter after Saturday’s loss.
“Going to assess,” Lupoi said. “I think both of the guys did a good job at times, so going to assess, do my very best at all positions to get our players we feel like are going to put us in position to win. So once again I was not taking out Jackson as a negative reflection of his performance. More so just to try to give our team a spark, go with Jaron and give him an opportunity to execute the offense under coach Pat.”
We are all looking forward to see who Cal’s starting quarterback will be against SMU.
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