The Good, the Bad, and the Rock Fights: Cal vs. Texas Southern Football 2025

Our annual strugglefest against an FCS team eventually gives way to a solid performance.

Was this the most disappointing Good game ever? It certainly felt that way in the first half…

Welcome back to The Good, the Bad, and the Rockfights, our weekly dive into PFF’s team-level grades from the Bears’ most recent performance. For a quick primer on the series, check out the intro to last week’s piece. Otherwise, we’re diving straight into the stats.

PFF Grades Comparison

PFF’s army of interns or AI or whatever they deploy evaluated every player on every snap. Those grades were consolidated into the dozen grades below (gold represents last week’s grades the the boxplots represent data from all previous Wilcox-Era games).

Saturday’s grades (gold) in comparison to all previous grades under Wilcox.

It was a solid day across the board, as 8 of the 12 categories earned scores in the top 25% (above the top of the box in the figure). Defense and coverage flirted with the highest grades we have seen. The only sub-par grades were running and tackling.

PFF Clusters

I fed the results into our machine learning algorithm and it assigned Saturday’s game to…

Each data point represents a game, with more similar games closer together and more dissimilar games farther apart. Each color-coded shape represents one of our five categories of games. The Texas Southern game is highlighted near the top left of the graph. Click here for a larger version.

The Good! Unsurprising, given the stellar grades. Despite Cal’s tendency to frustrate fans with slow starts in these FCS games, this one joins all previous FCS games in The Good (except Idaho’s Bizarro Game in 2023). Although the Oregon State grades were revised by PFF at some point after the last piece was published, it remains in the Bizarro despite having some overlap with The Good. As always, these categories continue to evolve and shapeshift over time as more data points are added.

Odds and Ends

[Programming note: I am currently compiling all the pass protection, tackling, and run stop stats from 2017-present so we can use those as a basis for comparison. I plan to have that wrapped up by this weekend so we can start comparing some of the Odds and Ends stats to historic stats starting next week. Otherwise, some of these data points are a little more difficult to interpret, as it’s not always obvious what’s a good stat and what is a mediocre stat.]

• Offensive player of the game: RT Leon Bell (!), 86.5. The O-line has struggled in recent years, so it’s great to see Bell earning top honors. RG Sioape Vatikani was the runner-up, so the right side of the line had a great game.

• Defensive player of the game: LB Aaron Hampton, 87.5. Hampton only played 3 snaps, so I think S Isaiah Crosby (86.5) earns co-defensive player of the game honors.

• Iron men [played every snap]: RG Sioape Vatikani, LT Nick Morrow, LG Jordan Spasojevic-Moko,

• Pass protection: Cal allowed 5 pressures (1 sack, 4 hurries) on 44 pass plays, for an impressive rate of 11%.

• Pass rush: Cal forced 38 (!!!) pressures (2 sacks, 8 hits, 28 hurries) on 47 pass plays for an absolutely menacing rate of 80.1%.

• Tackling: Cal missed 10 tackles on 62 plays (16.1%). Not great, not terrible.

• Shake and bake: Cal forced 8 missed tackles on 78 plays (10.2%). Once again, Cal missed more tackles than the opponent; this is a concerning pattern throughout the Wilcox Era (I’ve seen this in nearly every game whose data I’ve pulled so far).

• Run stops: Cal stopped 12 of Texas Southern’s 15 runs, for a stellar rate of 80%.

I must admit, I feel considerably better about this game after looking over these stats than I did while watching it live.