The Good, the Bad, and the Rock Fights: Cal at Virginia Tech 2025

In which we increasingly see evidence of three unique eras of Justin Wilcox teams

Oct 28, 2025

Welcome to The Good, the Bad, and the Rockfights, our weekly attempt to make sense of what we saw on the field the previous weekend. When we debuted this series a few years ago, we initially identified three types of Wilcox games, hence the name of the series. Wilcox’s 2017-19 teams were commonly characterized as Rockfight-loving teams that would happily grind away an opponent en route to a 13-10 final score. Both a stellar defense and a struggling offense contributed to those low scores. After Tim DeRuyter and Beau Baldwin left their respective defensive and offensive coordinator positions, Cal flipped the script for a few years. Points scored and points allowed ballooned, leading to the emergence of our Pillowfights category. As the Musgrave offense neared its end and Sirmon’s defense started looking more like those Rockfight-loving teams of yore, some unusual problems started emerging in 2023 and continue through today: general competence across offense and defense offset by bad fundamentals: blocking and tackling. This led to the emergence of our Bizarro Games category, an increasingly common type of game recently. In sum, over the years we have seen a transformation from Rockfights to Pillowfights to Bizarro Games.

PFF Grades

As usual, our friends at Pro Football Focus graded the team across twelve different categories. I have plotted those below in comparison to all previous grades in the Wilcox Era.

Saturday’s grades (gold) compared to all previous grades in the Wilcox Era (boxplots). The box represents data between the 25th and 75th percentiles, while the horizontal line represents the median, or midpoint.

The Overall grade is bad, but there’s some interesting nuance here on both sides of the ball. Offense was near the 25th percentile, but Passing and Receiving were better than usual. Running was a little worse than usual, but not dreadful. So what went wrong? Horrifically low grades for Pass Protection and Run Blocking. It’s hard for the offense to enjoy any level of success when RBs have no room to run and WRs have no time to get downfield before JKS is under siege. Defensively, most categories were slightly worse than usual (although that Run Defense grade is suspect), with one glaring exception: Tackling posted the second-worst grade of the Wilcox Era. It was another evening full of missed tackles; I wasn’t tracking the tackling very closely, but I counted four on VT’s two-play scoring drive in the first OT period.

So we have a mix of competence and mediocrity for most grades, with absolutely atrocious grades for tackling and the offensive line. That sounds like a recipe for a Bizarro Game.

PFF Clusters

First, a quick programming note: last week we saw Cal earn its first Rockfight victory since 2022 and its first Rockfight win over a P4/5 opponent since 2019. Well, PFF heavily revised the grades and now that UNC game is a Bizarro Game. Alas, the Rockfight losing streak continues.

Anyway, I fed the grades into our clustering algorithm and…

Each data point represents a game, and points closer together represent more similar games. Five different types of games have emerged over the years. These cluster shapes and sizes change over time, and the Bizarro category has been expanding recently and swallowing more games that had been previously assigned to Rockfights or Pillowfights.

Bizarro Game! Interestingly, the Bizarro category has been growing in recent weeks. Its uppermost and lowermost borders stretch well into the Rockfights and Pillowfights, respectively. Some of this is an artifact of the plot, as we’re taking a twelve-dimensional (one for each PFF category) array of data and trying to represent it in a two-dimensional plot. But there is definitely some legitimate encroachment of Bizarro Games into previous categories. We’ve seen different flavors of Bizarro Games as the category grows, from a Pillowfight-esque shootout on Friday to the Rockfight-shaped win over UNC. As discussed in the intro, these Bizarro Games are increasingly becoming the defining characteristic of the late Wilcox Era teams (2023-25). It’s currently the most popular type of game for the 2025 team, with 4 such examples (OSU, Minnesota, UNC, and VT), followed by 2 Pillowfights (BC—which used to be classified as a Bizarro Game—and Duke), and 1 each in the Good and Bad (Texas Southern and SDSU).

Odds and Ends

Now onto some other interesting statistics beyond our 12 grading categories.

Offensive player of the game: RG Sioape Vatikani, 70.1
Defensive player of the game: ILB Harrison Taggart, 78.7
Iron men: RT Leon Bell, RG Sioape Vatikani, LG Jordan Spasojevic-Moko, LT Frederick Williams III, CB Zeke Masses, CB Brent Austin
Pass protection: Cal allowed 14 pressures (2 sacks, 2 hits, 10 hurries) on 48 pass plays for a slightly-worse-than-usual pass protection rate of 70.8%.
Pass rush: Cal forced 7 pressures (3 sacks, 1 hit, 1 hurry) on 24 pass attempts for a dismal rate of 29.1%. Keep in mind, VT has one of the worst offensive lines in the ACC.
Tackling: Cal missed TWENTY TWO tackles on 78 plays, for a missed tackle rate of 28.2%. That is the second-worst rating of the Wilcox Era.
Shake and bake: Cal forced VT to miss 14 tackles on 71 plays for a better-than-usual rate of 19.7%.
Run stops: Virginia Tech was unsuccessful on 20 of their 54 runs for a better-than-I-was-expecting rate of 37%. Unfortunately, when VT was successful, they were very successful running the ball.