Evans Hall: Forgettable Mediocrity of Cal Football

The deep mediocrity of the program in the face of new schemes, coaches, and players

Credit: Rob Hwang

Cal football enters a season with some changes on the field with a great spring and fall camp where some under the radar player is practicing with the 1s. We carry some hope after beating some pre-season good OOC teams, take a pause when we struggle against an FCS opponent only to win. The schedule looks tough but there are times where we think about a coin-flip play that changes the momentum of a season, only to lose to a team we should beat and have the entire season hinge on winning the Big Game.

That above can be used to describe nearly every Wilcox season since 2017. I was appalled by the team’s play against Syracuse, the lack of passion, scheming, focus, and general execution by the coaching staff down to the play on the field.

Syracuse isn’t a conventionally good football team. They sport the luckiest win % accounting for Postgame Win Expectancies (that is taking into account their and their opponent’s performance they should’ve won 3 games not 6 going into the Cal game). It is just Cal is so deeply mediocre that being high variance with some luck is enough to have the entire Cal football team look like it did.

Cal Runing Nowhere, on the Median

Cal had 166 yards on the ground for an average of 7.2 YPC, but removing the 75 yard TD by the JET and 53 run by Ott we’re down to a 91 yards and a paltry 4.3 YPC against a defense that gave up 5.5 YPC before the game. Looking at the chart above we can see that besides the 2 big runs, on early downs we barely made any movement forwards. This is most start on 2nd downs where of the 8 carries on those downs we had 4 of them gain 0 yards. On 1st down we had several runs for negative yards.

How do you eat a Golden Bear? 1 Efficient Play at a Time

Note how often Syracuse was able to not take a negative play on early downs. Most of early down passing and rushing allowed McCord and co. to stay on a positive game script with a smattering of explosive plays through the air and ground. On tape and spreadsheet the Syracuse orange was able to stay on schedule and keep converting when needed and move the ball down the field even if it’s just a handful of yards.

We Have Been There Before

In a 8 year tenure of a HC, you’d expect that a person retained for that long is able to point towards a couple of exceptional years where the team they lead and build make a jump outside of the median performance, showing the true ceiling of the program. However, in the case of the Wilcox tenure there is not single year where we can say we had out of the ordinary performance. Every year intersects every quadrant of “good offense/bad offense” and “good defense/bad defense” spectrum. 2024 is all over the place, same way 2023, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17 have been. Just seized by the gravity of mediocrity, never leaving unless it’s by being beat by 2023 UW.

Offense is Forgattably Mediocre

Not a single year did Cal anything better than an average offense in the P5 world, but we certainty had a run of poor offenses that were either inert or unmovable.

4 OCs, 5 QBs, 8 sets of 11 starters, over a 100 players who played a snap for the offense. And all we can show is this. This is what I mean by the forgettable mediocrity, nothing memorable besides individual moments, or super-star players’ moments. But as a whole, you can replace any of these (especially post-Covid) year’s offenses with one another and have more or less the same offense.