Program outlook
Cal Poly's deepest football history predates its FCS era. Two Cal Poly alumni later reached the Pro Football Hall of Fame: John Madden, whose playing career at Cal Poly ended with a training-camp knee injury before he ever played in an NFL regular-season game, redirecting him toward the coaching and broadcasting career that defined him; and Bobby Beathard, Cal Poly's quarterback in the late 1950s, who spent four decades as an NFL personnel executive and built rosters that reached seven Super Bowls.
Since Oct 28: L 7-61 at Montana State. 4-6 this season.
Cal Poly moved to Division I-AA (now FCS) in 1994 and joined the Big Sky Conference in 2012.
Since Tim Walsh's 2016 team went 7-5 and reached the playoffs, Cal Poly has not posted a winning season. The program has cycled through three head coaches in six years — Beau Baldwin (4-21, 2020-2022) and Paul Wulff (10-24, 2023-2025, fired Nov. 23, 2025) — before hiring Tim Skipper, UCLA's interim head coach for the final nine games of 2025, to a five-year deal on December 3, 2025. Skipper inherits a program that just opened the $45 million John Madden Football Center in June 2026, a bet that new facilities plus new leadership can finally end the post-2016 drought.
Through October 4 the Mustangs are 3-3, so the winning-season question is still open. They beat Idaho 38-34, Central Washington 24-17 and, on the road, Eastern Washington 31-27, but lost 30-20 at San Jose State, 38-35 at home to San Diego and, on October 4, 42-34 at home to Weber State as a favorite. A .500 start keeps alive the thing the program has not managed since 2016: finishing above it.
Update (Oct. 28, 2026): Cal Poly is 4-5. Since then it lost 28-18 at Northern Colorado on Oct. 17 and 43-26 to Utah Tech on Oct. 24. The Oct. 24 loss to Utah Tech came as a 15.5-point favorite.
The Golden Horseshoe rivalry with UC Davis (first played 1939, named rivalry since 2004) remains the program's most visible annual moment.
Most weeks vanish. These didn’t.
A chartered plane carrying the Cal Poly football team crashes on takeoff from Toledo, Ohio, following a game at Bowling Green, killing 16 players, the student manager, a booster, and both pilots -- 22 people in total. Surviving quarterback Ted Tollner later became a head coach at USC and San Diego State. Cal Poly still honors the victims at a memorial rock before every game.
Heartbreak
2020
Since the program's last winning season (2016), Cal Poly has gone through three head coaches -- Beau Baldwin (4-21), Paul Wulff (10-24, fired Nov. 2025) -- without a return to .500, before hiring Tim Skipper in December 2025.
Heartbreak
Moment of the year · 2026
Week 6 of 2026. An upset win. It turned on one snap in Q4 — a 37-point win-probability swing.
More in this tab
Big Sky standing · 2026
Cal Poly is 8th of 13 in the Big Sky at 3-4. The path to the title is steep — the focus is on playoff positioning and rivalry wins.
| # | Program | Record |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Northern Arizona | 6-1 |
| 2 | Montana State | 5-1 |
| 3 | Montana | 5-2 |
| 4 | Weber State | 5-3 |
| 5 | Idaho | 4-2 |
| 6 | Idaho State | 3-3 |
| 7 | UC Davis | 3-3 |
| 8 | Cal Poly | 3-4 |
| 9 | Southern Utah | 3-4 |
| 10 | Northern Colorado | 2-4 |
| 11 | Portland State | 2-4 |
| 12 | Eastern Washington | 1-5 |
| 13 | Utah Tech | 1-7 |
Three gameday rituals — the ones outsiders never quite catch.
since 1960
Cal Poly players visit a memorial rock near Alex G. Spanos Stadium to pay tribute to the 16 players, the student manager, and others killed in the October 29, 1960 plane crash following a game at Bowling Green in Toledo, Ohio — one of the worst air disasters in American sports history. For road games, the team stops at the rock before boarding buses to the airport. (The exact year the tribute became a fixed pregame ritual, as opposed to periodic commemoration, is not independently confirmed; 1960 marks the tragedy itself.)
since 1939
Cal Poly and UC Davis first met in 1939, but the rivalry took its current name and trophy in 2004, when both schools showed up with a horseshoe trophy they'd each built independently; UC Davis won the inaugural named game 36-33 and its trophy became the permanent one.
