A look at the negatives from the Cal-UCLA game

TwistNHook: What are some of the negatives from the Cal-UCLA game?

Berkelium97: We won, but still showed many of the same issues that have plagued us this season: penalties, turnovers, poor pass protection, occasional derps from Maynard (a couple airmailed passes, handoff issues). Fortunately the opponent committed many more of these errors.

Unclesam22: Penalties, OLine, and XPs. These things still plagued the Bears, but they played well enough in all of the other aspects of the game to cover them up. Against better opponents these weakness will be exploited and will probably cost us the game, but Saturday night they did not hurt us. Still worrisome though. The turnovers were problematic too, but thankfully UCLA could not capitalize.

NorCalNick: Turnovers and penalties, and that's really it. The defense held UCLA to 4.7 yards/play, which is a top 25 level performance. Conversely, the offense rolled up nearly 500 yards of offense. It's hard to mine that for problems.

The offensive line is still clearly a liability, but Even then he still got hit a ton and against teams with better secondaries there will be more sacks. But at least we have a gameplan to deal with our issues as much as possible.

Oh yeah, extra points? I still haven't seen the replays, but so many things have to go wrong to miss extra points that I can only assume it's everybody's fault. Thank goodness it didn't matter this time.

TwistNHook: Before everybody gets too depressed, let's watch this:

NorCalNick mentioned the extra points and that is definitely frustrating. I'm not sure if they were blocked because of a low kick by D'Amato or instead poor blocking.

As for the penalties, what is odd is that Cal actually had fewer penalties than UCLA. Here are the numbers:

UCLA had 12 penalties for 99 yards, while Cal had 10 penalties for 100 yards even. The reality is that 10 penalties isn't great, but we technically won the penalty battle! Plus, it didn't seem the penalties killed that many drives.

The one that really killed me though was this one:

C 1-G U04 PENALTY UCLA offside defense (27-Hofmeister, Rya) 2 yards to the UCLA2.

C 1-G U02 Timeout California, clock 09:14.

C 1-G U02 PENALTY CAL false start (80-Wilfley, Harris) 5 yards to the UCLA7.

UCLA has a penalty. Then, we take a time out. OK. We're right at the goal line, let's make sure that we get the right look in there (even though we had time to do that when the UCLA penalty was being called). But, then, we have a false start penalty coming out of that timeout. I hate it when we get penalties coming out of time outs. Cal ended up scoring a TD on this drive to go up 10-7 and we never quite looked back. But that penalty could have been a real killer.

OhioBear: More kicking woes. I feared that the missed PATs would come back to haunt us. Luckily, they didn't. The penalties continue to be a negative and an annoying characteristic of this team. The injury to Anthony was also a negative - hopefully, that is not serious and won't keep him out of action too long. The turnovers were also a negative: both of them were unforced errors that should not have happened.