Evans Hall: The Melancholy of Haruhi Oski-miya

The Endless Eight Years of Cal Football Stuck in the Loop

The classic anime “The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya” is a classic story of growing up, aliens, mystic events, teenage gods, and an ordinary man trying to navigate it all. The infamous “Endless Eight” arc of the story revolves around 8 days where the main group gets stuck in an endless looping day where they tackle different events and summer activities but at the end they end up restarting the same day as if none of the progress accrued the day before.

It is also known to be the most frustrating and hated arc of one the greatest anime ever created…

Wait… this sounds familiar.

Take-Off That Red…zone offense

Cal football is average through the air and painfully inefficient on the ground. And that’s when we’re outside of the redzone where we sort-of able to operating semi-efficiently on the success-rate front and inertily on the explosive front. These numbers rank once the space compresses in the redzone.

I think it has to do with the fact that Cal is unable to use the vertical space, and thus making it much harder for Nando to make the correct read and throw. Add in the fact that 2 of our 3 WRs in patterns tend to be Mikey Matthews and Jonathan Brady both slot guys who will struggle to make catches and gain separation.

What usually helps is having an active run game, however, our lack of a run-game means that there is no gravity for the defense to coalesce around in the box, making it harder to pass the ball since defenders are more spreadout on the field.

Down by Down Inertia

Fernando Mendoza was squeezing wodka out of a potato with the offense. On early downs we were able to get some movement of the ball but no real explosiveness. So we are still fighting for 1st downs. Then 3rd down happens and that’s where NCState is able to shut down our offense.

Cal defense prides itself as a bend-don’t break defense but from the looks of it NC State was able to take the bend-don’t break defense on a down by down case not drive by drive for Cal.

We’re back here again?

We have been here before. Cal can move the ball, despite on early downs and outside the red-zone, with the run game lagging behind the passing game. Espcially on 2nd downs where we were barely bale to run with the football causing 3rd and long cases where we only covert 2 of 14 of them.

Mediocrity, thy Name is Cal.

Cal sits in squarely on the bad side of the middle of the FBS of all teams. Note that this is a sample of all FBS team, so we have P4 + G5 + Pac-12 teams, all of their data accounted for. So We add in the UC Davis game + SDSU game on the platter for Cal and we’re operating in the world of UConn, Rutgers, and Baylor that is lead by the old friend: Jake Spavital.

Adding into the despair, it gets worse when we take the mediocre Passing Down PPA and stack on the rate at which we face passing downs.

Cal puts itself in a terrible situation by facing passing downs at one of the highest rates in college football this season. From the looks of it, it can be worse considering the rest of the teams we have in the same realm of the passing down rates. However, we’re dealing with them so often that being slightly mediocre in these situations keeps us ineffectual down by down case.

Endless Eight Years

The Cal offense, sans 2018 and 2020 is the same. It keeps having to trade-off explosive plays or success-rate. But we have seen this offense before, yes it arrives via different formations, offensive philosophies...

And yet we never generated much variance from the middle to lower ends of the cluster on the two SP statistics on the offense. This is what I mean by “Endless Eight” it has been 8 years of roughly the same offense under Wilcox, same deep-ish dive level of outcomes.

I just want to go ahead and finish this arc of Cal football and move on to the next season. Maybe Goddss Haruhi can save us?