Evans Hall: 2nd Down, Telegraph Avenue To Go

2nd down is quite decisive

Credit: Rob Hwang

“Cal offense has it’s issues” is a sentence uttered every since the end of the Davis Webb era. Each era has it’s own issues that can be teased out: mediocre QBs without skill guys who can support him, a RB room that is just a step slow, or an OL that refuses to block anything like Google Chrome after AdBlock was disabled.

A cavalcade of issues I have documented in the past:

Overall, a frustrating watch where the actors and scene directors change and the director and casting director remained the same. Every year we go the same way wondering what went wrong as another punt came to be.

This year we can narrow down to the one main thing that is: problem with 1st down runs.

Big Picture

I know I am being repetitive about this, but the issues with the 1st down offense are prevalent for Cal on the run game with just 35% of the runs being efficient, and that is likely hard carried by the Oregon State and early success against UNC. The early down passing game is slowly falling down to the earth with recent middling performances (ex. Cal went 7-10 for 27 yards against UNC for a 2.7 YPA).

Maximizing the Minimal

Focusing into the 1st down, and we replace the explosive play rate with a measure of minimal gains. As in cases where we gain 2 or fewer yards.

And here lies the rub: the passing game stays roughly at the same as the rest of the nation. Factoring in incompletions JKS is doing what is generally expected of a passing offense.

The issue is the fact that Cal is 3rd in the country in running gains that go for minimal gains: over 50% of our running plays on 1st down go nowhere. That is with the UNC and Oregon State games going into the sample size.

So we’re bad at the running game, surely we can’t be running it that often when it isn’t working… right?

Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele’s Bizarre Adventure : Run/Pass Tendency

Note: Why a waffle chart? Cause I wanted to try it. Each cell is 1 percent on a 10 x 10 grid!

We’re running and passing the ball at the same rate as the median team in FBS on 1st down at a 56% run rate… That’s sub-optimal decision making on early downs considering the output of the running game.

Looking into the 2nd and 3rd downs we’re breaking away from the national median and pass the ball on 67% of 2nd downs, and a crazy 75% of 3rd downs. This is likely due to the fact that the offense is already behind schedule on those downs.

However, what is the ratio when looking specifically into 2nd down?

2nd down, down bad

This time we’re looking at raw counts on the waffle chart!

Cal faced 2nd and 10+ 8 times more than the median P5 team facing a P5 team. We face 2nd and 10-7 8 times more than the median P5 team. Which means that when a median team has faced 2nd and 7+ 49 times, Cal faced it 65 times in the same time span. That is not mentioning that in other situations we’re right around the national median. What does this mean? On top of struggling on moving the ball early in the downs, we face 2nd down really often: which means long drives and a lot of inert plays.

On those 2nd and long plays we’re heavily reliant on JKS with 50 passing attempts on 15 rushing attempts. Makes sense, we’re already behind schedule, but it is a lot to ask of a true freshman QB with a bad supporting cast.

Another observations is the heavy reliance on JKS’ arm on the 2nd and short where we passed 10 times on 4 rushes while the ratio for the rest of the nation is reversed… Looks like we have a strong tendency to try to get a chunk play when a 3rd and short is available. If I am a DC I would key on that.

So we’re on 2nd down… what do we do with it?

Answer is that not much.

Though it is a little more effective on the run game the fact of the matter is that the run game is likely deployed against defenses getting ready to defend the pass. And yet there is scarcely any efficiency going on in these situations.

Conclusion

As long as we struggle on running the ball on 1st down we will continue to face 2nd downs that set us up for difficult 3rd downs. On a back of the envelop analysis, on drives where we face 2nd and long the likelihood of scoring a touchdown goes down by half, chance of getting a FG goes up by 4 pct. points but the chance of punting doubles.

The TD percentage goes down to 7.7% when we face 2 of those 2nd and long cases wherein the TO rate goes up by a little.

So when you watch the next Cal game, look at cases where the face a 2nd and 8+, it basically indicates that the drive has half the chance of scoring a TD. I will do more analysis on this relationship later, but alas… signs ain’t great when math is mathing like this.