The Good, the Bad, and the ????: Cal vs. SMU
A throwback to a type of game we had only seen three times in the 2020s.
Welcome back to The Good, The Bad, and The Rockfights [*gestures at all these new categories of Cal football games*], our weekly attempt to make sense of what happened on the football field the previous weekend. Earlier this week, we tried to make sense of the past twelve years of Cal football, so today’s exercise of evaluating a single game should be a comparatively trivial effort.
PFF Grades
As usual, our friends at PFF evaluated every player on every snap, distilled those down to individual-level grades, and then distilled those grades down to team-level grades. Those grades are below, in comparison to all prior PFF data for the Bears.
It was a decent day for the offense. Pass protection was exactly on the median and Running was a bit worse than usual; otherwise, everything had a good day. Run Blocking was a bit better than usual while Passing, Receiving, and overall Offense were in their respective top 25% (which is saying a lot, now that we have the 2014-16 data in these comparisons). Defensively, grades were not nearly as good. Tackling enjoyed a strong performance, a frustrating rarity recently. Coverage was also strong, helping to offset a lowly Pass Rush grade. As was the case far too often this season, Run Defense earned a bottom 25% grade. This all culminated in a Defense grade that was notably below average.
Generally strong offense coupled with mixed results on defense…where does this slot in our new set of categories for evaluating Cal?
PFF Clusters
I fed the grades into our clustering algorithm and…
Sonny Delight! One of our new categories, this represents games where the offense has a strong day and the defense does just enough to keep the opponent at bay. This one certainly had the feeling of a Sonny Dykes game: Cal builds a huge lead, gives up a flurry of late-game touchdowns, and barely holds onto the win thanks to some late-game heroics. Meanwhile half the fanbase makes sure they still have their cardiologists on speed-dial. This kind of game has been a rarity lately, as this was only the fourth example over the past eight seasons (others: the 39-25 win over Oregon State in 2021, the 49-31 win over Arizona in 2022, and the 44-7 win over Oregon State in 2024). Coincidentally, the closest neighbor to the SMU game is the 2016 win over Hawaii, which featured the head coaching debut of Nick Rolovich.
Now onto our usual assortment of other PFF stats.
Odds and Ends
Offensive Player of the Game: QB Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele, 82.1
Defensive Player of the Game: CB Zeke Masses, 78.6
Iron Men [played every snap]: RT Braden Miller, C Bastian Swinney, LG Jordan Spasojevic-Moko, LT Nick Morrow, CB Zeke Masses, CB Paco Austin, S Aiden Manutai, S Dru Polidore Jr.. Honorable Mention goes to Kendrick Raphael, who tallied 38 touches for 164 yards and a TD.
Pass protection: Cal allowed 11 pressures (0 sacks, 3 hits, 8 hurries) for a perfectly middling pass protection rate of 76.1%.
Pass rush: Cal generated 8 pressures (1 sack, 2 hits, 5 hurries) on 41 pass plays, for a woeful rate of 17.4%.
Tackling: Cal missed 7 tackles on 68 snaps for a great tackling rate of 89.7%.
Shake and Bake: Cal evaded 5 tackles on 84 plays for an abysmal rate of 6.0%.
Run stops: Cal stopped 12 of SMU’s 27 runs, for a lowly rate of 44.4%.
Until the bowl game, enjoy the holiday season! May we all be gifted with a stellar new coaching staff.
The outcome of the game was delightful indeed.
Thanks for the work that goes into these. I meant to comment on your last post that walked through your clustering strategy. Great stuff and a nice little refresher on data analysis. Can't get that on just any sports blog!