2023 Football Season In Review: The Offense

Reviewing a Cal offense defined by unexpected contributors and surprising growth.

Trond Grizzell and Jack Endries, photo via @calfootball twitter

The 2023 season has come and gone, and so it’s time to reflect back on what we saw on the field. Over the next few weeks I’ll have a series of posts looking back on what Cal did in 2023, how that stacked up to projections, and what it says about Cal’s chances in the ACC next season.

2023 Offense Statistical Summary

Statistical rankings

• 5.5 Yards/play, 74^th in the nation, 8th in the Pac-12

• 4.4 Yards/run, 54th in the nation, 9th in the Pac-12

• 6.7 Yards/pass attempt, 85th in the nation, 6th in the Pac-12

• 28 Turnovers lost, 130^th in the nation, last in the Pac-12

Advanced Stats

Success Rate: 41%, 77th in the nation.
SP+: 43rd in the nation, 7th in the Pac-12
FEI: 53rd in the nation, 7th in the Pac-12

If you’re curious, and I know you are, If Cal were in the ACC they would have ranked 7th in yards/play, but FOURTH in SP+, behind only Florida State, North Carolina, and Miami (barely), and just a touch ahead of Louisville, Georgia Tech, and Clemson. FEI wasn’t quite so bullish, perhaps because of a disagreement on schedule strength adjustments, but I’m comfortable saying that only two ACC teams (FSU and UNC) had offenses that were significantly better than Cal in 2023, which is WILD.

Strengths & Weaknesses

I’ll admit, identifying strengths and weaknesses for Cal’s offense was tough this year because Cal was kinda average at everything. 3rd and 4th down conversions? Average. Red zone? Average. Explosiveness? Average. Sacks allowed? Defensive havoc allowed? Average. I guess I could talk about the one obvious strength (Jaydn Ott!) but that’s not exactly insightful, is it?

Strength: Standard Down Running(!!!)

This is a strength less in the sense that Cal had a truly dominant running game, but that this was a major strength relative to pre-season expectations, on which more below.

Consider this graph put together by Parker Fleming on Twitter:

Cal was more or less dead average nationally (against a top 25 strength of schedule) at blocking for their run plays and above average at creating yards after contact (thanks, Jaydn & Isaiah!) and when you mix that together you have a strong run game and a solid base around which to build an offense.

Weakness: Turnovers

As noted above, Cal finished 130th out of 133 teams with 28 total turnovers, and it was 100% a group effort. Worse, it wasn’t even bad luck, as Cal fumbled 23 times and recovered almost exactly half of them, 11, while losing 12. Three different QBs threw an interception and and eight different players fumbled the ball.

Is there anything to do about this? Well, one would hope that Fernando Mendoza’s interception rate will go down in his 2nd season as a starter. Alternatively, if Chandler Rogers gets the starting nod at QB, he’s historically had a low interception rate, albeit against G5 defenses.

As for fumbling, this is an area where Fernando needs to improve. He was sacked 15 times, and ran the ball 20 times, and yet fumbled the ball 9 times. Now, QBs do tend to fumble more often based on how they hold the ball when looking to throw, but improved pocket awareness and better ball security could go a long way for Fernando in year two.

Answers to Pre-Season Defining Questions

Can the offensive line get fixed in just one off-season? And are there any tackles on the roster

Miraculously, yes and yes. Barrett Miller fit at left tackle, T.J. Session took a major developmental leap, and Cal was able to cobble together solid interior line play through a number of injuries. More on this below, but the line went from the biggest liability on the team to roughly Pac-12 average, which is a massive jump for one season.

Is there a Pac-12 level QB on the roster?

Yes! But boy was it a journey to get there. The QB carousel in games 1 through 5 was dizzying, and with 20/20 hindsight it’s hard not to wonder what Jake Spavital saw in practice that led him to start Fernando Mendoza 3rd on the depth chart out of fall camp.

