The Novel: Cal vs UCLA Football (2021)
In which the bowl hopes are done and dusted.
Ultimately, UCLA would have been the better team in maybe 7 of 10 matchups this year, and this wasn’t an inexcusable outcome in a vacuum – it’s an immensely frustrating one that is the end product of the Bears failing to pick up any one of those earlier one-possession losses; those TCU, UW, Oregon, Arizona, or Nevada games when one or two plays (or one or two coaching decisions) could have made a difference.
That’s what made the Tucson debacle so egregious in the first place -- they needed Arizona particularly to protect themselves from any potential evening like this. Instead, you go into next week against an equally bowlless USC game to celebrate the seniors, but nothing else.
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Wilcox might leave of his own accord since he’s already being whispered as in contention for other jobs – who knows what Washington or anyone else wants with all these West Coast spots open this year – but whatever happens, decisive action looks unlikely from the Cal side; the overwhelming odds are that he will not be fired this year, because the Powers That Be are happy to have the Axe. That leaves us in purgatory for the moment: keeping a coach who hasn’t offered any definitive proof the team will ever be that much better than this under him while being granted excessive amounts of slack for the mediocre results (some of which is fair and out of his control, some of which is due to things entirely in his control). This, again, was the result of a year the team loudly expected to compete.
Perhaps if the team of the last month had appeared from Week 1, this becomes an 8 win team, and this particular loss is not so harmful in that particular universe. But it did not, and those are the results we have to interpret. Those are the results the coaches are responsible for.
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One of the more recently delightful additions to Cal Twitter has been the increasing activity of Jesse Stewart (follow him at jessedstew), a current-generation student and an assistant offensive coordinator at Acalanes High School in his spare time – how he has enough to do it, I don’t know! Because of those credentials, I think it’s important to share his perspective on this game, which, in essence, is that the gameplan against UCLA was fine, but the execution from the QB position wasn’t:
I trust his judgment there because I am certainly not the best X’s and O’s analyst – my ability stretches as far as diagramming a few plays here and there individually, and even then, not always completely correctly. And certainly, if we had gotten Musgrave after the game, he’d believe something of the same, regarding the gameplan; that it was schematically sound.
My issue is the same one it has been all season: if your plan involves Chase throwing against the blitz, and he has been a notoriously shaky guy even before that – and he was on Saturday -- why are you not calling the game differently beforehand? Why did it take until very late into the fourth quarter to even try a screen against the UCLA linebacker pressure? Part of being a good coordinator is your ability to read the flow of things, especially if you do not, as Musgrave said earlier this season, script plays!
(For the record, both Jesse and I agree that Garbers is very limited, which we all have known since 2019. To me, this means the game should be called accordingly, knowing so.)
Because the line was already dominated up front from the first snap, it was an evening short on offensive stars, but the guy you have to mention is Nikko Remigio playing his ass off, accounting for pretty much half of the team’s yardage by himself. That the team was unable to turn his punt returns or his tough catch over the middle on 3rd and 14 into anything substantive is not his fault; the last two weeks are the best he’s looked in over a season.
The other: Chris Brooks, who was one guy away all night from tearing a big one. When healthy, he is Cal’s most physically talented runner since Lasco, and as always, I wish we had stuck with it.
Some early plays to me that felt emblematic of the evening:
9:25 1Q: 3rd down and 5 at UCLA 35 – Cal finds Jake Tonges leaking out into the flat, with a pseudo pick given in front of him – it’s a two man route combination, where the #2 receiver ended up occupying both defenders -- but Chase inexplicably lofts the ball to a place no one can get it. The target officially is for Crawford. I am not at all sure he’s seeing.
9:25 1Q: 4th down and 5 at UCLA 35 – Cal takes a deep shot in one on one to J Michael Sturdivant, only to find an underthrown ball that he ultimately can’t reel in.
5:52 1Q: 1st down at UCLA 49 – Chase completely misses a wide open Brooks on the wheel, and throws an interception when Shaw bumps off Jake Tonges. The second interception before the half can be excused, but just barely.
There was a short period of the game after this when the Bears began to move the ball by swinging the ball out wide from their condensed sets – getting guys pulling into space from out of 13 personnel, or cutting back against the rush when they spotted it out. Then, they got away from this on their third quarter drives, during which UCLA padded the margins:
17-14 UCLA, 13:29 3Q: Brooks run 3, Brooks drop, Tonges incomplete, 4th and 2 after offsides penalty but a punt from the Cal 38. Given the way the night was going early, that decision to punt wasn’t the death knell, but I would have strongly considered going for it there already and said as such during the game. Okay, fine. Trust your defense that has largely held to this point in suboptimal conditions. Sure. It was two yards, though.
