Evans Hall: Return of the very Average Cal Team Against Davis
Cal was so average it was both comforting and worrying, like Maruchan Ramen
Cal football ended the 2021 season struggling to be average on offense and good enough defensively to be a borderline .500 team that needed a bounce of the ball here or there to get a Bowl big. But alas.
OFEI = offensive efficiency, DFEI = defensive efficiency.
We can see here from 2021’s Football Outsider’s FEI ranking Cal was in the midst of ~.500 teams. Cal was 86th on offense and 41st on defense, and this averages out at 67th in the country out of 130 teams in the database. We can see here that there are plenty of bowl-level teams on the list, and is what we have hope Cal to be as the bare minimum.
However, coming into the season we were worried that the mass exodus of production on offense (only three returning starters only two of whom were) and defense (Elijah Hicks, Cam Goode, and Josh Drayden) would cause us to have to watch a rebuilding year besotten with a 3-9 record.
There were glimmers of hope, with the coming of highly touted athletes across the board (J.Michael Sturdivant, Jeremiah Hunter, Mavin Anderson. Justin Richard Baker, Jermaine Terry II, Keleki Latu, and Jaydn Ott) hoping to buttress the loss of production. So what happened in the first game?
QB Centric Offense
Piotr with the Axe @PiotrLe
Quick Preview of my Weekly Column: Cal was generally more explosive through the air and avoided negative plays vs. P5 team offenses that faced non-P5 defenses. The Running game on the other hand was the opposite with many plays with a PPA of ~0. Note distribution is smoothed. https://t.co/l5yefdrl6QWe remained a QB-centric offense letting Jack Plummer have the ball on crucial 3rd downs. This matches last year’s observation where an inordinate amount of 3rd down play-calling put the onus on Chase Garbers. Last year we could reason that Chase would scramble for the 1st down and basically be a runner. However, despite flashes of escapability Jack Plummer cannot be counted to scramble and only has his arm to truly rely on.
Will this continue? Or will the emergence of a legitimate star at RB in Jaydn Ott give us a more balanced play-calling on 3rd downs?
Basically Same Average
Note: that the graph is for garbage time data. What is garbage time? Most folks know it as the time to leave for the parking lot when it’s garbage time, or in the famous words of Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio “I shall not today attempt further to define […]” garbage time “[…] I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it”.
But for the purposes of the chart I will use the Football Outsider’s definition:
The criteria for "garbage time" are as follows: a game is not within 38 points in the second quarter, 28 points in the third quarter, or 22 points in the fourth quarter.
What this chart presents is the distribution of all 44 P5 vs non-P5 games that happened in week 1. Cal is the golden dot in the lower-left-hand side quadrant were teams that were below average on both offense and defense.
This is expected considering the Q1 drives by the Cal offense averaged of -0.29 PPA, while during the rest of the game Cal averaged 0.62, 0.22, and 0.42. On defense it is a similar distribution: 0.14, 0.02, 0.25, and 0.16 PPA by quarter.
Piotr with the Axe @PiotrLe
Cal football, R, ggplot2, and Maruchan Ramen. Oh yeah, football season is here and I am here for it @WriteForCal https://t.co/Fv4iHBH6HTWithout the 1st quarter, Cal’s offense averaged a PPA of 0.43 which would’ve put us just above the average line and ~ 19th in the nation. Were the 1st quarter jitters the reason for the poor start? Last year Cal would start red hot, scoring on nearly half of the drives in Q1 only to falter in Q3 (which if you see above is what kinda happened with a dip from 0.62 to 0.22).
Distributing the Plays
Just like last year, Cal’s offensive output distribution mimics the national averages. There isn’t much to say with only 20-30 plays both runs and passes so the distribution will change as more data enters the sample size. I will just hope that the distribution will move to the right just a little more.
On defense, Cal remained in line with its comparators with a slight tilt to the right side on the rushing defense side, note that the lower the defensive PPA the better. Most P5 teams didn’t try to do anything too exotic during the game. We did a good job of keeping the Davis passing offense right around average, the only bump being on the run defense with the 60-yard TD.
Drive Success Rate (DSR)
In 2021 Cal had a DSR of 71%, DSR is the probability of an offense converting a 1st down on any series of downs. If we assume that Cal needs ~ 7 first downs to score a TD on any given drive, such a drive has a 9% chance at a TD (71%^7). Against Davis, including the Q1 disaster, we had a DSR of 78% (88% if we remove the Q1 experince). In that situation a 7 first down drive has a 17.6% chance of a TD… if we maintain the basically impossible rate of 88% we would be scoring TDs at a 40% clip. (Note: in 2021 Ohio State had a DSR of 83% so let’s not count on that). I will bet that our DSR will decline as we play more comparable teams, but it’s a number worth paying attention to in the future to see if we really have a revamped offense.
The TD% formula also implies that explosive plays play a huge impact on the scoring potential of an offense, if we cut down the # of downs needed per TD from 7 to let’s say 5 even an abysmal 71% DSR gives us a TD% of 18%.
Concluding Thoughts
We came into the season with questions on the offense and defense with a lot of new faces in key positions on the roster. What we got is much the same on the spreadsheet: comforting but slightly worrying averages. Comforting because we didn’t get the fall-off on offense and defense (note n=1) most teams suffer when an overwhelming amount snaps is turned over, worrying because the new faces with better athletic profiles can only get us to what we were. So like Maruchan ramen, this Cal team looks to be more or less the same but not really exciting…
Unless the DSR rate we gained against Davis is something that indicates efficiency and explosion in the future, then it can be the super-charged flavor packet for the Maruchan ramen.
Considering the amount of turnover and transition of players, I think is analysis is premature. Let's see how the Bears perform over the next two games in order to get a substantive sense of the season.
I hope this isn't an indicator that our offense, in spite of having more talent, just plays about the same as it has in recent years.