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Tequilla's Thoughts - California
Tequilla
Member Posts: 19,954
A little delayed in writing this as I've been spending most of the days losing 5 pounds with the liquid shits inspired from yesterday's performance. As always, there was some good, bad, and whatever ...
Stealing on something that @CokeGreaterThanPepsi said elsewhere over the course of the weekend, Cal's total yards of 458 look bad on the surface, but in the context of 92 plays (overall average of just under 5 yards per play) and the run defense allowing 139 yards on 51 attempts (2.7 yards per attempt, 3.7 yards per attempt taking away the 5 sacks) speaks to how well the defense played. Personally, I was somewhat impressed by what I saw from the Cal offense (notably Goff, more on that in a bit) and expect them to score 30+ in probably 7 or more PAC games this year. Defense definitely played well enough to win and I was impressed by the ability to get pressure on the QB throughout the day.
Jared Goff is everything that he's cracked up to be. He made a number of great throws on the day fitting the ball into spaces that most QBs in the conference couldn't. I expect that he'll be a Top 5 pick in the draft and should be a good pro from what I've seen.
Cal is still Cal though and while Sonny Dykes will most likely ride Goff to a strong year this year, that's probably the worst thing for Cal in the near future as I was very unimpressed with a number of decisions that Dykes made throughout the game. On the road when you have what you feel is the better team, you should take points whenever possible ... particularly when facing a young opposition that you expect to struggle to score points. There were 2 opportunities in the first half where Cal could have taken FGs and instead left points on the field. Huge difference between Cal up 20-7 at half versus 26-7 at half. The decision to go for it on 4th and 4 to win the game I also thought was highly questionable given that a punt there leaves UW with probably 90 yards to go with 50 seconds and no timeouts. Failing to get the first there leaves UW with at least a very reasonable shot to at least get a throw into the endzone there. It's just poor game management. What will end up happening is Cal's going to roll to an 8-4 or 9-3 record this year with Goff, he'll leave, they'll regress next year to 4-8 or whatever and Dykes will have the built in excuse for the next year or two about needing to get a new QB ready to go with Goff leaving early.
I don't want to get too much into the Babushka play calling as I'll save that for another thread because I've got a ton of thoughts on the coaching side of things after this game, but the play calling balance here was a little suspect. Of the 55 total plays ran, the end total was 27 runs (including 5 Browning sacks + 4 additional scrambles) and 28 passes. Adjust for Browning's rushing attempts and you have 18 runs versus 37 passes. That's just a terrible fucking balance. I get that you were struggling to get yards for carries outside of Washington, but he had 10 carries for 109 yards. When combined with just 3 catches (and 1 critical drop), that's just criminal to get him only 13 touches on the day when he accounted for about half of the offense. Fucking terrible.
I've stated from the beginning of the season that I'm going to look at this season in total before really coming up with some strong opinions. We're definitely going to see some high moments and some low moments. Browning has grown up a bit the past couple of weeks and then took a step backwards against a PAC level defense (albeit being Cal). He'll grow from this. The comparable that I think is worth watching this year is the progress of Rosen and see how his development is comparing/contrasting from Browning. Rosen had a strong first week against an overmatched Virginia team that was rightfully focusing in on the run. Rosen then struggled the next couple of weeks including a relatively brutal performance against BYU. However, the BYU game prepared him well for the speed of the game against Arizona. Will be interesting to see how Browning progresses over the next 10 days to get ready for USC.
All in all though, I do feel like the team is a bit ahead of where I was expecting them to be this year ... at least defensively. Offensively though, it's a fucking dumpster fire and the reason it is a dumpster fire isn't because you have young players that are going through inconsistent moments because that's going to happen. It's because when I look at our offense, the biggest problem I have with it is that I can't come up with what the identity is. I just don't see anything that makes me look at the team (either this year or last year) where I can say that when the going gets tough, we have these 3-4 plays that we're going to go to to be successful. And for my gratuitous TCU plug in, there was a drive in the 4th quarter where TCU ran the same off tackle play to the right side of their line for 4 straight plays that picked up 50+ yards and a TD. Those off tackle plays are staples of their offense and when it works, they follow up on it until the opposition proves that they can stop it. That's good offense. I don't see that right now with UW at all.
In the end, we were lucky to be in the game as we were outplayed in some critical areas. Cal's coaching tried to keep us in the game and our offensive coaching did a great job of being predictable and stupid enough to allow Cal's defense to actually look reasonably good. Really hard to figure out after this game how full the glass is going forward.
Stealing on something that @CokeGreaterThanPepsi said elsewhere over the course of the weekend, Cal's total yards of 458 look bad on the surface, but in the context of 92 plays (overall average of just under 5 yards per play) and the run defense allowing 139 yards on 51 attempts (2.7 yards per attempt, 3.7 yards per attempt taking away the 5 sacks) speaks to how well the defense played. Personally, I was somewhat impressed by what I saw from the Cal offense (notably Goff, more on that in a bit) and expect them to score 30+ in probably 7 or more PAC games this year. Defense definitely played well enough to win and I was impressed by the ability to get pressure on the QB throughout the day.
