The Good, The Bad, and The Rock Fights: Cal at Pitt Football

In which we enter The Bizarro World

Welcome to the Bizarro Games, Cal fans

Do you remember our recent existential crisis? No, not the one after the Miami loss. Or the one after the Florida State loss. I’m talking about a couple weeks ago when we dove into our PFF clustering algorithm to figure out why some of the clusters were looking increasingly weird (for example, Pillowfights that looked less and less like what we traditionally expect from Pillowfights). In that piece I emphasized that one of the intriguing features of this series is that our clusters continuously evolve over time as we accumulate data, especially when new data points look less and less like previous data points (which means they have a harder time fitting in our traditional clusters). Well, it has happened again—we have created a new category of Cal games. In 2022 we had enough data points of all-offense, no-defense games to create a new cluster, The Pillowfights. And now, we have enough data to create another new cluster: Bizarro Games.