The Good, The Bad, and The Rockfights: Cal vs. Washington

A tale of two halves

PFF provides many situational player grades: for example, passing in different depths and directions, passing in a clean pocket, DB grades one-on-one against each receiver. Unfortunately, there isn’t much granularity in the team-level grades, such as quarter-by-quarter grades. Saturday’s game would present some interesting contrasts when graded by quarter (or at least, by half). The Cal defense likely would have earned fantastic first-half grades for holding an explosive UW offense to 6 points while the offense would have earned awful grades for doing…whatever it is they were doing to accumulate a whopping 84 yards. Meanwhile the grades probably would have been flipped in the second half as the Cal offense found a way to move the ball consistently while the defense started making some uncharacteristic mistakes (I’m still amazed by the blown coverage on that 4th quarter TD after they called a timeout…to address the soon-to-be blown coverage). With only a single, game-level set of grades, let’s see if we can make some sense of what we saw on Saturday.