Cal Football 2025: How's the Offense Looking?
Comparing the 2025 offense to the 2024 offense so far
Introduction
Much ink was spilled in the offseason speculating on how this year’s team would compare to the last year’s team. With a secondary sent to the NFL, a new offensive coaching staff, and high profile portal moves, we spent months asking: What will the 2025 Cal offense look like?
The speculation ends now. Cal is 3-0. Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele is legit. We are so back.
What the data say
For this analysis, I will be comparing play by play data for the first three games of last season (UC Davis, at Auburn, and San Diego State) with play by play data for the first three games of this season (at Oregon State, Texas Southern, and Minnesota). Comparable schedules? Your call, but what I am most interested in seeing is how each offense’s early season gameplan (and performance) differed to get a sense of what to pay attention to for the rest of the schedule.
Question: What is the proportion play calls are rushes/passes?
Here are the play calls so far with the 2024 offense in blue and the 2025 offense in gold:
Keep in mind that we are working with an n size of 3, and the raw number differences aren’t crazy, but we are passing more compared to this time last season. This could be due to a number of factors: better o-line play, no star running back, a better QB, etc. Likely, it is a combination of multiple factors. Keep your eye on how this ratio evolves over the season.
Question: How distributed is our passing game among the receiver room?
Sticking with the passing game, how many viable targets does Jaron have on a given passing play? I restricted the sample to players who have completed at least three catches, and we can see that we have about the same number of receivers between seasons (nine vs. eight).
These box plots divide the completions for each receiver. The horizontal line in the middle of each box represents the median yards per catch for each receiver. Players are shown in increasing order of passes caught. For example, we can see that for the 2025 season, our leading receiver currently is Jacob De Jesus, with a median yards per reception hovering around five. (One interesting point — Trond Grizzell is our only returning pass catcher, and you can see his median yards per reception is over ten yards now compared to somewhere just over five last year!)
Here’s a box plot summarizing the information for the teams as a whole.
So far, we are averaging roughly the same number of yards per completion compared to last year. The fact that this is true despite the fact that we are passing more is promising — we’ve maintained average passing yards while doing it more often. If future defenses gameplan around Cal being a pass-first team, and the average continues to hold up (or improve!), we will be in truly exciting times.
Question: How distributed is our run game?
Similar question but for our rushers.
This graph had to be rotated to show a number of explosive runs, mostly from 2024. Players listed closer to the top had more carries. Among players who’ve had at least three rushing attempts through three games, we have four in 2025 compared to six last year. Perhaps expected given how many time Jaron has thrown the ball.
Here are the team box plots:
Median yards per carry look identical. The slightly skinnier gold box means that rushes in 2025 are a bit more consistent in the number of yards we can expect.
Conclusions and Questions
Through three games, the 2025 Golden Bears are more pass-heavy than they were in 2024. We can start making some guesses as to why that is (Nick’s PFF reports and our the Good, the Bad, and the Rockfights coverage are helpful), but I’ll be interested to see if the team becomes more obviously pass-heavy as the season progresses.
When we do complete passes, the yards per catch and the number of viable receiving threats look nearly identical between seasons. Again, we are passing more than last year — so will this necessarily translate to more yards per game overall? Presumably the gameplan will center around improving Jaron’s throws and decision-making as well as our receivers’ ability to hold onto throws from a lefty QB — will that lead to higher average yards per pass by the end of the year?
Similarly, average yards per carry are comparable across both years The main difference is the 2024 Golden Bears had a few explosive plays breaking 30 yards, whereas what qualifies as explosive run plays in 2025 are mostly under 30 yards. Hoping to see a few runners breakout over the course of the season.
What sticks out to you from the data? What other questions do you have about our offensive? What will you be looking at as the Bears close non-conference play this Saturday?
Yes, JKS has had a very solid start to his college career and he's fun to watch. For me though, what's more important, and I think much more impactful to Cal overall, are the program changes that Cal has made. A new Chancellor and bringing in Ron Rivera and relatedly the upgrades that they made to the offensive coaching staff (TWO former FBS successful head coaches Harsin and Rolovich on offense!). And the changes they've made to accountability, the game day experience ,and community outreach have been tremendous. All that to say while I hope JKS stays, it's more important that Cal continue to build back up the program and finally have the institutional support they've lacked for so long. If they can do that, everything else will fall into place.
So I think the takeaway for me is that our collective eyes haven’t been deceiving us. We passed more than ran, but our runs have been about the same success whereas our passes have been much more successful than last year. Once/if we get our running to become more of a threat - which I think will need to be because defenses will need to protect against passes, we might become even better than what weve seen so far from this team.