Post-Game Thoughts: Miami Football

Nothing that happened on Saturday was real and you cannot convince me otherwise.

ROB CLAIMS HE TOOK THIS PHOTO BUT IT MUST BE FAKE. AI IS TOO GOOD NOW.

I had one overriding thought all day long on Saturday, October 5. Now, upon reflection, it is still what I believe. None of that was real.

It is not possible that in one day, Cal could host College GameDay, then play a football game 10.5 hours later, and that in that game Cal would build a 25 point lead, and then lose the entire lead and the game in a nightmarish 4th quarter.

It is not possible that a rabid army of Cal fans would occupy Memorial Glade all night long, then have a massive party in the wee dark hours of the morning, and have ESPN dedicate three hours of Saturday morning coverage to everything that is great and fun about Cal fan culture.

It is not possible that Rece Davis would sign off after the show and tell Cal fans that if somebody asks him what his favorite GameDay city is, that he might answer ‘Berkeley.’

It is not possible that Cal is playing a conference game against a top 10 Miami.

It is not possible that I was uncomfortably hot wearing shorts and a t-shirt at midnight in Berkeley in early October.

It is not possible that, on a day in which every eye of the college football universe was trained upon our Golden Bears, that Cal would then play a game that only the most darkly cynical Old Blues would script out.

None of that was real. Everything you will read from this point onward is clearly the product of random brain synapses firing in the head of an unsound Cal fan. A fever dream brought on by some unknown cause. Nobody likes the “it was all just a dream” trope, but sometimes that’s the only possible explanation for a series of events so equally improbable and yet predictable.

Offense

Efficiency Report

11 drives: 4 touchdowns, 1 FGA (1-1), 5 punts, 1 turnover (1 interception) 2.8 points/drive

Without adjusting for strength of opponent, this was Cal’s best offensive performance of the season. When you add in the fact that Miami *might* be the best defense Cal has faced.

Big plays and drive finishing

A 57 yard touchdown to Jack Endries.

A 51 yard pass to Trond Grizzell, and then a 5 yard touchdown run from Ott.

A 66 yard touchdown pass to Jaydn Ott on 4th an 1.

A 56 yard screen pass to Jaivian Thomas, and then two plays to finish off a scoring opportunity.

The Cal offense was very big play dependent. Just like in previous games, backward plays were a major problem - 14% of Cal’s plays went backwards. Throw in four runs that were stuffed for zero yards and you get a continued picture of an offensive line that struggles to win battles up front.

But unlike previous games, Cal was able to use the aggression of their opponent against them. Three of those four big plays listed above were pass plays that relied on defenders getting themselves out of position by moving too far up field. Cal very nearly hit on enough big plays to offset their down to down disadvantages in the trenches.

The good news is that Miami is the last defense on the schedule that appears to have a clear talent advantage along their defensive front (I reserve my right to revisit this off-the-cuff assessment after more detailed scouting of future opponents).

Defense

Efficiency Report

12 drives: 5 touchdowns, 1 FGA (1-1), 4 punts, 2 turnovers (1 interception, 1 downs), 3.3 points/drive

Cal held Miami to 263 yards across the first 48 plays the Hurricanes ran, good for 5.5 yards/play, which is pretty excellent against a top 10 offense. Miami mixed in plenty of positive plays, but Cal had plenty of their own, including a number of pressures and sacks on Cam Ward. Relative to opponent, those first 48 plays could be argued as the best we have watched a Wilcox defense play for a portion of a game. Unfortunately, we have to talk about the last four drives of the game:

A gassed defense in one chart

For basically three quarters the Cal defense kept Miami’s offense in check, allowing only two scoring drives and forcing Cam Ward into one of the single worst throws I have ever seen in my many years of watching college football.

But the Cal defense had to defend a TON of plays, and the cumulative effect started kicking in. When Miami had to play perfectly, when they had to score a touchdown on every drive, they wore the Bears down. Just look at how each drive took fewer plays and took less time incrementally.

The first drive on the chart above is frustrating but acceptable. Miami scored a touchdown, but it took them a ton of plays and time to do it. If any of the other subsequent drives took as long, Cal wins. But Cal only got more tired, the pass rush only became more unable to bother Ward. It was one of the most excruciating slow motion horror movies I’ve ever been forced to watch.

Special Teams

A slight win in a low-impact game

Cal won the net punting battle, 47 yards/punt to 43. Lachlan Wilson’s best punt, a 60 yard boomer, backed Miami up which may have helped lead to the Nohl Williams pick 6. Wilson’s 2nd best punt, a 46 yarder that bounced out of bounds at the 8, should have been good enough to stop Miami from driving for the game winning touchdown.

Coaching/Game Theory/Errata

The single best decision and play call in the Wilcox era

Going for it on 4th and 1, and then faking a QB sneak/up the gut run and turning it into a swing pass that scored a touchdown was inspired, and exactly what we need from this coaching staff for the rest of the season.

