Jared Goff roundtable: Cal fans, are you confident he sustain the Goffense?

Pretty sure everyone will say Jared Goff was the most impressive aspect of last week's game. What are his strengths and weaknesses? Are you confident in running the offense through him and being a pass-first team this season?

Sam Fielder: His strength is clearly his accuracy and his knowledge of the offense. His weakness are his taking of sacks when it seems he could throw the ball away and his lack of accuracy on the deep ball (he's hit some in the past two weeks, but he had some really, really bad misses on deep balls today). I am pretty confident in running the offense through him, though I do wonder how well we'll do when someone with a good D shows up and really puts him under pressure. Even so though, I really would like to see more from the running game. It has been solid but not great and I'd like to see it improve some to take pressure off the passing game.

Leland Wong: Goff has impressed me tons (as mass is the proper means to measure impressiveness). I think his biggest strength is his ability to stay calm in the pocket despite any pressure. However, while I've been impressed with him so far and I think he could lead our team, I wouldn't want to become a one-dimensional pass-heavy team. One of the things that appealed to me about the Dykes hire was his balanced attack at La Tech in 2012. We have great running backs, so I hope we can find ways to run block for them to get them in the game. If we rely too heavily on Goff's arm, I'll get worried when we face teams with strong cornerbacks and safeties, like Oregon.

Berkelium97: Strengths: He has incredible poise. Nothing seems to disrupt him. Consider the play where the ball fell right out of his hand in the second quarter. I would expect most QBs to fall on the ball. Good QBs might have the situational awareness to pick up the ball and throw it out of bounds. Instead, Goff picks it up and delivers it 15 yards down the field to his receiver. He operates the offense like a seasoned vet: he reads the field well, delivers the ball accurately, and is solid in high-pressure situations (3rd downs, red zone offense).

Weakness: His accuracy could use some minor improvement. His downfield passing game isn't perfect and he overthrew a few receivers on longer routes today. Occasionally his passes are behind or off the fingertips of his receivers.

I'm comfortable running the offense through Goff against weaker defenses, but I don't expect the offense to do well against the likes of Oregon and Stanford. We have enough variety in the pass offense to be able to adjust to pressure packages (when we identify the blitz pre-snap), but I don't have much confidence in the offense if the line is being manhandled (which I expect to happen, especially against Stanford).

atomsareenough: Yeah, I'm quite confident running the offense through him; he's the best QB we've had in quite a while, and he's only going to get better. His strengths are consistency, accuracy, and good, fast-decisionmaking. He hasn't made too many mistakes with the football. He had a sure pick that was dropped today, so he got lucky on that one, but for the most part he's putting the ball in good places. He's had several touchdowns dropped as well, on the flip side. His weaknesses are that he's prone to making the wrong read of the defense when they throw something new at him. He's going to learn and improve from that, though. I'd like not to be a pass-first team, but our run blocking needs to improve first. Right now it looks like teams are daring us to throw with our true freshman QB, and thankfully, Goff is responding as well as we could hope. Maybe his continued success will open up the running game a bit more.

Vlad Belo: Count me among those who are impressed with Jared Goff. His strengths are his poise, his seeming command of the offense, and his consistency in throwing the ball on time. As for weaknesses, I'd like to see more accuracy on the deep ball. Yeah, he hit Harper and Treggs with on-the-money deep throws in the first two games, but he's also missed some opportunities downfield.

I'm confident in Goff and am open to having a pass-first offense with him leading it (though ideally, I'd like to see us run the ball better). I'm anxious to see how Goff does against an elite team like Ohio State this week and in a hostile environment like he'll get at Oregon in a couple of weeks.