Golden Bears

The name in American football belongs, in practice, to one place: the University of California, Berkeley, where the football side grew out of the campus athletics department rather than any city franchise built for a professional league. American football in the United States runs on two separate tracks, one of municipal professional clubs, the other of university teams, and this one has stayed on the university side of that line for its whole existence — it has never fielded a professional roster and has no place among the National Football League's thirty-two clubs, whatever a stray database entry might suggest.

California Memorial Stadium, built into the hillside above the Berkeley campus, holds close to 63,000 — a capacity that puts a college ground on a scale usually reserved for professional venues.

The Golden Bears play at the top tier of college football, NCAA Division I FBS, and now line up in the Atlantic Coast Conference, having moved on from the West Coast groupings that shaped their rivalries for most of their history.