I. Intro

So, after back to back losses to open the season, here’s a list of what we know for certain: barring an unprecedented meltdown by all four teams above them, the Bears are not going to win the conference this year.

And…that’s it. That’s the list.

Everything else is in the ether, because the normal analytical frameworks that we use to digest college football can’t quite be used in the same fashion this season. Any hot seats that there may or may not be at this point can't really be as definitive - it’s simply illogical to place the same weight on the results, when entire units can be revealed as “out” for COVID just minutes before kickoff.

Even the normally reliable Five Things, in which I look at projectable key factors to the matchup, failed – it lied, seeing as the game was lost on zero of those: Chase played excellently, the Cal OL was passable (although we did not learn about the missing starters until game time), the tackling was largely improved (I’d argue gap filling is more of an issue), the situation at the nose was a non-factor, and the mentality of the team was still very much intent on winning.

And yet, it doesn’t mean nothing, either.

Recruits have their eyes on these games, for one – and while I agree with the assertion that any players driven away from Cal because of this season wouldn’t be well served here, they are still watching. For two, it is undeniably meaningful to watch a program pegged to be on the rise faceplant in such dramatic fashion, whether you’re a fan or otherwise. Look no further to Palo Alto for proof of this – after an 0-2 start there, public perception is of a program now stagnating, if not flatlining. It certainly matters to the players who are out there, which makes all of this even worse to try to process – the best Cal team in 15 years (on paper) never got a chance to live a life in reality, because of reasons largely out of anyone’s control.

Injuries are regretful, but built into the nature of our understanding. They happen. Pandemic-impacted seasons are not, and this happens just as the Bears were aiming to surge their way back to the Pac-12 penthouse.

Instead, they’ll be fighting their way out of the cellar next week against Stanford. It feels cruel. It feels wrong. It is a crumbling promise, a T.S. Eliotian handful of dust, all the same.

For as long as I have had a Monday postgame column, I’ve written them feeling a level of responsibility to digest each game’s implications rationally and fairly – never overreacting too hard in one direction or the other. It’s why, for example, that I was finally ready to see Sonny Dykes fired after the Oregon State loss in 2016, even though I was not the first to such an opinion.

Such rationality has become impossible this season, when football arguably shouldn’t have been played in the first place, yet continues to trudge along anyway. Opponents are changed on short notice; lineups too.

If things were normal, and the Bears were granted full health and all of their practices and the luxury of not preparing for multiple games at the same time, then maybe this team is 5-2 right now, or 6-1, or 7-0 after all. It’s still fun to believe in that alternate universe. We have lived there often, as Cal fans.

But normal left the vocabulary in March, and it does not seem to be returning to our tongues any time soon.

All that leaves us with is something heavier to hold in its absence: the knowledge that this is, once again, not the year.

II. The Offense

Chase, when allowed to throw the ball, produced some absolute beauties. This was what we were hoping to see. There were still a few concerning, noticeable things, some of which are related to him, and some of which are structural in how Musgrave called the game – namely, holding the ball too long on a critical third down sack, but also, a troubling lack of a productive passing game to the right side of the field, for the second game in a row.

Still, Garbers was good enough to win. He made a few understandable mistakes, but he was ultimately failed at the playcalling level, because the Bears turtled up and tried to control the game on the ground, missing four linemen and leaning on one walk-on at tight end to do it. The Bears were lucky to get away with any points at all on a possession where they ran a bootleg-TE leak type action three times in a five play span at the goal line. They followed that up with baffling decisions to insist upon the run throughout the second half, despite knowing the conditions we discussed above:

3rd quarter rushes: 8 of 13 plays, 1.1 YPC

4th quarter rushes: 10 of 23 plays, 2.5 YPC

Offensive tweaks put in place this week, you can see that Cal used more motion to set their WRs on the LOS – which both adds players to the point of attack, but also forces Oregon State to shift their gap responsibilities - motion some times to empty, even called a couple of really good screens. Sure, fine. But, functionally, I don’t see much that differentiates the results from what they could have gotten from the early Baldwin.

Excellent game for Kekoa Crawford, who pulled in 10 of 11 targets for a career best 141 yards and a touchdown. Some of these were difficult ones, and I would have loved for them to play some deep games with him on third down. There are only so many times you can run him into a slant the next few weeks. It’d be good to change some tendency in this regard.

You can really see the need for a gamebreaker tight end in future classes. Tonges’ line of 9 for 55 looks great, but 33 of them came on one play. Adjusting for that, 8 catches for 22 yards looks…less great. He also received 12 targets on the afternoon.

As a long time advocate of Marcel Dancy carries, you can see why – he is a joy to watch and is really good at changing directions/cutting. Damien Moore’s stat line doesn’t look great but they clearly trust him in short yardage. The rest will come when there is actually a healthy offensive line.

Through two games, Nikko Remigio has 4 targets (2 caught) and 7 yards. Despite his special teams brilliance on Saturday, this can’t continue. There was a point on Saturday where I pointed out I would consider manufacturing some touches for him:

They ran a handoff for him on the very next play after I wrote this. I’m not sure what it means, but I can’t imagine it’s great, because *last* week, they hit the wheel route right after I tweeted this:

More offensive coordinators should run their shot play on 2nd down after the turnover. The first down is too obvious.

III. The Defense

I’ll make the case for this again later in the column, but Cal’s defense played well enough to win – with the score 24-20, they forced a turnover, and then a shutdown drive up 27-24 with 7 minutes to go. If the offense can drain any clock in a substantial fashion there, the game is dramatically different, since Oregon State had been held to 4.2 YPP in the 3rd, and 4.25 YPP up until the final Jefferson run.

