Cal Football 2025: How's the Offense Looking? Pt. 4
Intro
The California Golden Bears ended the 2025 regular season with a tumultuous final three games. I must admit at the outset that I got it totally wrong in my last piece: “At this point, we know what kind of team we have, and it would appear that our realistic expectation for the final three games of 2025 should be another 1-2.”
Instead of losing to two ACC Championship contenders and beating a truly awful Stanford team (as I expected), the Bears did the exact opposite: two upset wins over then-ranked Louisville and SMU and a baffling loss at the Farm in what was Justin Wilcox’s final game as Head Coach.1 Looking at the data, what can we say about the 2025 Golden Bear offense, and how did it compare to the 2024 offense?
The data
Question: What proportion of play calls are rushes/passes?
Here are the play calls so far with the 2024 offense in blue and the 2025 offense in gold:
The theme this year has been a shift toward a more pass-heavy offense. In the last three games, Cal leaned even more toward the pass, resulting in close to 60% of play calls being passes, up from 55% last year.
Question: How distributed is our passing game among the receiver room?
The 2025 passing game has run through Jacob De Jesus and Trond Grizzell (our only returning receiver, who saw heavier usage this year). Tight end Mason Mini and running back Kendrick Raphael rounded out the top four receivers in 2025. Only De Jesus had more catches than last year’s top receiver tight end Jack Endries.
When we checked in 9 games through the season, 2025’s QuaRon Adams had not been averaging one catch per game, but heavier usage in the stretch has resulted in him making the cut! 2024’s Mason Starling has dropped off from the graphic.
Looking at team yards per catch, the 2025 and 2024 teams basically averaged the same number of yards per completion. There are other variables at play that might color your interpretation of this fact. You might think this is a positive given that we had a true freshman starting at quarterback this year and the 2025 Heisman Winner at quarterback last year. You might think this is a negative given that our offensive line made a (small) step forward this year from truly abominable last year.
Interestingly, the last three games of 2025 took the #2-#4 spots in number of completions out of all games in the last two seasons, topped only by the 2024 Wake Forest game. In general, more catches were made later in the season in 2025, suggesting the Bears might have gotten better at catching.
Question: How distributed is our run game?
This graphic is essentially unchanged from the three games ago. As expected, Kendrick Raphael carried the run game to close out the season.
Here are the team box plots:
It’s worth restating what I said in my last check-in: “Remarkably, the running games look quite similar across seasons when viewed at the team level. (Though again, much of that 2025 volume comes from ONE player).” The other notable difference is that 2025 did not see any explosive runs beyond 35 yards, which might be another indictment against the 2025 offensive line.
Kinda fun to see that the 2025 season finale against SMU takes the #2 spot for carries per game, while the Big Game loss this year takes the bottom spot.
Conclusion and Questions
What have the data told us this season? The Cal offense saw a shift away from running the ball to maximize the potential of our star freshman quarterback Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele. At the same time, the post-2024 season portal whisked away our best skill players — Jaydn Ott and Jaivian Thomas at running back, Nyziah Hunter at wide receiver, and Jack Endries at tight end. In 2025, we relied heavily on Jacob De Jesus, Trond Grizzell, and Kendrick Raphael to move the ball, making our gameplans simple for opposing defenses to scheme around.
We have a new head coach in Berkeley, and a public commitment by Sagapolutele2 that he is staying. The next order of business should be to bring in (or develop) weapons around him, and distribute the ball among more threats at and beyond the line of scrimmage.
As far as I can tell, the pieces of something truly beautiful are falling into place. There is hope yet for the future of the Golden Bears.3
Am I a bad fan for saying I would trade those two ranked wins if it meant retaining the Axe?
Though I am going to be nervous until the first day of the 2026 season.
P.S. This series was a way for me to 1) Learn how football offenses work and 2) Practice data analysis in R. I enjoyed it! No word from the Big Bosses of Write for California if my services will be retained next season, but should I be so lucky, how would you like to see this series change? What was interesting? What was missing?
Need to have more running attack in balance with passing attack next year.
Footnote 1: I agree! Go Bears.