Post-Game Thoughts: Duke Football 2025

Cal falls to defeat in painful, clarifying loss

photo via Rob Hwang

Since the minute Cal’s game against Minnesota ended, nearly every single piece of information has caused me to dial back my expectations for the 2025 football season. Sadly, reality came crashing down upon the heads of Cal fans on Saturday.

When I checked my phone in the morning and saw that Pitt was dominating Boston College in all phases, my stomach turned over. When Oregon State blew it against Appalachian State, I laughed darkly. When Ohio State dispatched with Minnesota like a tomato in the garbage disposal, my hopes plunged further.

For one quarter, Cal defied gravity. But in totality, Saturday night was a game between two teams on two different levels.

Should these teams be on different levels? The 247 talent composite doesn’t think so. But I’m more interested in Ron Rivera’s assessment of that question.

Offense

Efficiency Report

12 possessions: 3 touchdowns, 5 punts, 4 turnovers (4 interceptions), 1.75 points/possession

The defining mystery of this game is why Cal’s offense crawled into a hole and died after three possessions. Here are the relevant numbers, for those who might be curious:

1. First three possessions:

• 12 points, 14 first downs, 210 yards, 7.8 yards/play

2. Final nine possession:

• 0 points, 6 first downs, 76 yards, 2.2 yards/play

Possible solutions to this theory that have popped into my head have included the following:

• JKS appeared to hurt his ankle on a scramble late in the 3^rd drive:

Maybe he wasn’t able to effectively plant his back foot, leading to inaccuracy/bad throws?

• Cal ran out of script plays?

• Duke made some kind of scheme/strategy adjustment? To my eyes it seemed like they were sending more guys into the backfield on run/pass blitzes but I haven’t run tape to confirm this.

Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele-is-the-truth-throw-of-the-week OR

Jaron-Keawe Sagapolutele has to be nearly perfect, and that’s not realistic, healthy, or fair

On the first drive of the game, JKS completed a 19 yard pass to Trond Grizzell that fit through a window that was maybe five feet wide:

On the one hand, what a throw! What a job by Trond to hold onto the ball!

On the other hand, in the stadium my immediate thought was “boy, I’m glad we got away with that, but if those are the kinds of windows we have to ‘open’ receivers, this might be a long night of football. For three possessions, JKS was able to hit throws like these, but you simply cannot sustain an offense on plays like this, because they’re too low percentage and too risky. Cal HAS to have other sources of offense.

Cal does not have other sources of offense

The Bears simply to not have the ability to effectively run the ball. On 21 running back handoffs, Cal averaged 3.9 yards/carry and had one run longer than 8 yards all night. The Bears are 126th in the nation in yards/run, and I’m beating a dead horse in pointing out that Cal cannot run the ball.

But it’s worth pointing out that Cal cannot run the ball well even though they have a legitimate downfield passing threat. Usually, teams that are so utterly incapable of running the ball fail in part because opposing defenses do not respect the passing game as a threat. They throw defenders into the box and safeties creep up towards the line of scrimmage because there’s no risk of getting beaten deep.

But that’s not the case for Cal, which speaks to some combination of inability to block, inability to break tackles, and inability to scheme.

Defense

Efficiency Report

12 possessions: 6 touchdowns, 1 field goal attempt (1-1), five punts

To my eyes, Duke’s offense had three phases in this game:

• The first half, in which Duke raced up and down the field more or less at will, and only got stopped once due to Duke’s own penalties.

• The 3^rd quarter, in which Duke turtled pretty heavily to sit on their lead, and a more aggressive Cal defense forced four punts in a row.

• The 4^th quarter, in which an exhausted and/or demoralized Cal defense finally fell apart and allowed Duke to run the ball right through them to eliminate whatever small chance Cal had of mounting a comeback.

In a vacuum, you could maybe look at Cal’s 3^rd quarter defensive performance as encouraging, because they handed the Cal offense four chances to get the game back within one score. But Duke was pretty clearly playing much more conservatively on offense. In 16 plays across four drives that ended in punts to start the 2^nd half, Duke threw exactly ONE pass deeper than about 3 yards past the line of scrimmage. I think Manny Diaz and company (correctly) diagnosed that the only way they were going to lose the game was if Mensah threw interceptions, and they called a game to avoid that singular risk.

