Cal is the ONLY school with top-ten draft picks in football, baseball, softball, soccer, and basketball over the past five years

It all started with a tweet by @SlangOnSports.

The official Cal Athletics account followed up with their own version of this factoid, but expanded the timeframe—making it far less impressive by subsequently accommodating for another school to match the feat.

The @SlangOnSports tweet got me thinking about Cal’s success across drafts, so I decided to take my own dive into the data and made a finding that is now officially official after Thursday’s NBA Draft.

Over the past five years (2015–2019), Cal is the only school with at least one top-ten draft pick in each of the drafts for baseball/softball (MLB and NPF), football (NFL), basketball (NBA, and WNBA), and soccer (MLS and NWSL).

Here’s all the data—a massive array that lists each school and the number of top-ten picks for each draft, including the total number of top-ten picks that each school had for the past five years. There’s an absurd number of programs—128—which includes 102 universities/colleges, six international pro basketball teams, and 20 high schools. Cal has the seventh-most top-ten picks over this timespan (behind Duke, Florida State, UC Los Angeles, Stanfurd, Oklahoma, and LSU).

There was just one other team who came close to duplicating Cal’s feat, but came up short with just six of the seven drafts—UC Los Angeles lacks an MLB draftee, but came close with the 16th pick in 2015. Stanfurd and Duke only managed five drafts, lacking the NPF Draft and another.

But enough about those other schools. Let’s focus on the ten California Golden Bears who have been drafted in the top ten of their respective drafts since 2015:

This is quite an accomplishment for the university to recruit, train, and develop such stellar athletes and help guide them towards the pro level.