With Croteau not available, the team lined up in a 3-3-5 for most of the game, most often rotating between Josh Drayden, Trey Paster, and Craig Woodson as the 5th DB. (Woodson was the team’s highest rated player by PFF.)

Cam Goode came up with several of the game’s biggest plays, including combining with BRETT on a sack that Trace generously referred to as a Nam Le special. More impressive, as usual, was his speed from the back side.

Another game, another week where the Cal cornerbacks are dramatically better than their respective skill position opponents, only to find the defense lost elsewhere:

UCLA WRs Kyle Philips, Charles Njoku and Chase Cota – 6 catches, 58 yards

Oregon State WRs Trevon Bradford, Zeriah Beason, Champ Flemings, and Kolby Taylor: 7 catches, 70 yards

The problems are more at the linebacker and safety level. Look at some of the touchdowns below here:

First touchdown: Quintoriano washed JH Tevis at the line of scrimmage, then ran him into the safety. Since the Bears are in one high and everyone’s in the box, Jefferson is gone after that. There’s no one else available to make the tackle.

My read of the Quintoriano touchdown was that Deng was caught out here – Woodson is down in the box and the other safety is on the opposite hash. With Bynum in man, no one else is able to take that deep, so him being a shade slow to react – he takes two steps into toward the line of scrimmage; by then, Quintoriano is even with him and starting to cut up field. The rest is a clinic.

The trick play touchdown by Tyjon Lindsay is just the kind of thing that has made me so enamored with Brian Lindgren. Daring, with a good feel for the moment to call it. If it’s just a reverse, the Bears are in position to snuff it out. Goode is right there. But no one is able to account for the QB after Bynum has already taken his man, and there’s your difference maker.

And as a reminder – they still had a chance to win after all of this. They did not have to play particularly well against Oregon State to settle the fanbase and the arc of the season.

IV. Advanced Stats

[Yards Per Play] – Normally, this type of disparity makes the game feel more lopsided than it was, but 36% of Oregon State’s yards came on the two Jermar Jefferson runs, which dragged up the average immensely. Factoring those out, you get 230 yards on 49 plays, or a 4.69 average that is far more indicative of the mediocre way Oregon State moved the ball against Cal – they had only one play in Cal territory in the first half, and outside of the first play from scrimmage, their only scoring drives began from inside the Cal 40; each the result of a Cal special teams miscue.

What I am telling you here – and will again below, is that this was one of the worst, most consequentially awful special teams games in history.

[3rd Downs] – I think this is another misleading figure – it will look like the Bears were extremely strong on 3rd down, but many of these conversions did not come when they mattered:

3rd quarter – 1 of 2, punt; 2 of 3, punt

4th quarter – 0 of 1, punt; 1 of 2, TD; 1 of 2, INT

Converting 45% of 3rd downs is excellent in a vacuum; the Bears would have ranked 20th in the country last year at that number. (Coincidentally, they did not – they averaged 37% on 3rd downs last year).

But at the risk of sounding very, very much like Justin Timberlake in The Social Network – converting third downs isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Avoiding third downs altogether.

[Havoc] – You can excuse some of Oregon State’s 9 TFL day on the fact that four offensive linemen were missing, and one of the interceptions was on a fourth down attempt into the end zone. A few others, you can chalk up to Musgrave’s baffling, predictable decisions to run the ball. All in all, this was a survivable level of disruptiveness from the Beaver defense. On the Cal side, much more aggressive performance by bringing up the safeties to the line of scrimmage – possibly because Croteau was not available – resulted in some success, plus some other OSU runs cut down early, but not for a loss. You can see they were able to plan a bit more specifically for this one.

V. The Special Teams

In 2013 against USC, the Bears gave up a pair of punt return touchdowns to Nelson Agholor (two of their five on the year), plus another special teams score on a blocked punt by Soma Vainuku.

The next week, they would attempt an onside kick as part of their comeback attempt, only to have it taken back the other way for a Colorado touchdown.

That same coach also invented one of the worst special teams playcalls ever, the next season – also, as luck would have it, against USC:

I am taking you down this little gallery of horrors to inform you that what we saw against Oregon State was one of the worst special teams disasters we’ve ever had – and that is already something we are no strangers to here in Berkeley:

1st quarter - One punt return touchdown by Nikko Remigio is taken off the board by a block in the back. This pins Cal at their own 7, where they would go 3 and out, take a baffling delay of game getting the punt team onto the field, then shank said punt to give OSU the ball at the Cal 35. The Beavers would score the first play after that. (Meaningful error count in this sequence: 3)

3rd quarter - One near kick return touchdown by Nikko Remigio is taken off the board by a hold. This pins Cal at their own 8 yard line, where they end up picking up a couple first downs, only to stall out and punt from their own 38. Josh Drayden slips off of the clear, open tackle on Trevon Bradford, who returns it back to the…Cal 39. The Beavers would score five plays after that. (Meaningful error count in this sequence: 2)

4th quarter – An Oregon State punt allows Cal to get the ball with 7 minutes remaining, and the lead. It is fair caught by Nikko Remigio and nearly muffed – Cam Goode snatches out of the air to preserve the possession for the Bears, who proceed to go run-run-pass and then get their punt blocked by a single rusher against their three man shield. The Beavers would score three plays after that. (Meaningful error count in this sequence: 1)

That, of course, makes six critical errors on special teams, ranging from coverage to punt protection to blocking - any one of which might have made the difference on this afternoon, seeing as Oregon State scored after each sequence. All of the above becomes even more mind-melting when you realize that none of the special teams issues involved the kicking, which is often the most obvious culprit! On this afternoon though, Longhetto was terrific – nailing a consequential 52 yarder just before halftime.

Instead, all you have is a systemic failure of everything except kicking. Nikko Remigio has got to be furious, and rightfully so.

One for the ages, truly.