24-14 UCLA 11:19 3Q: Swing pass Brooks caught for loss -2, Clark incomplete (open on the deep crosser but Chase doesn’t hit it), Chase scramble for 13 first down, Chase keep 2, Brooks rush 4, Garbers sacked for loss of 6, punt. Here, you are down two possessions, but with enough time to get back in the game. It’s possible to stabilize, and you call plays that Chase cannot execute on this evening – and didn’t earlier – the first down is only because of an unplanned scramble. You have to take the ball out of his hands here, and this is probably the most crucial drive of the game for that reason.
27-14 UCLA 2:25 3Q: Dancy rush -4 (blown up by interior pressure; Dancy has to cut back and into the arms of a waiting defender), Crawford complete 7, Dancy swing pass 3 (tackled in space), punt. Defense holds enough to force a field goal and a glimmer of hope -- Charbonnet scored to put the game away after this sequence -- and honestly, you’ve been put into a position where you need to pass because you lost control earlier.
Granted, there are some limits to looking at the game with this approach, which can feel results oriented, but it’s been consistent with the things I’ve hoped the team would do all year; and that Cal might have lost anyway if any of these things changed. It certainly doesn’t feel like they tried everything, though.
Personnel does matter – Cal got outphysicaled if not outright bamboozled up front by the UCLA pressure packages, which also calls into question the early zone read stuff, where Chase had less of an advantage than last week against Stanford.
Aside: it’s somewhat remarkable to me that after two high profile errors by Kaz Allen on Saturday night – one leading to half of Cal’s points on the evening, the other, a sure touchdown off the board, that Chip Kelly continued to go back to him all game. Meanwhile, Cal’s best pass-blocking running back appeared to earn himself a trip to the doghouse after fumbling last week – he wasn’t seen again til late in this one – and although such a benching was warranted, stands out in stark contrast.
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Guilty plug: some writing about pho, fuh, and feeding your culture’s food to your immigrant parents.
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After watching the tackling debacles that were the 2019, 2020, and 2021 trips to the Rose Bowl – the middle of those, a 24-hour turnaround game because of COVID – I’m starting to believe the Pasadena field is actually cursed, and not in the cosmic, no-January-football sense. The Bruins play on natural grass, but however it is maintained seems to give the Bears immense trouble, because they (and sometimes even the hosts) slip frequently. That advantage usually favors the faster, more athletic team, though, and unfortunately, that’s the Bruins, more often than not.
This week was bound to be a more realistic test of the Bears’ improvements on the defensive side of the ball, and while they were game for quite awhile, it got away from them late through a combination of general exhaustion and out-adjustment on the UCLA side: 5.0 YPP allowed in the first half, to 7.4 (Cal: 5.2 to 1.9). They ran the ball into a relatively undersized Cal front, broke tackles, and then slipped them in the open field whenever they got DTR isolated on a linebacker. When he was flushed by pressure, DTR’s athleticism got him away from pursuing defenders, either into safe places to throw out of bounds – he took an unnecessary sack at least one though – or to skate by them. Then, they threw in an occasional throw to Dulcich or Phillips sitting down against zone, just to keep things honest, especially in the second half, when they pulled up for a pop pass twice. Pretty simple gameplan in which five guys are responsible for all your yards from scrimmage.
I mean, I’ve seen this Zach Charbonnet performance already. It’s the exact same one Joshua Kelley used to put on against us.
A priority for the future under this Cal staff has been to get more athletic in the front seven, where they’ve put in a lot of work recruiting talent for the 2020 and 2021 classes already. Unfortunately, and playing against a much more veteran UCLA team, it just wasn’t all there yet – they will one day to inject more athleticism on the edge than Bimage or Croteau bring (both of whom have been great at the things they are good at doing), linemen that can dominate the point of attack more consistently, when we’ve had to make due all year with only a few bodies. There are some good candidates in the pipeline here overall; we’ve seen some play already. Rutchena and Iosefa some great plays (4 combined TFL, a fumble blown dead early, etc), but also missed some opportunities to make those statlines even beefier by whiffing on tackles. They’re young, and they’re going to keep developing. Others will return next year (BRETT!), or are still in the process (Myles Williams, Derek Wilkins, Patrick Hisatake, Elarms-Orr and the like). I don’t think anyone feels bad about the future here, especially with Young and Hearns in the back waiting.
