Some of you may remember that I made a fanpost back in June 2008 regarding Cal's successes and failures in the Tedford era. That post was pretty crude as it only contained our W/L records against other teams and in different locations. So when I decided to update it to include information from the 2008 season I expanded it to take a look at a lot more statistics.

Keep in mind throughout the post that correlation does not imply causation.

Key:

Blue - GOOD
Red - BAD

Records By Team

Teams played more than once:

Analysis:

I'm going to ignore the teams that we played once because they were either bowl games, the tail end of a home and home agreement from the Holmoe era or series that are still to be completed.

Still we seem to own New Mexico St, Michigan St, Stanford, Arizona St, and the Washington schools. Unfortunately however the Oregon St and (unsurprisingly) USC owns us. I'm a bit surprised at our record against Arizona because I was always under the impression that Arizona is just an annoying little gnat. But other than the two times Cal shut out Arizona it's been a tight game with them owning us thrice. And I'm glad to see that despite the two losses we are pretty much owning Oregon. Take that JOregonFan!

Records by Location

Places played at more than once

A map displaying the same info as above (click to see a larger version)

Analysis:

There are two things that jump out at me when I see this. Firstly why the f*** haven't we won at Los Angeles yet! Our SoCal record is atrocious (the one victory coming against a Texas A&M team in the Holiday Bowl). Secondly we've been nearly unstoppable at Berkeley. For the past three years no one but Oregon St and USC have been able to stop us there. It has become a true 12th man for Cal. And I like to think that I made a difference these past three seasons!

I honestly don't know what to make of the map. We do pretty good on the west coast (barring SoCal) and the Midwest but we have trouble in the east coast and SEC territory. But then again it's hard to draw conclusion because we haven't played much there.

Record By Month

Analysis

There's only one conclusion I can draw from this: If you want to beat Cal, play us in November or at worst October. This makes it look like Cal starts out strong, runs out of steam midway through the season and then dominates in December (which is usually against Stanford and bowl games). If you consider the fact that USC is at its strongest in November and that we tend to play them in November, then our record against USC makes sense. I'm glad that we play them in September next year.

Record By Conference

Analysis

We own the Big-10 (11). And our three losses to the Mountain West came early in Tedford's era (Air Force, Colorado State and Alex Smith led Utah). Recently we've also dominated the MWC. Glad to see no losing records here. We're .610 against the Pac-10 which is pretty damn good considering our record in Tucson and Los Angeles.

Records for Starting QB

Note: Longshore started Air Force Bowl 07 and Riley started UDub 08

Winngest Starting QBs

Analysis

When it comes to winning percentages it's clear that Aaron Rodgers was the best starting QB that Cal had (Steve Levy is just an abberation). But neither Nate Longshore nor Kevin Riley are too bad. HOWEVER keep in mind that this only says who started. It could be that the games were won (or lost) because of our running game, our D, etc.

That said it doesn't surprise me that Nate Longshore is our winningest QB in the Tedford era followed by Rodgers.

Poor Reggie Robertson. Only played three games and lost two of them. Whatever happened to him?

Also when I was compliling the data I noticed that outside of the second half of his season Ayoob wasn't THAT bad. Sure he had turnovers but he did compile some decent stats in some of his early games. What the hell happened?

Records by Turfs

Analysis

Dear god we suck on grass. Is this because we face our worst enemies on grass or do we really just suck on grass? Our stats on Artificial turf is exaggerated due to the fact that we play on Artificial turf at Memorial.

Records at Different Timezones

Analysis

East Coast has Cal's number. That's all I can deduce here.

Record By Starting Time

Average Starting Time: 2:36PM

Analysis

I was surprised to see that we've only lost one game in which Cal played earlier than noon (and that game was Maryland). I honestly thought that it would be worse. But guess not. And Cal seems to do great during prime time games (3PM-5PM) though most of it's games tend to be in the afternoon (thus the average starting time of 2:30PM). Not sure what the problem is with night games.

Record Against Ranked Teams

Number of Ranked Teams faced: 25
Average Opponent Ranking (when opponent is ranked): 14

Analysis

So unsurprisingly Cal has trouble with top-10 teams (and the only victory coming against USC in 2003). It doesn't help that most of the top-10 teams Cal faces is coached by Pete Caroll. We seem to do ok with the other ranked teams (not sure what's up with 16-20 though) and we usually beat unranked teams.

Of the 25 ranked teams cal faced (out of 89) they were on averaged ranked #14. That's pretty good.

Record When Ranked

Number of Times Ranked: 47
Average Ranking (when Cal is ranked): 13

Analysis

Cal's successes when ranked in the top-10 is almost all from the 2004 era. But what I'm most curious about is Cal's record when ranked between 11-15. Out of 7 games when Cal is ranked in that spot in the past 7 years, Cal has never lost.

Cal has been ranked (not including post-season) a total of 47 times out of 89 (53%!) and during these 47 times Cal was ranked on average 13. That's pretty damn good.

Records...

Analysis

I can't see anything surprising here. If an opponent turns it over less than you, rushes more than you or simply plays better than you then you'll lose. And vice versa. Although it's funny to note that when an opponent has outpassed Cal, Cal has won a higher percentage of times then when Cal has outpassed the opponent. This is probably because the losing team tends to pass a lot.

Also the fact that we do terrible when our running game gets shut down seems to show me that Cal is pretty much a rushing team rather than a stereotypical West Coast passing team.

Yearly Stats

Click to see fully

Analysis

I had to make this into an image because I couldn't fit the table into this fanpost.

What I can take away is that Cal averages around 180yds rushing per game which is quite a bit (and look at the rushing numbers in 2004 and 2005 - holy crap!). Unsurprisingly the 2008 team's passing was the worst in the past 7 seasons and the offense was the statistically the second worst even though the running game was the third best. But our defense was damn good (only the 2004 edition comes close). And another surprising thing I noticed is that our turnover margin is a whopping +37! That's mainly due to the insane +18 in 2002 (!) and the +15 of the last season. And is it any surprise that the two worst seasons Cal had under Tedford, 2005 and 2007 had a negative turnover margin?

So that's that. I wanted to find out where Tedford recruited from and then overlay that with the map that showed Cal's successes but I got too lazy so that's a project for someone else or for later.