I don’t actually think Cal turtled

Cal had two late possessions that ended in a punt where, had they been able to burn more clock and/or score, they would’ve won. The bigger problems were execution (a couple really costly procedural penalties) and talent gaps (Miami getting pressure/penetration that blew up a couple plays). Cal tried to run some misdirection stuff like they had been using all day, and one of those plays led to a long run and a first down, but another was a screen to Ott that was narrowly incomplete.

Targeting roulette

Nobody knows what targeting is, nobody has ever known what targeting is, and anybody claiming to know what targeting is should be dismissed as a liar and a charlatan. It will forever be a random number generator, an annoyingly broken game mechanic ready to confuse and anger you at every opportunity.

Therapy Session/Fan Culture Navel Gazing

Feel free to skip over this if you only care about the on-field actual-football stuff

I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more emotional day as a Cal fan. I’ve had more emotional single games, but never a day that was so full from pre-dawn to midnight, and I think that goes for much of the fanbase, whether you were in Memorial Glade in a tent before heading to the game, or you watched GameDay and then the actual game broadcast from home.

And when you have a day so long, so exhausting, so emotional, and it ends with a gut punch like that . . . well, the end of the game got kinda ugly. There was more than a little jawing back and forth between the Miami bench and the Cal student section, and more than a few water bottles thrown. I think there was more than a little social media spleen.

I have a general philosophy about this kind of stuff, which is as follows: I give everybody a pass on anything they say during the game, and in the next few hours after a game, because college football breaks our brains in ways that should be clinically studied. And so I generally will give people grace whenever possible.

Still: It was a really sour ending to what had been a wonderful day for so long. And it got me thinking, because some of what we saw is part of a larger problem that was particularly extreme this week. We have the following factors at play:

1. COVID and a long stretch of bad-to-mediocre football means that a ton of old institutional memory, traditions, and culture were lost. An example: the tradition of overhead clapping on 3rd downs still exists, but many students don’t know it. They see people putting their hands up so they copy the move, but don’t know they’re supposed to clap so they just hold their hands up. Plenty of other previously common chants are lost to the sands of time*, but they haven’t really been replaced by anything because the sound system sucks and gets overwhelmed by the full-stadium system (which is now so incredibly loud that it’s almost too good).

2. The sound system provided to Cal’s mic-men is utterly incapable of being heard by the vast majority of the student section

3. Cal made an (in retrospect) bad decision to switch team sidelines and place the opponent right in front of the students.

What you have happening right now is a bunch of students who have minimal experience with what to do with themselves, given little to no audible direction, getting placed right behind the opponent’s bench, and the results have been so bad that I’m worried somebody might decide to move the students off the 50 yard line.

Cal, please consider any or all of the following:

1. Move Cal’s bench back to the east side of the stadium - if not permanently, at least for night games/late season games when hot weather isn’t a concern.

2. Give the poor mic men a sound system that can be heard. Surely there’s an engineer somewhere on campus that can figure it out.

*Lest anybody think that these are the crotchety ramblings of an Old Blue, please note that I don’t really care if old chants go away. I don’t need or want the student section to copy what we did when we were students in the aughts; I want students to create a culture all their own that works for them. But absent any kind of ability to provide direction, what you’re left with is nothing more create than chanting “F#$% [insert opponent],” which should be a chant of such derision that it only gets used against Stanford.

Big Picture

So you remember last week, when we all got to have a fun debate about how to frame a tough loss? About realistic expectations vs. feeling frustrated about an opportunity spurned? YAY WE GET TO DO IT AGAIN!

Miami is a better team than Cal, a more talented team than Cal. I have a hard time looking at their schedule and finding a reality where they don’t make the college football playoffs. If Cam Ward doesn’t throw an awful pick-6, it might be that Miami wins this game in less dramatic style. And if you told me a week ago that Cal would lose by 1, I would’ve been sad about the L but I was bracing myself for heavier defeats.

But Cal also created a golden opportunity for themselves to earn the kind of program re-defining win that has evaded them since the Tedford era. They earned a 25 point lead that should have been enough, and they couldn’t make it stand up. They couldn’t get the one additional score necessary to put the game to bed; they couldn’t get the one additional stop necessary to snuff out any possibility of a comeback.

The entire day was one long advertisement for Cal’s CULTURAL viability as a football program. The first three quarters of the game was an advertisement for Cal’s on-field viability, until the bottom fell out.

The only way to recover from that is to win football games. Lots of football games.

Cal has to finish out the last 7 games of the regular season at least 5-2. Anything less would represent just another mediocre season. Another 7-5 (or worse) season, against a schedule this weak, would be a major disappointment.

But 5-2 or better is absolutely possible. Cal just pushed the best team on their schedule to the absolute brink. The Bears will be favorites in 5 games, and will only be (relatively slight) underdogs in road games against Pitt and SMU. The team that can push Miami like that can pull a road upset against good-not-great teams like the Panthers and Mustangs.

The road to washing the taste of this loss away begins in a week. If the Bears knock off the undefeated Panthers back east, then you can start dreaming again.