The Good, the Bad, and the Rockfights: 2024 Cal Football Season in Review

2024: it was the Good of times, it was the Bad of times, it was the age of Rockfights, it was the age of Bizarro Games.

Looking back at 2024: some good, some bad, and plenty of rocks

In 2024, Cal football played 956 offensive snaps, 916 defensive snaps, and 225 special teams snaps. Somehow, our friends at Pro Football Focus (PFF) evaluated every player on every snap; that totals a ridiculous 23,067 evaluations. I am genuinely curious how PFF does it—surely there must be some algorithm-aided evaluation unless they’re running a sweatshop of underpaid evaluators, but how does their process work? Alas, that’s a question for another day. Today’s question is rather straightforward: what kind of team were the 2024 Golden Bears?

This is the final edition of the 2024 season’s series of The Good, the Bad, and the Rockfights, our weekly evaluation of Cal football using PFF’s grades. PFF provides an overwhelming amount of data evaluating each week’s performance, so we simplify it by taking their twelve team-level grades and comparing them to the grades of the previous 90-something games under Justin Wilcox. Still, 12 grades over that many games remain an overhwelming amount of data, so we use those grades to distill the game into one of five categories: Good (good grades across the board), Bad (bad grades across the board), Rockfights (strong defense, decent blocking and running, abysmal passing), Pillowfights (great offense despite poor blocking and abysmal defense), and, our newest cateogry that emerged in 2024, Bizarro Games (everything earns good scores except blocking and tackling). For this exercise, we are going to look at the entire season as a whole by averaging all 13 games together and seeing where that ends up among our categories. And for additional fun, we’ll do the same for all the previous Wilcox-era seasons.

Grades Comparison

Figure 1 below compares the averaged 2024 grades to all previous grades from 2017 to present.

Figure 1. (Click here for a much larger version) Boxplots show the spread of grades for each category, with each season’s average superimposed (black for prior seasons, gold for 2024). The box represents data between the 25th and 75th percentiles while the horizontal line represents the median.

Those grades cover six offensive categories—overall offense, passing, pass protection, receiving, running, and run blocking—and five defensive categories—overall defense, run defense, tackling, pass rush, pass coverage. All previous grades are represented by boxplots, which show the spread of previous data. The box captures data between the 25th and 75th percentiles, while the horizontal line represents the median. Larger boxes indicate larger variation in the data. I’ve superimposed each season’s average grade over those boxes. Previous seasons are in black while 2024 is yellow (you may have to click the image or the link in the caption to see a larger version).

Offensively, 2024 was a rather middling year as it sits near the middle of previous season’s averages. Overall offense sits exactly on the median, suggesting that this offense was very close to a typical Wilcoxian offense. Passing and pass protection were slightly better than usual, although they were aided by the second-best receiving grade under Wilcox (no doubt aided by the talent upgrade among the WR corps in 2024). Ott’s injuries and intermittent struggles helped Cal earn its lowest run game under Wilcox (typically the team’s best category under Wilcox), although the running game was further limited by some run blocking that fell well below normal.

Defensively, 2024 represented a return to the strong defenses of the first half of Wilcox’s tenure after a few years of uncharacteristically poor defenses (notice in the chart how 2017-2019 are typically above their 2021-2023 counterparts). Overall defense and run defense averaged considerably better than normal while pass rush, long a weakness of Wilcox’s defenses, earned its second-best rating under Wilcox. Tackling and coverage were slightly worse than normal, but both represent noticable improvements over 2021-23.

Cluster Analysis

Next we take the set of grades and feed them into a machine learning algorithm that clusters games together with similar sets of grades. In this exercise we include the yearly averages too, but the approach is still the same. After churning through the data, it spits out each game/year into one of five categories. Before proceeding to where the 2024 season ended up, here is a look at where each game was categorized this season.

• Good (3): UC Davis (W), Oregon State (W), Big Game (W)

• Bad (2): Miami (L), SMU (L)

• Rockfights (4): Florida State (L), NC State (L), Syracuse (L), UNLV (L) [unfun fact: Cal has not won a Rockfight since the 2019 win over North Texas]

• Pillowfights: None!

• Bizarro Games (4): Auburn (W), SDSU (W), Pitt (L), Wake Forest (W)

Predictably, Cal won all three Good games and lost both Bad games (Cal has never won a Bad game and has only ever lost two Good games: at Colorado in 2017 and at UCLA 2017). The Rockfights losing streak continues, as this marks the fifth consecutive season without a Rockfight win, a curious contrast to the early Wilcox teams that would use Rockfights to upset conference title contenders like Washington. The improvement on defense helped keep the team out of the Pillowfights, a category full of games from the defensive lull of the 2020-2023 seasons. Finally, our newest category, Bizarro Games, welcomed four games from the 2024 season. So where did 2024 end up after 13 games?

Figure 2. (Click here for a much larger version) Each point represents a game, and data points closer together are more similar while data points farther apart are more dissimilar. Data points are clustered into color-coded categories, each representing one of our five types of games. Data points with boxes around them represent the average for that respective season.

The Rockfights! This team’s average statistical profile fits in the lower section of the Rockfights near the border with Bizarro Games. 2024 joins the 2017-2020 seasons in the Rockfights, while 2021 and 2023 sit in the Bizarro Games and 2022 is our lone Pillowfight season. With another defensive leap forward in 2025 (questionable, given the talent departure at DB), the Bears could more solidly fit in the Rockfights next year a la 2018. Or, if they can finally put together a strong and consistent offense, we could see the team take a step over towards—and possibly into—the Good. Or things go completely pear-shaped, the team plummets into The Bad, and we spend the next offseason figuring out what kind of team a new staff will craft. Whatever happens, we’ll be here to crunch the numbers and provide way too much detail into these statistical profiles. Until next season, Go Bears!