When Cal played UCLA at the Rose Bowl
in 2013, the game was downright boring. Cal got shut out in every
quarter but the second, and after scoring ten points in that quarter
gave up twenty unanswered to lose the game 10-37. Goff threw for a
near season low 215 yards with zero TD's and one awful INT. One year
later, Cal was driving with a chance to kick a go-ahead FG in
the final minutes of an exciting, back-and-forth 34-36 shootout. Unfortunately, we
all know how that ended.
This post is going to answer two
questions about the scenario that I just described. The first is, “Why was Cal's offense so much more successful in 2014
than in 2013,” and the second is “Why did we throw a deep
interception on a play that didn't need a deep pass?”
Conveniently, an answer to both of these questions is the pass
concept “4 Verticals,” a concept I've discussed a few times on
this blog. There are a ton of interesting specifics behind that
general answer, though, and this post will focus on
those details.