Mendoza certainly had his freshman moments both in terms of decision making, accuracy, and ball security. He is far from a finished product. But he also showed poise, toughness, and an ability to take hits and still make plays, particularly throwing the ball over the middle of the field. He had excellent chemistry with Cal’s other unexpected contributors, tight end Jack Endries and WR Trond Grizzell.

It’s a shame that injuries impacted Sam Jackson’s chance to impress multiple times during the season, but it’s hard to come to a conclusion that he had the necessary skills as a passer to pair with his clearly elite athleticism as a runner.

Can Jake Spavital rediscover his mojo as an offensive coordinator?

Again, this took some time, but again I think the answer was ultimately positive, even if one can quibble with the extent to which this should be a credit to Spavital vs. the rest of Cal’s offensive brain trust.

Taken in whole, Cal’s coaches were able to scheme up run plays that got Jaydn Ott loose, and were able to play to the strengths of their freshman QB such that he was able to succeed despite his inexperience. It took some time for them to put the pieces in place such that the on-field talent could be reasonably maximized, but they figured it out in time to get Cal to a bowl game that few were predicting, and that fewer still would have predicted if they knew what kind of production Cal would get from their defense and special teams.

Predictions in Review

And as an annual matter of self-accountability, how did I do in my projections for the 2023 season, made back in early August? Let’s take a look at a few statements and grade them for accuracy after the fact:

I don’t think there are Pac-12 level tackles on the roster.

This single sentence probably stands as the most incorrect prediction I have made in a decade of attempts to project Cal sports. And it’s another reminder of something we all know but occasionally forget: Coaching matters.

After a few years of awful development and coaching, Mike Bloesch came in and turned Barrett Miller from a maaaaybe average interior lineman into an average left tackle. He turned right tackle T.J. Session and the rest of Cal’s returning line into an average power conference line, one year removed from them being probably the worst P5 line in the country.

I didn’t think it was possible. They proved me very wrong.

The other challenge: Pac-12 offenses this year are stacked. Cal could find positive answers to all of the questions above and still top out at maybe the 8th best offense in the conference because there is so much returning talent up and down the west coast.

Yuuuuup. Cal got a bunch of really positive answers on offense and was still nowhere near touching the top offenses in the Pac-12.

Prediction: The Cal offense is more erratic and boom/bust than any prior Wilcox-era offense, as Spavital and company overcome various personnel issues to cobble together the 9th best offense in the Pac-12. The Bears are comfortably ahead of Stanford, ASU, and Colorado, a small step behind Wazzu, and a big step behind the powerhouse offenses with proven QBs that everybody else in the conference sports heading into 2023.

This ended up being pretty close. Here are the tiers of Pac-12 offensive performance this year:

Elite, top 15 units: Washington, Oregon, USC, Arizona, Oregon State
Average offenses with strengths and weaknesses: Cal, Wazzu, UCLA, Colorado
Its own category due to injury: Utah
Bad offenses: Arizona State, Stanford

When Cal finally landed on Fernando Mendoza, I think they had the best offense of the mid-tier teams. But it took Cal til game 6 to land on Mendoza, and bad QB play cost Cal one win and nearly another game or two. Those games count for the 2023 ledger, even if they’re not so relevant to projecting for 2024.

Cal will enter 2024 with something that has been very rare during the Wilcox era: high offensive expectations. The Bears will be returning most of their 2023 production, and while there are holes to fill (primarily Barrett Miller and Jeremiah Hunter), Cal has already added a number of intriguing additions via the transfer portal, with more potentially still to come. From where I’m sitting right now, more talent is coming in than going out. (and there’s still time to come back home now that DeBoer is in Alabama, Jeremiah!!!)

We’ll see what change the off-season brings, and I’ll have to (sigh) familiarize myself with ACC rosters. But as of right now, Cal’s expectation should be to have a top four offense in their new conference.