Evans Hall: Asking Oski of the Machine about Cal Football 2025

Waffles and Bars... I want some waffles and drinks

Oski, one who they call god of all that is physical and binary, tell us what it means to be a Cal fan. What should we look at to understand the evolution of the Wilcox tenure.

He speaks: “I craveth the waffles, and colorful bars. for they tell what was, and what is. Waffles because I hunger, bars because I am sober. Both bad places to be when watching Wilcox ball” He then went silent. Who am I to deny the machine.

Waffle of Offense

Somehow Cal has found a way to have the best offensive TD conversion rate in 2025. I think it has to do with the fact that we have a ~31% chance each drive ends with a TD. This is a trade-off where we punt 42% of the time. The issue is that the offense has only had 7% of it’s drives end with a FG compared to 18% in 2024 (and 7% in missed FG, wild that full 25% of 2024’s drives ended with FG attempts).

Generally Cal has kept the punt rate very high, 2017 had 37% of drives end with punts with a high of 49.5% in 2019 and a low of 32% in 2023 (Ott’s breakout year and Spavital’s lone year… maybe should’ve kept him).

Fun fact, in 2018 only 18% of drives ended with a TD… woof.

Second Serving, Waffle of Defense

I got hungry and took a bite of the 2020 waffle, don’t tell anyone (I think the rounding algorithm in geom_waffle rounded the values in a way where the numbers stop stacking to 100).

Here we have a case of the minor but noticeable degradation of the Wilcox defense between the pre and post-Covid eras. with the TD rate going from 16.7% in 2018, 23.2% in 2019 to a rate of 33.9% in 2023, 26.8% in 24, and 27.8% in 2025. With the forced punt rate going from 43.4% in 2018 and 35.3% in 2019 down to 25% in 2023, 37% in 2024 (2nd highest post Covid) and 34.7% in 2025.

I am full now, time for a drink, an offensive drink at a bar

These are all relative percentiles for the Cal offense vis a vis the rest of the P5 in their respective seasons. 2019, 2020, 2022, and 2025 what a season to be a Cal punter where we had over 10 pct. points and currently over 7 pct. points over the national trend lines in drives ending with a punt. Only in 2023 and 2025 do we perform above the trend line with TDs. 2024 and FG kicking, what a year 4 pct. points more than the national trend in missed FGs, which is alot considering the national average was 3.4% of drives ending with missed FGs and Cal’s was 7.6%.

Another reason we have struggled is that when while we do score TDs more than the national mean, our FG attempts are down in a corresponding rate with over 4 pct. points less.

Second round, one more shot for the defense

I miss the 2018 Cal defense.

Forced punts, and got INTs 5 pct. points lower than the national mean, and was 10pct. points lower than the P5 teams in allowing TDs. What a defense. 2023 was the worst Wilcox defense being 10 pct points worse than the standard with punts and touchdowns, redeeming themselves with the fumble rates. What I do see with the Cal defense is that ever since the highs of 2018-19 Cal has slowly regressed to P5 mean with 2022, 2024, and 2025 turning in unremarkable seasons.

Conclusion

Initially, I had a thesis that was not supported by data. I was expecting a middling offense that struggled to be above mediocrity and found volatility, I was expecting a consistently regressing defense, and found is mediocrity. But in a way it represents the Wilcox tenure, despite of 9 years of coaching there has been a lack of growth on either side of the ball. Whenever we’d achieve goodness it would slip out of our hands, and the only thing we’d be able to maintain is a grip on mediocrity.

Year 10 of Wilcox would likely do the same: find a way to oscillate around the median while we hope that Oski of the Machine blesses us with good volatility. But he might be full of waffles and drunk so anything is possible.