The Bad, the Worse, and the Dumpster Fires: Cal at San Diego State Football 2025
Another unmitigated disaster in the city of San Diego
Welcome to this week’s edition of The Good, The Bad, and The Rockfights. Several years ago we created this series to make sense of the many different grades Pro Football Focus assigns to each week’s performance. With twelve different grading categories, there are many ways these games can differ. We can see games where each running game slowly tries to grind its way to success against an impenetrable defense (i.e. Rockfights) or games where everything goes right except for some of the fundamental components of success like run blocking and tackling (i.e. Bizarro Games). And then there are games like what we saw on Saturday. We don’t need advanced analysis, machine learning, or sophisticated visualizations to make sense of what we saw. We just need a pair of eyeballs and a disturbingly unshakeable sense of deja vu.
But since you’re already here, we might as well go through the data…
PFF Grades
PFF’s graders evaluated every single player on every single play, and then aggregated those grades to team-level grades. We highlight those grades below in comparison to all previous grades from the Wilcox Era.
Not good! Data points below the box are in the bottom 25% of all previous grades, and data points below the horizontal line within the box are in the bottom 50%. As you can see, we have plenty of bottom-25% grades out there. Again, not good.
PFF Clusters
11 of the 12 grades were below average, and 9 of 12 were in the bottom 25%. There’s not much point in feeding these grades into our machine learning algorithm, because we already know how it’s going to classify this game. Or do we…?
Of course we do! If you thought this would end up anywhere but The Bad, you need to get your eyes checked. The plot above clusters similarly graded games together, and this one fell somewhere between the 14-42 loss to UCLA in 2021 and the 19-63 loss to Oregon in 2023. Great company, those games.
Odds and Ends
Offensive Player of the Game: WR Trond Grizzell, 71.8
Defensive Player of the Game: S Isaiah Crosby, 86.3
Iron men: RT Leon Bell, C Tyson Ruffins, RG Sioape Vatikani, LG Jordan Spasojevic-Moko
Pass protection: Cal allowed 14 pressures on 47 pass plays, for a much-worse-than-usual rate of 29.8%. But how did Cal achieve a better-than-usual pass protection grade with a worse-than-usual pass protection rate? That is because the right side of the line was graded quite well while the left side had disastrous ratings.
Pass rush: Cal forced 3 pressures on 23 pass plays, for a woeful rate of 13.0%. This was one of the worst pass rushes of the Wicox Era.
Tackling: Cal missed 11 tackles on 58 plays, for a disappointing rate of 19.0%.
Shake and bake: Cal eluded 11 tackles on 73 pass plays, a better-than-usual rate of 15.1%. However, Cal once again missed tackles at a higher rate than the opponent.
Run stops: Cal stopped 17 of SDSU’s 35 run plays, a slightly-worse-than-usual rate of 48.6%.
Other a better-than-usual rate of avoiding tackles, it was all bad news for the Bears in our Odds and Ends stats. But now that we have suffered a humiliating loss, this weekend’s matchup against Boston College is looking much less like a trap game, right? …right?
I think we were 100x worse than these statistics.
I'm surprised this one didn't just crash the program. The computer program. And maybe the football program.