Evans Hall: In terms of successful plays, we have no successful plays
It looked great on the field, but on paper it was not great.
After talking with Nick on our pod, I looked up the stats and indeed, despite leading by 25 and scoring early, plugging in the stats after the game we only had a 4.1% win expectancy with a projected 14 point loss.
The Bear Market recaps an epic day
Piotr and Nick are back to talk about everything that happened in Berkeley between 6:00 a.m. and midnight this past Saturday. The gameday experience, Cal's boom-bust offense, parsing out how to fix Cal's pass protection issues, an exhausted defense, targeting confusion, stadium atmosphere thoughts . . . it was a busy day.
Looking deeper into the data it makes sense. We took advantage of highly variance plays to score. Only the deepshot to TROND could be replicated since it was a function of good play by our guys otherwise the plays required deception and a tendency breaking set of designer plays.
Unsuccessful Down by Downs
We had explosive plays on 1st downs, but otherwise on the graph Cal never looked like anything worth writing home about. Especially when rushing, we’re on the wrong side of the distribution at every down. Add in the passing on 2nd and 3rd downs we couldn’t place on the successful play rate at all.
On the flipside, Miami was able to move the chains even if they weren’t able to get explosives at the rate they are used to.
On the field play, by distance to the endzone
Charting the performance we just couldn’t do much outside of big plays here ant there. Notice the # of plays resulting in negative PPA. That’s not good for general sustainability of the offense. It is good to have plays on the +2 range of PPA, but without plays around the 0.5-1 mark instead of negatives we’re going no where fast.
A tendency worth noting is the plethora of runs or trying to run on 1st down was killer with only 5 runs generating positive PPA out of 10 downs overall.
Worth noting is that we elected to pass on all but 1 play on 3rd downs. further evidence that this is a passing offense when the chips are down. However, the problem is besides 2 plays, all of them were negative plays.
Inverting the FSU Script
In the FSU game Cal struggled in the scoring zone but feasted between the sticks. In this case we inverted the script where the offense was quite… useless on the ground and effective before the endzone (weighed by the explosive plays no doubt) but on the ground… just couldn’t do it. This is a trend, we have not been able to run the game in the 3 P4 match-ups we have had before entering the scoring area.
Cal Defense put the clamps on Miami for 3 Quarters… Sadly there are 4 Quarters and it was not ours
Looking at this we were able to force Miami into negative and very negative plays across the board with only a handlful of plays generating positive yards, usually close to the line to gain. Miami had to slog through our defense in order to earn yards further away from the sticks.
However, before the game ended the defense ran out of gas in the tank. We can see here in Q4 where the Miami team was able generate a ton of explosive plays and high PPA passes regardless of down and distance. This is what happens when we force the defense to play 86 snaps on defense (10.2 more than the 74.8 average in the woeful 2013 1-11 Dykes season, and 4.4 more than the 81.6 in the 2014 season).
We have successful academic plays! If I'm not mistaken, every one of the three Nobel Prizes awarded so far have recipients who spent some time at Cal. The Chemistry prize today includes Dr. Baker who did his PhD at Cal in biochemistry. Go Bears! That puts us up to about 64 faculty and alumni. Miami still has...sorry, only 4.
It all comes down to the lack of real talent in the O line. We have really good running backs But without a competent O line their skills can't; be utilized. So we're a one dimension offense against a good defensive opponent.