Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele hit the back of his drop at the 33-yard line and fearlessly launched his first collegiate pass attempt 40 yards through the air. The ball landed in the waiting hands of receiver Trond Grizzell for a 35-yard gain down the left sideline.
Three plays later, Sagapolutele exhausted his initial reads, rolled to his left, then threw his tight end, Mason Mini, open with a beautiful back-shoulder strike for a 19-yard touchdown.
There was no sign of nerves for Cal’s true freshman quarterback who was making his collegiate debut in a tough road environment. Those were reserved for his father, Tiki Sagapolutele, who was so overwhelmed he couldn’t help but walk around in circles inside Oregon State’s Reser Stadium.
“I had a hard time watching that game,” he said.
Tiki might have struggled to watch, but Jaron’s performance seized the attention of college football fans across the country — from Pat McAfee to Dez Bryant to every one of the sport’s diehard followers who stayed up well past midnight Eastern time in Week 1 to watch the late game.
Sagapolutele connected on the first nine passes of his career and threw two touchdowns before recording his first incompletion. For a Cal fan base that’s endured so much angst over the past five years, Sagapolutele’s sudden star turn was a ray of hope.
But with each perfectly placed pass, speculation only intensified about what Sagapolutele’s next college destination would be and how much money might get thrown his way.
I guarantee that one of the top D1 programs is going to offer Cal freshman quarterback a lot of money next year…From what I see right now..he is legit…
— Dez Bryant (@DezBryant) August 31, 2025
It was impossible for some not to think about his future even though the 19-year-old signal caller insists he’s grounded in the present.
“I want to be a Cal Bear, and this is where I want to be,” Sagapolutele told The Athletic this week. “So I don’t pay any attention to it.”
Welcome to college football in 2025, where Sagapolutele sits at the intersection of so many different components of the sport in its current form.
He’s the jolt of life that can awaken an otherwise sleepy program. He’s also the latest example of the rush to anoint a young quarterback the second he shows an ounce of promise. And he could be at the center of a tug-of-war between a program that has to fight to keep players it develops and the high-profile, brand-name juggernauts that will always be lurking with lucrative offers.
Sagapolutele will face his stiffest competition yet when Cal hosts Minnesota on Saturday night. Every high-profile program has staffers dedicated to watching and evaluating players all over the country to prepare for the opening of the winter transfer portal window. And in this era of player movement, where tampering is rarely policed, it’s not difficult for any program to reach out through intermediaries to gauge interest when someone’s star is rising quickly.
Sagapolutele had a much less glamorous outing against Texas Southern in Week 2. Cal’s offense got off to a sluggish start, and though Sagapolutele passed for 267 yards, he finished without a touchdown and threw his first career interception. But given what he demonstrated against Oregon State, he’ll be observed closely the rest of the season.
“Obviously impressive first game but it’s (early),” said a director of a Power 4 program’s name, image and likeness collective, granted anonymity so he could speak candidly. “Assuming he keeps it up and shows top-10 pick potential, there’s no reason he can’t demand a $4 million-plus payday.
“They will be getting lots of phone calls.”
This isn’t the first time Sagapolutele has been the subject of a poaching conversation.
He began his high school career at St. Louis School — a Hawaii power that produced Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa — but transferred to James Campbell High after one year to play for head coach Darren Johnson.
“Every year, I was worried about him leaving,” Johnson said. “But he was at practice every day. Every single workout. Other people would invite him to the workouts. Better schools from Cali, Utah, he didn’t want to go (anywhere else). He wanted to play right at (James Campbell).”
So when the 6-foot-3, 225-pound lefty says he hasn’t paid much attention to the buzz around him, there’s some credence to it. His family has handled this sort of chatter before.
“A lot of people have approached me and asked me, ‘Oh, OK (there are) all these tweets about (how) there are going to be schools poaching, there’s NIL,’” his mother, Setema, said. “But that’s not for me.
“My concern is that Jaron is happy, that he can thrive, can continue to grow as a student, as an athlete and just overall. Just enjoy this whole process that he’s going through right now.”
Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele has thrown for 501 yards and four touchdowns in his first two games. (Craig Strobeck / Imagn Images)
Setema and Tiki have both made it clear they hope their son stays at (and graduates from) Cal, where the coaching staff has embraced their family and communicates with them almost daily. Most importantly, they can see how happy their son is.
That wasn’t always the case for Sagapolutele through a rollercoaster recruitment process where he enrolled at Oregon in December and called his mother just days later to tell her his heart was still with the Golden Bears.
Sagapolutele originally committed to Cal in July 2024, when he was still an under-the-radar three-star prospect who ranked in the 600s nationally in the 247Sports Composite. That door opened only because Cal’s original quarterback commit, three-star prospect Robert McDaniel, flipped to Arizona.
“Him flipping was the greatest blessing of all time,” said a program source at Cal.
But a standout performance at the Elite 11 Finals last summer vaulted Sagapolutele up the recruiting rankings, and he climbed into the top 100 by mid-November. Soon after, Oregon and Georgia came calling.
