2024 Cal Football in review: The Offense

Our look back on the 2024 season begins with a unit that will require a heavy rebuild

Now that the dust has settled and the transfer portal has mostly slowed down, It’s time for our annual season in review, in which we grade out how well Cal performed on the field, as well as our own attempts to predict what the Bears would produce prior to the season.

Here’s what the record reflects:

2024 Offense Statistical Summary

Statistical rankings

• 5.4 Yards/play, 89^th in the nation, 12th (of 17) in the ACC

• 3.6 Yards/run, 112th in the nation, 13th in the ACC

• 7.2 Yards/pass attempt, 72nd in the nation, 11th in the ACC

• 11 Turnovers lost, 15^th in the nation, 3rd in the ACC

Advanced Stats

Success Rate: 41%, 87th in the nation.
SP+: 65th in the nation, 12th in the ACC
FEI: 79th in the nation, 12th in the ACC

If you’re curious, Cal’s offensive performance was a slight but clear step back as compared to what the Bears put up in 2023. That’s probably not a huge surprise, because whatever advantage Cal gained by reducing their turnover rate this year was given back due to the collapse of the offensive line, which led to a massive decrease in run game effectiveness and a huge increase in sacks.

Biggest Strength: Fernando Mendoza

I originally was going to say “the passing game when Fernando Mendoza wasn’t sacked” but I decided not to bother beating around the bush. To the extent that Cal was able to move the ball down the field, it was generally down to Fernando Mendoza’s ability to get the ball out quickly and with accuracy. Cal actually saw improvement in yards/passing attempt as compared to 2023 despite vastly worse pass protection from the offensive line, and that’s mostly down to the toughness and accuracy from their former quarterback.

Biggest Weakness: The offensive line

Usually I try to be more granular with these categories. But this is the rare situation where a specific position group struggled in all areas across the board. Pick any metric and Cal’s offensive line ranked near the bottom of the country. Line yards/rush? 118th. Sack rate? 128th. PFF’s run blocking grading metric? 115th. The offensive line was unable to create push in the run game, was unable to provide time for Mendoza in the passing game, and committed a total of 36 penalties across 13 games. After making so much progress in 2023, the offensive line’s massive step backward was the biggest reason Cal followed up a 6-6 season with another 6-6 season despite a much easier schedule.

How were Cal’s defining questions answered?

Can Cal make the right choice at starting quarterback from the jump?

Yes, thankfully, though there were still rare moments where Cal went away from Fernando Mendoza that were cause for question both in the moment and in retrospect. Cal’s coaching staff, perhaps as gamesmanship, didn’t provide clarity regarding Cal’s starting QB through fall camp and the early portion of the season, but it was clear that Fernando Mendoza won the starting job and held onto the job through the strength of his play throughout the season.

Can the Cal offensive line take another step forward?

You can see from the structure of the question that I did not anticipate that the offensive line would instead take a big step backwards, as noted above. Rather than improving on the roughly average production Cal got in 2023, the line instead regressed to their 2022 performance.

Now, thanks to graduations and various transfer portal moves, it’s entirely possible that Cal will start 2025 with five entirely new starters along the line.

How far can Jaydn Ott carry this team?

As far as roughly midway through the UC Davis game, when Ott sustained an injury that would cost him three games and severely limit his effectiveness for the rest of the regular season. Ott only started looking like his prior, explosive self in Cal’s bowl game, which at least provided optimism for his senior season.

Predictions in Review

Here’s what I wrote back in August of 2024:

But ultimately, what I come back to, is that about 20 times a game, Cal will be handling the ball off to Jaydn Ott, the best running back in at least 13 years. When you have that kind of player making up that much of your offense, it’s really hard not to move the ball.

Sigh. Maybe the biggest what-if of the season is “what if Jaydn Ott doesn’t sustain an injury in the first game of the season?” It’s possible that it doesn’t make much of a difference because Cal’s line was so porous. But Cal’s line was porous in 2022 as well and that didn’t stop Ott from having a high impact campaign. Instead, Ott was unable to make cuts or break tackles and spent much of the season getting overwhelmed in the backfield as Cal’s running game became ineffective.

Even better, Cal will probably only face a couple of high end defenses.

VERY true, even truer than I thought at the time. Cal played exactly TWO teams with defenses that were above-average on a national basis: Auburn and SMU. That Cal struggled so badly to block a series of units that ranged from nationally average (Pitt, NC State, Miami, etc.) to nationally below average (Stanford, Wake Forest, Florida State etc.) was what made this year so frustrating and demoralizing.

Prediction: Cal ends the season as the 5th best offense in the ACC, and the gap between Cal and the best offense in the conference isn’t as big as you’d think.

Oh boy, that’s unfortunate. Granted, again my prediction was based on the assumption that Jaydn Ott would be healthy and as effective as he was in 2023, but even with that bit of bad luck this was still a pretty bad prediction.

In some ways, I want to defend this prediction. Cal hasn’t had better QB and WR play (even without the mostly-injured Kyion Grayes and Tobias Merriweather) since Jared Goff and his merry band tore up Pac-12 offenses a decade ago. For the first time under Justin Wilcox Cal had a few units on offense that were clearly average or better within their conference.

But I put entirely too much faith in the ability of Cal’s coaching staff to rebuild the offensive line two seasons in a row. Cal never found answers on the left side of the line, and dealt with off-and-on injury issues at center, right guard, and right tackle. The line never had any kind of cohesion and it completely derailed what was a promising set of skill position talent.

Cal is currently slated to bring back much of that offensive talent that was so intriguing last year, and they’ve done a pretty decent job bringing in plausible solutions along the offensive line:

There will be a ton of uncertainty. Will the line improve, and if so, by how much? Can Cal’s skill talent stay healthy? Who’s going to start at QB, and to what extent can they replicate what Fernando did last year?