Post-Game Thoughts: Florida State Football

Cal outplays the Seminoles on the road but finds ways to lose anyway in a heartbreaker

Photo via @calfootball twitter

If Fernando jumps over an outstretched arm on a late scramble.

If either of two missed field goals are converted.

If any number of plays in the red zone are successful.

If Cal can find a hot read on a few different FSU extreme blitzes.

If a couple of dropped passes are completed.

Cal wins this game.

For the second time in the season, Cal went into the deep South and outplayed a traditional college football power. Unlike the first time, Cal made enough unforced errors to lose the game. Just one more psychic scar to add to the collection.

Offense

Efficiency Report

11 drives: 5 field goal attempts (3-5), 4 punts, 2 turnovers (1 interception, 1 downs), 0.8 points/drive

I’m not going to lie to you and pretend that Cal’s offense was good against Florida State. 0.8 points/drive speaks for itself, and even if Cal was perfect on field goals that’s a rough 1.4 points/possesion. But SEVEN of Cal’s 11 drives reached the Florida State 40 or further, and the Bears only suffered one 3-and-out. Normally, when you put up 9 points, it means that the offense couldn’t move the ball. No, Cal’s issue was converting yards into points, and it’s easy to diagnose the primary problem:

Backwards plays are kneecapping a promising offense

Cal ran 74 plays against Florida State, and a full 12 of those plays were tackles for loss. 16% of the time, Cal went backwards. For the sake of comparison, Cal went backwards on 8.4% of their offensive plays in 2023.

If you prefer this illustrated in raw, painful numbers, behold:

74 total plays for 410 total yards (5.5 yards/play)
12 backwards plays for -48 yards (-4 yards/play)
62 positive plays for 458 yards (7.4 yards/play)

In case you’re curious, 7.4 yards/play is really, really good - it would’ve been good enough for 3rd in the nation last year. 5.5 is . . . well, functionally identical to the 5.46 yards/play Cal put up last year, good for 80th in the country.

And those numbers above don’t include penalties! Throw in 6 accepted penalties with meaningful losses of yardage and Cal spent a large portion of the game going backwards.

Now, it’s disingenuous to suggest that Cal could just magically eliminate negative plays from their performances. Even the best teams go backwards sometimes. But when a team has a negative play roughly once every 5 or 6 plays, it’s really really hard to sustain a drive, and it results in things like 5 field goal attempts when even one touchdown would have been enough to win the game

So what’s the solution?

There isn’t really a solution, other than to block better. But that’s a hard thing to fix in-season.

Improved health from Sioape Vatikani and Will McDonald is hypothetically one answer to this conundrum, except that Vatikani’s availability for the reason of the season is now significantly in doubt (thinking good thoughts for the big fella). And while McDonald will likely improve the line incrementally, I don’t think that Cal is an incremental improvement away from a consistently functional offensive line.

The other thing that Cal theoretically could improve? Better blitz hot routes. Whenever teams have sent extra bodies and gotten free rushers (as in the final 4th down sack, though there have been plenty of examples this year) it feels like Fernando has been dead in the water without any kind of option. I don’t have access to all 22 film so I have no idea if this is a play structure issue or an ID issue for Fernando, or if guys are getting through to Fernando so fast that even well designed plays get blown up before he can hit a hot route, but I can’t really recall many plays where Cal has punished a blitzing defense, and until we find a way to do it teams are going to keep sending bodies at Fernando.

Defense

Efficiency Report

10 drives: 2 touchdowns, 6 punts, 2 turnovers (1 interception, 1 downs), 1.4 points/drive

Florida State, conversely, crossed midfield 5 times, but two of those drives stalled out immediately and a 3rd ended on Cal’s lone interception. FSU did benefit from generally better field position than Cal did, and FSU’s inefficiency is best illustrated in the 4.2 yards/play they put up.

The obvious problem? FSU hit the endzone, Cal didn’t.

Time to pick nits: what went wrong on those two drives?

FSU’s first touchdown drive was pretty simple: FSU started in excellent field position after a sack, and Cal didn’t tackle well on a drive characterized by runs and short passes.

And FSU’s second touchdown drive featured two excellent throws from DJU, one on 3rd and 18 that was a dart into traffic over the middle with a rusher about to hit him, and the other the long touchdown pass over the shoulder to a receiver with outside leverage.

I don’t think there’s much to learn from these sequences other than to say that the Cal defense isn’t elite, and competent teams will have enough moments of execution to occasionally put up points.

But the defense played well, and absolutely well enough to earn the win. We’ll learn much more about their ceiling when a top 10 offense comes to town in two weeks.

Special Teams

This style of play demands good placekicking

There are thin margins here. Ryan Coe is 5/11 on his kicks, but one hit the upright, another appeared juuuust wide (though ESPN2 annoyingly didn’t give us a good angle) and two other misses are from 50+. Move two kicks a couple of feet and Coe is 7-11 and roughly an average college kicker.

There’s still more evidence than not that Coe is in fact roughly an average college kicker who happens to be going through a slump that an average college kicker sometimes hits, and it’s unfortunate that the slump came in a game with five field goal attempts. That Coe nailed a 51 yarder with room to spare is indication enough of what he’s capable when he’s right.

Worth noting: field goal attempts, made or missed, will not be enough to beat Miami.

Coaching/Game Theory/Errata

The worst game theory decision of the Wilcox era

4th and 3 from the opponent’s 40 yard line should be an automatic go for it in all but extreme circumstances. Like, if you are 2023 Iowa and you have the worst offense in the country and an All-American punter, or if you have an NFL level field goal kicker who can bang in 57 yarders.

Burning a timeout and then punting adds a little bit of salt to the wound, but the focus should be on the decision to punt in isolation. You’re going to be lucky to gain 30 yards of field position, and as it is it turned out to be 20. As has been well established, Cal’s offense isn’t good enough to throw away scoring opportunities, and FSU got to the 40 yard line in one play. If Cal turns that drive into points the entire complexion of the 2nd half is different, and maybe Cal wins it.

Frankly, this is a decision that has become rote for every head coach at every level except for, like, Kirk Ferentz. I was baffled when we trotted out the punt team, and the punt openly hurt Cal’s chances to win this game.

Big Picture

I think we have to be able to hold two things in our head that, to a certain extent, conflict with each other:

Last week, all I could think about was that if Cal beat Florida State it would mean all of the following things:

1. We could bask in the glory and possibility of an undefeated start for two blissful weeks.

2. Cal would almost certainly get ranked, after next weekend if not this week.

3. It would set up the biggest Cal home game since the Tedford era.

4. There was a strong possibility that College Gameday would finally come to Berkeley.

I didn’t vocalize any of that, but I allowed myself to think about how fun it would be, and how valuable it could be for a program trying to rebuild fan interest and recruiting cachet.

And it almost happened. It should have happened.

It’s also true that Cal still isn’t good enough to be able to walk into a solid opponent’s house and outplay them so much as to win convincingly, win by multiple scores, take any random chance out of it. And so Cal lost this game.

This loss very likely means that dreams of ACC contention are gone, but those were never realistic goals for this team anyway. This loss doesn’t eliminate hopes of an 8 or more win season and a building block towards better years in the future.

Miami was going to be a major challenge either way. If Cal were to somehow pull that upset, everybody will forget about this game immediately. But the difference between a successful season and an unsuccessful season will be decided against teams like NC State and Pitt, teams that are closer to talent-level peers.

That’s all well and true, but we all allowed ourselves to get our hopes up when it became clear that Florida State had Big Problems this year and that Cal was clearly good enough to beat them. You’re allowed to feel emotions about that, whatever those emotions happen to be.