But I think it was unnecessarily cautious because:

Duke got whatever they wanted down the field

So far this year, the sense was that Cal’s completely rebuilt secondary had been passing tests, but those tests had been low-key quizzes. Duke was a brutal midterm, and a reality check.

Watching live, I knew that one reason Cal got shredded by Mensah and the Duke pass game was because Cal barely got any pressure. Sure enough, the numbers are ugly. Cal pressured Mensah on just 8 of 32 drop backs, and many of those pressures didn’t really stop Mensah from doing damage.

But I was equally concerned about how frequently and easily Duke receivers got open. And after reviewing some of the highlights . . . well, Cal got beaten pretty easily in some man coverage looks early, then got beaten in zone coverage looks in the 2nd quarter, and I guess I don’t know what the solution is. Expect a more detailed film study during the upcoming bye-weel.

I think Cal has a couple of guys who can hold up in man coverage (Masses and Austin) and a couple of players who are good zone defenders (Ferrelli, primarily) but they don’t necessarily have an entire secondary of players well suited to either option against a legitimately dangerous downfield passing team.

Special Teams

Kickoff challenges the only thing of note

This was a pretty low-impact special teams game, in part because it was even (both teams punted five times, and both teams averaged 41 net yards/punt), in part because there was only one short field goal attempt combined, and in part because the Duke offense moved the ball so well that relative field position didn’t matter.

But Cal did struggle a bit with kickoffs and kickoff coverage. On Cal’s first kickoff, from the 50 following a Duke penalty, Cal couldn’t punish Duke for a return attempt despite getting a 15 yard head start and allowed a 24 yard return. Later Duke managed a return out to the 42 that kicker Chase Meyers needed to make the tackle on. Then, Chase Meyers hit a squibber to the 20, and a Duke blocker returned it 15 yards.

It’s clear that Cal is considering alternative strategies on kickoffs without long kicker Abram Murray, and this might be a relative weakness until Murray is healthy

Big Picture

This game falls into a few different well-worn genres of Justin-Wilcox-Era games.

It was a classic of the “Cal fans get excited and show out for a home game only to be disappointed” genre.

It was a beautiful fall evening and campus was hopping for homecoming. Ron Rivera and the Bearcast got a warm reception on Memorial Glade. The North end of the endzone was as full as I’ve seen it for any non-Stanford, non-College-Gameday crowd in some time. The students showed up. A dude in a gorilla costume (and 50-odd other East Bay stalwarts) showed up for the Black Bears section.

They all stayed pretty late into the game, until Duke scored in the 4th quarter to go up 17, launching a mass exodus of humanity towards the exits at around 10:30. I suspect many will not be back in two weeks.

You have another “we have convincing proof that this team isn’t any different than every other Wilcox team” game.

In the space of a few weeks, projections for Cal’s season have collapsed. Most of this has to do with Cal playing poorly; no-showing against SDSU, barely beating BC, and getting comprehensively beaten by Duke. Some of it has to do with prior Cal wins looking less impressive with each subsequent week as Oregon State, Minnesota, and Boston College have all looked worse than expected to varying degrees.

The Bears sit at 83rd in the current SP+ standings, ahead of just five power conference teams (three of which are on Cal’s schedule!). I haven’t gone back to check, but I believe this may be the lowest ranking Cal has had under Wilcox in this particular analytical system. As of right now, Cal will be favored to win two games the rest of the way: North Carolina and Stanford. Barring some kind of unprecedented turnaround, for the ~12^th season in a row, Cal’s season will now be defined by a chase for a bowl game and not a chase for any achievement more impressive than that.

Ron Rivera has made it quite clear in his public statements that 6-6 is not good enough, not acceptable. Right now, every objective measure suggests that 6-6 is roughly where Cal is headed.

Cal is not the kind of a program that would announce a mid-season head coach dismissal. That’s fine. A front office can prepare for what the future might bring without announcing a formal decision earlier than needed.

I hope that’s exactly what is happening behind the scenes right now.