After 15 Big Games representing Cal as a player, coach, and broadcaster, Troy Taylor will be on the Stanford side for the first time when the Cardinal coach faces the Bears Saturday at Stanford Stadium (3:30 p.m., Pac-12 Network).
“It’s gonna be a little strange,” Taylor said. “I think once the game gets going, it’ll feel pretty normal to go into a kind of competition mode, but yeah, it’ll be a different experience for sure.”
Taylor was Cal’s quarterback from 1986-89 and started two Big Games, which resulted in a tie in 1988 and a loss in 1989. He graduated as the program’s all-time leading passer with 8,126 yards.
He soon turned to coaching, and had stints coaching receivers, quarterbacks and tight ends at Cal from 1996-99, even serving as the team’s recruiting coordinator in 1999. When he stepped away from coaching, he worked as an analyst on Cal radio broadcasts from 2005-11.
“Just being a part of Cal for so long and having such a love for the university and what it’s given me, I’ll always have a lot of gratitude for the university, the program there, and I always will love Cal,” Taylor said. “Now being on the other side of it, this is my family – the Stanford Cardinal – and excited to be able to go into a battle.”
Taylor’s playing career featured two of the most memorable games in the rivalry, which has been played 125 times on the football field. As a freshman, Taylor was sidelined with a broken jaw when 1-9 Cal upset 16th-ranked Stanford in the final game for coach Joe Kapp, who knew he was being fired after the season. Taylor’s junior year, when he made his first start against the Cardinal, Stanford’s Tuan Van Le blocked a 20-yard field goal at the end to preserve a 19-19 tie – the last tie in Big Game history.
“I remember neither team really knew what to do,” Taylor said about the tie. “Because typically, your memories of The Big Game my freshman year is Joe Kapp being carried off the field, it was a huge upset and everybody’s on the field and you celebrate and you run around with the Axe and it’s just great energy. And if you lose the game you saunter off, and you’re not really that excited. So once we all realized it was a tie and there was going to be no celebration for either team, we just kind of walked off and left. It was very strange.”
But Taylor had another strong memory from the tie game, and it wasn’t something that happened between the lines. He remembered looking at the south endzone and seeing a scuffle between the mascots, Oski the Bear and the Stanford Tree.
“It was a legitimate fight,” Taylor said. “They were trying to hurt each other. It was in between series and I remember Oski trying to tear the Tree apart and I remember Oski pointed his finger – one of those four fingers he has – at the Tree, like ‘This isn’t over,’ you know? I’m like, this is bizarre. I was living in a cartoon world or something.”
And now Taylor will experience the rivalry from the other sideline.
“Obviously every game is really important, but there’s a different energy around the Bay Area, and people are a little bit more interested in this game,” Taylor said. “There’s no other rivalry like Cal-Stanford where I think the universities have so much respect for each other and what they stand for, and being obviously so close in proximity, and we’ve had wild games that have taken place here. People on the national stage still remember The Play. So it’s exciting to be a part of it.”