Let’s never play another 9:30 kickoff game.
Here’s what I gathered from the “highlights.”
OFFENSE
Warren: Better Performance or Worse Competition?
At least on this play, it looks like the latter. But that’s OK.
Left guard Patrick Vahe and center Zach Shackelford very suddenly push the nose tackle two yards off the ball, and with left tackle Connor Williams’ block, it creates a hole wide enough for a Chris Warren. This, he can do. When the offensive line gets push like this, that’s another step or two that the ballcarrier can take before he has to make decisions about what to do next, and Texas doesn’t want Warren making decisions except which shoulder he wants to use to run over the first guy he meets.
Bonus action: Watch the Cal cornerback at the top of the screen. One moment he’s sure he’s going to be the superstar of this play; then he gets a good look at Warren and hops back in front of Collin Johnson, basically begging to be blocked; then he bends down, midplay, and starts messing with his shoes.
Buechele Bomber
On a night when Shane Buechele didn’t have his best stuff (Does anyone really doubt that he was concussed and shouldn’t have been playing? You don’t get your helmet taken away for chest injuries.), this was a beauty.
Unlike his interception, this ball was not underthrown. It sails about 50 yards downfield, from the far hash to the bottom of the numbers. I think that’s about the limit of Buechele’s range, but it should be plenty most of the time. There isn’t much to analyze in the play itself — it’s just 3 Verticals with max protection against what seems off man coverage. But I did slow it down to point out (1) Buechele looks left initially to try to move the safety, and it helped; and (2) big whiff by Connor at left tackle but Vahe sacrificed himself to keep Buechele upright.
D’Onta Foreman, No Relation to Armanti Foreman
I loved this play call.
Cal was trying to play Cover 1 (man coverage with a deep safety), but with the jet motion they need a solution to the threat of jet sweep. If the nickel (#3) chases Jerrod Heard across the formation, he still don’t be in a position to force the ball back inside to his help, so he’s going to drop back while the deep safety rolls down to cut Heard off. The problem, though, is that those two players have to agree to disagree, and they both end up trying to cut off Heard. Once D’Onta Foreman masterfully clears the first and second levels, he finds there is no third level.
DEFENSE
The First Touchdown
This is a difficult one to break down without the all-22 or even a replay.
Texas is in Cover 3, but it’s difficult to show from this angle. The receiver who caught the pass is #15, lined up in the slot on the bottom of the screen. You can see that he started to break inside as he moves out of the frame, and based on the way Davis Webb drifts it may have been a fake screen. Or the receiver may have run a slant-and-go-type route. Either way, I’m assuming this was a double move, and somehow the slot got outside of Davante Davis, whose responsibility in Cover 3 was that deep third of the field. You have to give Webb credit for slinging that ball 50+ yards downfield (from the far hash), on target, while fading away. The ability to do that from so deep is part of the reason he had so much time to let the play develop.
Switch Release
For this play Cal overloaded the formation to the boundary with four receivers, which would normally get their best receiver, Chad Hansen, isolated with a corner on the other entire half of the field.
Texas, however, plays two-deep coverage, giving them a high-low bracket on him — it’s going to be tough to get him the ball. The problem is that that weakens the coverage on the four-receiver side. The coverage is hard to draw up — and I’d have drawn it up like Cover 2 but once the routes develop it ends up playing out like man anyway — but the gist of it is that Holton Hill needed to run with the fade route by the slot receiver. I’m not sure that he knew that, but it also seemed like he got caught with his eyes in the backfield. I did get the sense that Texas spent a ton of time working on defending screens — which makes it even less forgivable that they failed to stop them — and that may have been on everyone’s mind at times. At this point it’s worth highlighting that Chris Nelson does a great job peeling off his rush to pick up the back in the flat.
Overestimating Ourselves or Underestimating Cal
So we highlighted how Texas wisely “doubled” Hansen on the previous touchdown. This time is not so good.
This offensive play should look familiar because it could have come straight out of Texas’ playbook: basically max protect, three verticals. I drew a post-corner route for Hansen because I’m hopeful he did something to get past Sheroid Evans so easily.
Texas “rolled” the coverage to the boundary (the safeties’ coverage zones shifted that way), which is pretty standard practice, especially when you want to take a specific receiver away with double coverage. The problem is the receiver Texas should want to take away is on the other side of the field, and they end up with Evans matched up with him one-on-one. The coaches probably saw something on film and had a reason to do this, but it clearly didn’t work out this time.
How Are There So Many of These?
This one’s pretty inexplicable.
Everyone seemed to know what coverage they were in except Kris Boyd, who, oh by the way, is matched up with Hansen. (I was concerned before the game about the fact that Evans was going to draw that assignment, and the only player I believe was capable of holding Hansen down alone happens to be in the doghouse.) From the live replay, it seemed like maybe Boyd thought he and Dylan Haines would switch off receivers, but I do not know why he would think that.
The Last One, Which Didn’t Count
Yes, it should have been a touchback and Texas’ ball. It’s stupid and it will be nice to tell recruits about how we got hosed by the refs, but Texas never should have been in this situation in the first place, and they deserved to lose. Moving on, how did the back break lose for Cal’s only nice run of the whole friggen game?
They isolated Malik Jefferson with their 310-pound “fullback.” Jefferson had already banged up his shoulder earlier in the game, so that wasn’t a bad decision — you wouldn’t expect him to be eager to take on that block. It appears to me that he did what a lot of humans would do when confronted with this problem: He took the block on with his dominant side instead of the proper side. The result is a crease that the back shoots through for a derperrific finish to this game.
