Cal Sports Report

Aaron Rodgers Discusses His Trip to Cal for the Big Game on Pat McAfee Show

Former Cal star Rodgers met QB recruit Jaron Keawe Sagapolutele on Saturday. Did that help Cal's recruiting effort?

Jake Curtis

Former Cal quarterback Aaron Rodgers hugs Jeff Tedford, who was Cal's hed coach in 2004.
Former Cal quarterback Aaron Rodgers hugs Jeff Tedford, who was Cal's hed coach in 2004. / Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images
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Former Cal star Aaron Rodgers was one of the 90-some players from Cal's 2004 team who attended Saturday's Big Game and were honored between the first and second quarters of that game. And he talked about that experience on the Pat McAfee Show on Tuesday.

Rodgers may have even provided some recruiting assistance with highly touted Hawaii quarterback Jaron Keawe Sagapulotele, but we'll get to that later.

The main honoree on Saturday was not Rodgers, but the coach of that team, Jeff Tedford. Rodgers said on Tuesday's Pat McAfee Show that Tedford was the reason so many players returned from that 2004 Bears team, which finished the regular season ranked No. 4 in the AP poll but was deprived of a berth in the Rose Bowl because of some weird circumstances.

Rodgers, who was able to attend Saturday's Cal-Stanford game because the Jets had a bye, wore the same Cal coaches cap during the Pat McAfee Show that he had worn during the Saturday's reunion.

"Yeah, it was a blast, man," Rodgers said. "It was so much fun."

Rodgers said that 2004 team, which finished with a 10-2 record, "had that special sauce, that love for each other. It was pre-NIL, so college football was a lot different back then. We were all riding around on scooters."

Rodgers said that when the former players heard that the reunion was being put together to honor Tedford, everybody got on board.

"Everybody loved coach Tedford," Rodgers said.

Health issues have plagued Tedford's coaching career ever since he left Cal. He was scheduled to begin his third season Fresno State's head coach in 2024 before he announced in July that he was stepping down for health reasons. But he seemed strong when he led the 2004 team onto the field on Saturday.

Saturday was also the day that Sagapolutele attended the Big Game on an unoffical visit to Cal. Whether he came because he knew Rodgers would be attending is not known, but the two got together as seen in the twitter photo below.

Is it mere concidence that the next day Sagapolutele canceled his scheduled visit to Georgia, leaving Cal and Oregon as the only contenders for Sagapolutele, who is rated the 19th-best prospect overall in the class of 2025 by the On3 recruiing site?

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Jake Curtis
JAKE CURTIS

Jake Curtis worked in the San Francisco Chronicle sports department for 27 years, covering virtually every sport, including numerous Final Fours, several college football national championship games, an NBA Finals, world championship boxing matches and a World Cup. He was a Cal beat writer for many of those years, and won awards for his feature stories.

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