College Sports
The Bay Area is also well represented in college sports. Six area universities are members of NCAA Division I, the highest level of college sports in the country. Three have football teams and three do not.
All three football-playing schools in the Bay Area are in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of NCAA college football. The California Golden Bears and Stanford Cardinal compete in the Pacific-12 Conference, and the San Jose State Spartans compete in the Western Athletic Conference, though the Spartans will join the Mountain West Conference in 2013. The Cardinal and Golden Bears are intense rivals, with their football teams competing annually in the Big Game for the Stanford Axe. One of the most famous games in the rivalry is the 1982 edition, when the Golden Bears defeated the Cardinal on a last-second return kickoff known as "The Play".
The three non-football Division I programs in the Bay Area are the San Francisco Dons, located in the city of San Francisco, the Saint Mary's Gaels, from Moraga in the East Bay, and the Santa Clara Broncos, located in Santa Clara, California. All three are charter members of the West Coast Conference.
Read more about this topic: Sports In The San Francisco Bay Area
Famous quotes containing the words college and/or sports:
“Here was a place where nothing was crystallized. There were no traditions, no customs, no college songs .... There were no rules and regulations. All would have to be thought of, planned, built up, created—what a magnificent opportunity!”
—Mabel Smith Douglass (1877–1933)
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—Gayle Gardner, U.S. sports reporter. As quoted in Sports Illustrated, p. 87 (June 17, 1991)