Daniel Scott and Elijah Hicks wanted this, badly – the two of them played so hard the whole way through, flew around for 21 combined tackles, and kept a lot of the scoreline from being worse. They’ve been terrific for the last two months, and so, so important to recovering any light at all from this season.
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The special teams unit was terrific Saturday, and perhaps their freakish stretch of errors has regressed to the mean a bit: two big returns by Nikko and the fumble recovery would be enough to turn a lot of weeks.
Just not this one.
At least we got the Axe.
I'll need to watch the game tape a few times, but my initial observation as that this beatdown started and ended with the offensive line. If you recall UNR and WASU both had pressure defenses that brought numbers and 'pressed' on receivers. The goal of those defenses was to take away the run with numbers, bring pressure on our QB with numbers, take receivers off their shorter timing routes with the press and force the QB to throw long while under pressure. It worked all three time and the common denominator was the poor play of the offensive line. A shout out to our D for playing well. It would be hard to point to defense in the country that could have played better with the amount of time our D spent on the field, with the disastrous TOP of our offense. Getting back to our offense. We knew going into this game that UCLA had lighter and speedier D-Linemen. That means we should be able to beat them by driving them off the ball....if we could get to them. When reviewing film the O-line coach needs to know the limits of his players. We have GOOD lineman. Our boys are big, fairly athletic and tough. But, like most o-lineman they aren't quick. So how do you counter the UCLA defense? I would have schemed up a game plan that tightened our splits to create smaller gaps. Yes, this does hurt our running backs, but missed defensive players who come through those gaps uncontested are a greater challenge to our running backs than smaller gaps. Smaller gaps mean our O-linemen don't need to travel as far as with normal splits to make a block...its all part of space in that time and space thing. I would have not run any reads or slow developing plays; they are moot with tighter gaps, and they take the time aspect away from a blitzing defense. This is the time part of the time and space thing. I would have run traditional quick hitting physically destructive plays where our bigger guys could pound their smaller guys: dive, power, traps (I love the wham: if you want to keep a defensive player from crossing the LOS all you need to do is run this once and hit him in the ear hole), and many others. Maybe we don't break long runs but we do get 3-5 yards all the time. That means safeties need to move up to honor our run, it means we give Garbers more time to throw and it means our receivers can get open. Without establishing success in the run game our offense is doomed. In any event, this was not on the players; it was about scheme and coaching. Personally when the offensive coaches went into their Sunday meeting to discuss scheme, Angus should have piped up and said something about the ability of his players to have success against a speedy high pressure defensive unit. I like Wilcox and want him to succeed. He has one more year. He needs to assess his coaching staff and their abilities very carefully and then make some tough decisions. I like Musgrave, but he needs to realize these kids are not pro level athletes and some things in his scheme just wont work with college kids in a program like ours. He's smart enough to figure it out. But assistants need to know enough and have the guts to tell him what their players are capable of, and not capable of doing. Case in point, when I coached and we brought in a new offensive coordinator who ran the spread, he wanted all my O-liners to be able to do right and left stances and play both sides of the line. He wanted us to do double reads on pass pro. I told him no. I told him we were at a JC. When I looked at my kids and their athletic abilities, it was going to take a lot of time to get them good at one stance and position, and trying to make them all around players in a two year JC would hurt our chances orf playing well. I told him double reads were an invitation for delayed blitzes. I told him on pass pro that no one would ever beat us inside from tackle to tackle, or from TE to tackle if we did it my way. I coached my tackles up on the old momentum block so they could handle speed rushers. And I told the OC that if a blitz came from the outside then either a RB had to pick it up or in an empty set the QB had to make the hot read, FAST. He let me do my thing and it worked. We lost 3 of the first 4 games learning the new system, then we didn't lose another game. We ended up in a bowl game and beat the snot out of a team that beat us early in the season. And, my o-line did what they did well by keeping it simple. And, they did with with a lot of nasty and pride. They were a unit that were the big uglies, the big badasses and no one fucked with them. You need that in your o-line unit. CAL has the players....not sure we have the right position coaches.
I'll chime in only to say that the gap in our expectations is not the gap between who we are now under Wilcox and a perennial 10 win team. The gap is merely between where we are now and a consistent 8 win team, that beats Furd and an LA school with some regularity. It's not easy to do, but it's not out of reach. My despair is that this staff have reached plateau at like 5-7 wins. Any student of sports history sees the road littered with coaches who at one time were successful and then fade. Momentum is a MOFO. Wilcox, this year, has lost momentum.