The Good, the Bad, and the Rock Fights: Cal at Oregon State Football 2025

Making sense of a surprisingly pleasant evening in Corvallis

An OSU fan dreams about how much more comfortable he’d be if a pillowfight broke out…

Welcome back to The Good, The Bad, and The Rockfights, our weekly dive into Pro Football Focus’ (PFF) evaluation of Cal’s performance. Our objective is to distill those PFF grades into one of five categories of Cal performances: Good, Bad, Rockfight, Pillowfight, or Bizarro Game (more on what those categories mean later on). PFF’s army of evaluators watch every player on every snap and provide a ton of individual-level grades. This piece is more interested in team-level grades, so we focus on a mere twelve grades PFF assigns to the Bears’ performance.

PFF Grades

The grades from Saturday’s game are highlighted in gold below and contrasted against grades from previous games.

The boxplots represent all grades for each category during the Wilcox Era (the box captures data between the 25th and 75th percentiles while the horizontal line represents the median), and the gold dots represent Saturday’s grades.

Offensive grades were a mixed bag. Passing earned the highest score we have seen in the Wilcox Era (not bad for JKS’ debut), and receiving earned a strong score. However, pass protection, running, and run blocking earned scores below the 25th percentile. Clearly the offensive line needs more time to gel and correct mistakes like errant snaps. Defense also earned mixed grades. A revamped backfield earned an excellent grade, while run defense and pass rush were merely typical and tackling fared poorly.

PFF Clusters

Our next step is to distill these twelve grades into a single evaluation for the Bears. This entails fitting those PFF grades into a clustering algorithm. The algorithm uses data from all Wilcox-era games and sorts them into categories of similarly graded games. The chart below shows the typical grades within each of those categories.

A comparison of the average grades for each type of game

Our five categories can be summarized as follows:

• Good: everything was graded well across the board

• Bad: everything fared poorly across the board

• Rockfight: defense excels while the offense struggles

• Pillowfight: offense excels despite poor blocking while the defense struggles

• Bizarro Game: the team fares well in every category except blocking and tackling (which are two of the most important elements of a good performance)

Having covered the basics, let’s see where Saturday’s game fell in our categories. The plot below visualizes the five clusters and color-codes the data points by cluster (Click here for a full-size version).

A visualization of our five types of games. Data points closer together received more similar grades while those farther apart received more dissimilar grades. The color-coded shapes represent the five clusters.

I highlighted Saturday’s game with a yellow box, and it fell into the Bizarro Game cluster. While I initially expected the game to belong to The Good, this classification makes sense based on the sub-par run blocking, pass protection, and tackling grades. However, these clusters can evolve over time and membership can likewise evolve, so it would not be surprising to see the OSU game move into The Good at some point (especially because it nearly overlaps with The Good cluster).

Here are some noteworthy statistics from the rest of PFF’s analysis of the game. None of these are used for classifying the game, but they nevertheless provide some illuminating insight into the game.

Odds and Ends

• Offensive player of the game: Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, 95.1

• Defensive player of the game: Ryan McCullough, 80.1

• Iron men: RG Sioape Vatikani, LG Jordan Spasojevic-Moko, C Tyson Ruffins, LT Braden Miller

• Pass protection: 8 pressures (1 hit, 7 hurries) on 32 opportunities for an impressive rate of 25%

• Pass rush: 14 pressures (1 sack, 2 hits, 11 hurries) on 41 pass attempts for a decent rate of 31%

• Tackling: Cal missed 12 tackles on 65 plays, for a disappointing 1 missed tackle per 5.42 snaps (although a high rate of missed tackles is not unexpected for the team’s first game)

• Shake and bake: Cal forced only 4 missed tackles on 63 plays, for a woeful rate of 6.35%

• Run stops [this means the run was a “failure” for OSU]: Cal stopped OSU on a solid 56.5% of their runs

Check back next Tuesday to see where Cal’s matchup against Texas Southern ends up in our classification.