It’s not even close. The Cal rugby team has had the most successful history of any sports team at Cal. Its run of dominance over the past three decades is unparalleled by any other team in college rugby.
No other team in any sport can match the accomplishments of the Cal rugby team.
Phooey on Wooden’s Bruins. To heck with Auriemma’s Huskies. Jackson’s Bulls, Auerbach’s Celtics and Stengel’s Yankees can all go take a hike. The Cal rugby team has won 26 national championships since 1980, and Jack Clark has been around for 22 of them.
It’s the best run any team has had in the history of sports. Ever.
And no team at Cal was better last year.
Problem is, the Bears have been shorted in recent years by a rapidly evolving college rugby landscape, with two competing postseason formats and an increasing preference for the niftier, trendier sevens game over 15s. Clark’s Bears have adapted well, spearheading the creation of the PAC Rugby Conference and finishing second in the inaugural Varsity Cup National Championship last year.
Oh, and by the way, they won USA Rugby’s sevens championship earlier this year.
But because the rugby squad is held to a higher standard than any other team at Cal, its exceptional play is too often taken for granted. The gap between Cal and most of the teams it plays is so great that opposing coaches take pride in their margins of defeat. Triple-digit wins for Cal can be inadequate. Any loss is an epic failure.
The greatest argument you can make against this team is that it hasn’t won a 15s championship in two years — one year in which the Bears opted not to compete in at all. A two-year drought! What a travesty.
Clark’s gang staves off the rising tide of parity by staying ahead of its competition. In recent years, they’ve made a habit of putting up basketball scores in a sport where football scores are the norm. Schools that don’t keep up, like Stanford, do so at their own peril. It’s not that the competition is getting worse; it’s just that the Bears are getting better. Cal won its five matches against PAC Rugby foes — each among the top 20 teams in the country — by an average margin of 60 points last year.
So to even consider that the rugby squad isn’t the best team at Cal is laughable. While no Cal team won its national championship last year, no other team came as close. The ruggers lost their 15s championship in the closing seconds of a dispiriting final against BYU, so they can relate to the men’s golf team’s extra holes loss in their national semifinal. But the Bears have won championships before, and they’re poised to keep winning for years to come.
The only reason they aren’t higher on this list is that they have such a history of making history that it’s hard to appreciate it anymore.
Contact Chris Yoder at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @christiancyoder.