On the first day of December’s early signing period, Sagapolutele flipped to Oregon and a few weeks later headed to the Pacific Northwest as an early enrollee. Johnson said he believes Oregon was Sagapolutele’s childhood dream school and was too hard to turn down. But after a week in Eugene, Sagapolutele called home while en route to Oregon’s Rose Bowl appearance to talk with his mother about his change of heart. Setema promised her son that his happiness was all she cared about. She’d support him either way. By Jan. 3, Oregon had let Sagapolutele out of his letter of intent, and he entered the transfer portal. On Jan. 5, he was back with the Bears.
“Part of that decision was having conversations with coaches while you’re there on the visit and then when you get there, you’re enrolled at school, things changed,” Setema said. “He’s not afraid to compete. But once he knew where he was already (on) the depth chart versus just being there a week at Oregon, he knew that it’s probably not the place for him because for him, they had never competed yet. I think that was a big factor for him in making the change to Cal.”
Sagapolutele raved about Cal coach Justin Wilcox and his staff, which never burned the bridge even though he signed with Oregon.
“It was all love, and I think that’s why you got to have faith in your culture, your process and who you are as people,” the Cal program source said. “Because we never changed up. We’re not going to change up and he saw that. Oregon, it was fine. It was not him. … But he truly knew where home was.”
Within five minutes of walking back into Cal’s facility, Sagapolutele told the staff — unprompted — how happy he was to be back.
The Golden Bears lost 2024 starting quarterback Fernando Mendoza to Indiana through the transfer portal. That created an immediate opening to compete for the job, and Sagapolutele beat out Ohio State transfer Devin Brown, who some assumed was the favorite.
Johnson believes Sagapolutele is in Berkeley to stay.
“You can’t keep everybody away, but Jaron knows where his best football and his coaches who are going to take care of him are,” he said. “Why would he still go to some place else and still have to prove himself? He’s done it and now he’s just gotta keep doing it.”
Remember this about Sagapolutele: He’s chosen Cal twice now — once as an uncommitted recruit and then after transferring from Oregon. He was a highly touted prospect who had the option to go almost anywhere.
Given those circumstances, Kevin Kennedy, the president and an executive director of California Legends — the school’s third-party NIL collective — is worried less about losing Sagapolutele than he might be about other players of his stature.
Don’t confuse a lack of worry with a lack of urgency, though. Sagapolutele is a major priority for California Legends, which bought billboard space featuring the young quarterback in the Honolulu airport. It’s a small gesture to reinforce to Sagapolutele what he means to the fan base, but there’s more to come.
“This is one of these things where it’s not exactly like Jaron’s being paid in good vibes from Cal at the moment,” Kennedy joked. “We’re laser focused on making sure Jaron has all the resources he needs, everything he needs and, of course, the surrounding team. It’s not just about the quarterback. To have a great quarterback, you have to have a great offensive line, you’ve got to have great wide receivers, so it’s building that entire thing around him. But we’re fully committed to giving him whatever he needs to be one of the true greats in college football.”
Even though Cal has produced NFL stars such as Aaron Rodgers, Marshawn Lynch, Jared Goff and DeSean Jackson, for years it has had to fight the perception — and sometimes, the reality — that the school’s administration didn’t care enough about football.
The program hasn’t won more than eight games since 2008. The Golden Bears haven’t signed a top-50 recruiting class since the 2021 cycle and finished with the No. 69 class in 2025. They had to fend for themselves during the latest wave of realignment after the Pac-12 crumbled and eight of the league’s schools quickly found a new home in a power conference. Cal landed in the ACC but will receive only 30 percent of the league’s TV revenue shares for the next seven years.
“It’s never been a question of talent (for the football program),” Kennedy said. “Frankly, I think it’s been a question of will and want from the administrative side. Now, with Chancellor Rich Lyons, he’s really made it a very clear and explicit priority that we’re not interested in being (just) good enough any longer. We need to win. And the whole realignment debacle just emphasized we’re not winning enough.”
Lyons, Cal’s first undergraduate alum to serve as the university’s chancellor, took over his post on July 1, 2024, exactly a year before schools were permitted to directly compensate athletes through revenue sharing.
Kennedy said for the first time, there’s true alignment from the top of the university, and that will allow Cal to take advantage of all the school has to offer: academic prestige, location and the wealth of its donor base. Having a player of Sagapolutele’s stature — and keeping him — will give Cal its first opportunity to showcase that alignment.
When Sagapolutele takes the field this weekend, he’ll line up against a Minnesota defense that was a top-15 unit nationally in scoring defense and yards per play allowed last season. Through two games in 2025, the Golden Gophers rank second and sixth, respectively, in those categories. It’ll be a challenge but another opportunity for Sagapolutele to prove himself.
The better he performs not just Saturday but the rest of the season, the easier it becomes to envision a future where he leads Cal to a potential on-field breakthrough. But the more promise he displays, the more it will boost interest from other programs.
This is the type of problem that every program of Cal’s stature has to manage in today’s landscape.
“We’re going all in on this sport, and we’re going to make this thing succeed because the limitations that have existed to date, they can’t continue to hold us back,” Kennedy said. “We have to kind of go in. He’s a huge part of that story.”
(Top photo: Darren Yamashita / Imagn Images)