Jared Goff is everything that he's cracked up to be. He made a number of great throws on the day fitting the ball into spaces that most QBs in the conference couldn't. I expect that he'll be a Top 5 pick in the draft and should be a good pro from what I've seen.
Cal is still Cal though and while Sonny Dykes will most likely ride Goff to a strong year this year, that's probably the worst thing for Cal in the near future as I was very unimpressed with a number of decisions that Dykes made throughout the game. On the road when you have what you feel is the better team, you should take points whenever possible ... particularly when facing a young opposition that you expect to struggle to score points. There were 2 opportunities in the first half where Cal could have taken FGs and instead left points on the field. Huge difference between Cal up 20-7 at half versus 26-7 at half. The decision to go for it on 4th and 4 to win the game I also thought was highly questionable given that a punt there leaves UW with probably 90 yards to go with 50 seconds and no timeouts. Failing to get the first there leaves UW with at least a very reasonable shot to at least get a throw into the endzone there. It's just poor game management. What will end up happening is Cal's going to roll to an 8-4 or 9-3 record this year with Goff, he'll leave, they'll regress next year to 4-8 or whatever and Dykes will have the built in excuse for the next year or two about needing to get a new QB ready to go with Goff leaving early.
I don't want to get too much into the Babushka play calling as I'll save that for another thread because I've got a ton of thoughts on the coaching side of things after this game, but the play calling balance here was a little suspect. Of the 55 total plays ran, the end total was 27 runs (including 5 Browning sacks + 4 additional scrambles) and 28 passes. Adjust for Browning's rushing attempts and you have 18 runs versus 37 passes. That's just a terrible fucking balance. I get that you were struggling to get yards for carries outside of Washington, but he had 10 carries for 109 yards. When combined with just 3 catches (and 1 critical drop), that's just criminal to get him only 13 touches on the day when he accounted for about half of the offense. Fucking terrible.
I've stated from the beginning of the season that I'm going to look at this season in total before really coming up with some strong opinions. We're definitely going to see some high moments and some low moments. Browning has grown up a bit the past couple of weeks and then took a step backwards against a PAC level defense (albeit being Cal). He'll grow from this. The comparable that I think is worth watching this year is the progress of Rosen and see how his development is comparing/contrasting from Browning. Rosen had a strong first week against an overmatched Virginia team that was rightfully focusing in on the run. Rosen then struggled the next couple of weeks including a relatively brutal performance against BYU. However, the BYU game prepared him well for the speed of the game against Arizona. Will be interesting to see how Browning progresses over the next 10 days to get ready for USC.
All in all though, I do feel like the team is a bit ahead of where I was expecting them to be this year ... at least defensively. Offensively though, it's a fucking dumpster fire and the reason it is a dumpster fire isn't because you have young players that are going through inconsistent moments because that's going to happen. It's because when I look at our offense, the biggest problem I have with it is that I can't come up with what the identity is. I just don't see anything that makes me look at the team (either this year or last year) where I can say that when the going gets tough, we have these 3-4 plays that we're going to go to to be successful. And for my gratuitous TCU plug in, there was a drive in the 4th quarter where TCU ran the same off tackle play to the right side of their line for 4 straight plays that picked up 50+ yards and a TD. Those off tackle plays are staples of their offense and when it works, they follow up on it until the opposition proves that they can stop it. That's good offense. I don't see that right now with UW at all.
In the end, we were lucky to be in the game as we were outplayed in some critical areas. Cal's coaching tried to keep us in the game and our offensive coaching did a great job of being predictable and stupid enough to allow Cal's defense to actually look reasonably good. Really hard to figure out after this game how full the glass is going forward.
Comments
1) Worst officiated game that I've ever seen ... including the replay booth. I need to see something better that tells me that Goff was down on the sack late in the 4th where he was laying on the back of his OL before fumbling. The push off down the sideline for Cal's only 2nd half TD was ridiculous. There was also a face mask penalty late in the 4th on Goff where the refs were looking at each other trying to figure things out before throwing the flag 5 seconds later. Just a poor game all the way around by them.
2) One areas where we really missed with our injuries at S was in the intermediate throws over the middle of the field. Between our MLBs probably being better at the run than the pass combined with the S being just a tad slow made that the primary area of attack for Goff.
I realize that Browning will make mistakes ...
Babushka isn't helping him out much tho
Add in four years of decline on offense for Petersen. More importantly, four years of declining win totals.
The O needs to go.
Fuck my life. Sark.
I don't get your comment on the 2 minute offense. Other than our last drive vs. Cal, I think our 2 minute offense has been pretty good. BSU at the end of the game. Utah State before halftime.
As for the four years of declining offense/wins, I don't know enough about the situation @ BSU in CP's last 2 years to comment on those years. I'm guessing this is true for nearly everyone on this bored. I do know that at UW, he inherited a shitshow at QB in his first year, and his best option in his second year is a true freshman, being protected by 3 freshmen OL, throwing to a horrible set of WRs.