Evans Hall, Cal Football Stats & Analysis: Farewell and Thanks for all the Touchdowns

You can keep the empty yards.

What would you rather have a lot of yards or a lot of points.

As an aficionado of winning I prefer the latter, Chip Kelly being the radical innovator elected for the former. Truly we can only imagine what it means to understand football at that level.

Overall UCLA was just a Cal with a much more efficient defense, allowing 66% of the points per play Cal was allowing through the season. This of course has to be contrasted by the fact that the UCLA schedule avoided: Oregon, UW, as well as UNT who emerged as one of the top scoring teams in FBS football this year.

The offenses being similar actually have the same root: indecision at the QB position. However, wherein Cal was able to settle in on a singular presence behind center, UCLA kept shuffling between QBs only allowing the Game 1 starter to reclaim his role in the dying embers of the season.

Overall the passing game on 2nd and long was troubling with them pushing ups into the perilous waters of 3rd and long where the passing game had their singular boom play. The lack of sacks on 3rd and long situations is surprising considering the number of sacks UCLA has been able to generate on those downs. The rushing game was largely efficient but not explosive, which was still surprising considering how well the Bruins are at stopping the run. I think it has to do with the passing game never losing it’s viability, forcing UCLA to never be comfortable enough to load up the box.

It also helps that the other 11 teams did not have Jaydn Ott.

UCLA’s offense was simply chugging along but failed to convert these yards into touchdowns. I think it has to do with the utter lack of explosive-plays. This forced the UCLA offense to rely on the high variance, low upside, play of Dante Moore who could hit some 5-15 yard gains only to follow them up with turnovers or miss placed balls.

The run game was able to gain some traction but never enough to threaten the defense with anything gashing, which is a change from how Zach Charbonnet was able to abuse our defense in 2021-22.

Overall throughout the year Cal was able to sustain the offense at roughly the average per play performance only to fall apart in the 4th. This could be a function of depth on the offense as well as inexperience by the QB.

Less can be said about the defense which barely cracked the average FBS per play performance only in the 3rd Q. Overall it was a dreadful performance of the defense, even adjusting for the strength of schedule of offenses faced. So far we have not heard of any changes to the staff on that side of the ball, and this is troubling as we enter the ACC fighting for our football lives and relevancy.

The biggest of the defense was how leaky it was on early downs. 1st downs set up manageable 2nd and 3rd downs lead to prolonged drives and a low rate of 3 and outs forced.