"UC Berkeley" and "California"
I was watching the USC beat-down with a friend of mine who attends a small private college in the South, and he informed me that he runs into a startlingly large number of people who do not realize that super-nerdy academic powerhouse UC Berkeley is the same thing as sometimes sports powerhouse (football now, formerly basketball) Cal or California.

This meshes with my own personal experience of meeting people who almost certainly follow college football (and have heard of California), but when I mentioned I go to Berkeley, they would ask me where that is, or say they had never heard of it.

I mention this because of previous fears expressed on CalStuff (I couldn't locate the post) about the tradeoff of gaining a reputation as a bad-ass sports school in lowering our reputation as a premier academic institution. Apparently we can do both, as the largely out of country people who hold Berkeley in such high esteem probably don't associate our sports program with the school, and vice versa for our in country sports fans. Email This Post!