The Good, the Bad, and the Rock Fights: Cal vs Duke Football 2025

Pillowfights can be fun. Until the opponent starts putting bricks in their pillowcases...

The defense was fighting with pillows while the offense hit the pillow after about 20 minutes

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Good, the Bad, and the Rockfights, our weekly attempt to make sense of what we saw on the field during the previous game. And after Cal’s quick start followed by two hours of agony, some sensemaking is certainly needed.

Our friends at Pro Football Focus undertook their typical herculean feat by grading every player on every snap and then aggregating those grades into team-level grades. We will then use those team-level grades to figure out what kind of game this one was. First, the raw grades:

Comparing Saturday’s grades (gold) to all previous grades in the Wilcox Era. The boxes capture data between the 25th and 75th percentiles, and the horizontal line represents the median.

Generally anything below the box is bad because it’s a grade in the bottom 25% of all grades previously recorded under Wilcox. 8 of our 12 categories fall into that threshold, and run blocking set a new record for lowest score. Only 3 categories fared better than usual: receiving, running, and tackling, all of which finished in the top 25%, oddly enough. However, it’s hard to expect much from the RBs and receivers when the line can’t run block or protect the QB. So the offense featured some great individual efforts while everything else was mostly broken. Likewise, the tackling was good, but it’s hard to be too pleased with good tackling after the QB slings another 20-yard bomb or a RB breaks off a 30-yard scamper. And with all the other defensive categories falling below the 25th percentile, that was a consistent outcome: good tackling cleaning up the mess left by an otherwise broken defense.

PFF Clusters

What will our clustering algorithm make of this game? We have many bad grades, but a few surprisingly good grades too. Is it enough to keep us out of The Bad?

(Click here for a larger version) Each data point represents a game; points closer together earned more similar grades while points farther apart earned more dissimilar grades. The colored boxes represent our five categories of games. Interestingly, Bizarro Games are increasingly encroaching on the part of the plot occupied by Pillowfights

Pillowfight! Sure, it’s the closest Pillowfight to the border of The Bad, but this one made the cut. Interestingly, PFF bumped up several of the grades from the Boston College game and that one migrated from Bizarro Games to Pillowfights. Pillowfights were more common from 2021-2023, but we have not seen any in a while (last week’s BC revision notwithstanding). Pillowfights tend to be oddball games where the defense can’t do anything right and the offense tends to have some success despite O-line struggles. That certainly fits Saturday’s script, although the offense was successful for about 20 minutes until the Blue Devils started filling their pillows with bricks.

Odds and Ends

• Offensive Player of the Game: RB Kendrick Raphael, 73.9

• Defensive Player of the Game: LB Aaron Hampton, 75.1

• Iron Men: RT Leon Bell, RG Sioape Vatikani, C Tyson Ruffins, LT Frederick Williams III, CB Zeke Masses

• Pass Protection: Cal surrendered a woeful 21 pressures (6 sacks, 1 hit, 14 hurries) on 43 passing plays. This was one of the worst pass protection rates of the Wilcox Era.

• Pass Rush: Cal generated only 9 pressures (2 sacks, 7 hurries) on 33 pass plays. This is another notable low in comparison to the rest of our data.

• Tackling: The Bears missed 8 tackles on 68 snaps, for a better-than-usual rate of 11.7%.

• Shake and Bake: Cal evaded 11 tackles on 66 snaps for a solid rate of 16.7%. Also, Cal had one of those rare games where the opponent missed more tackles than Cal (not that it seemed to help the final score much…).

• Run Stops: Cal stopped 18 of 35 runs, for a perfectly typical rate of 51.4%.

Comparing Saturday’s Odds and Ends stats (gold) to all previous stats under the Wilcox Era

Enjoy the bye week!