The Good, the Bad, and the Rockfights: Cal at Washington

Strong receiver performances spare this one from the depths of The Bad

Cal and Washington square off in Saturday night’s pillowfight. Except Washington’s pillow is full of bricks.

One of the novelties of following Cal football is that the team always seems to find new and exciting ways to disappoint. When we started this series using PFF’s team-level grades, we found three types of Cal football games under Justin Wilcox: good (offense and defense were graded highly), bad (offense and defense were graded poorly), and rockfights (pass offense struggles, running fares reasonably well, and defense earns excellent marks). As last year unfolded, the team developed a strange, anti-Wilcoxian pattern of earning great passing grades, so-so running grades, decent run defense grades, and sub-par pass defense grades. We dubbed this new category of games The Pillowfights, and the 2022 team accumulated several entries (nearly all losses, unfortunately) in our strange, new category. After a couple good games sandwiched around the Auburn rockfight, we have our first pillowfight of the year.