5 Takeaways From Oregon State's Loss To Cal

The Oregon State football team physically showed up to Memorial Stadium on Saturday afternoon for a tilt with the Cal Bears. Still, it’s hard to say beyond physically being there the Beavers were.

On paper, the oddsmakers didn’t see this as a blowout, and neither did we at BeaversEdge. We all predicted this matchup to be right around the 11-point spread in favor of the Bears.

As it turned out, the Beavers had their worst performance of the season, their worst loss overall since 2019 against Utah, when the Utes won 52-7, and their worst loss on the road since 2018, when Ohio State spanked the Beavers by 46 points.

Simply put, it didn’t look like the Beavers showed up today.

And arguably, no play was more indicative of what type of day it would be for the Beavers than Cal’s opening touchdown drive. Just as it looked like the Beavers would hold the Bears to a field goal attempt following their opening drive by stopping Cal running back Javion Thomas on a swing pass behind the line of scrimmage, only to have Thomas pitch the ball to a running Fernando Mendoza who caught it in stride and took it to the house for six.

It was only six points, but it looked to stun the Beavers, and that stun led to the other side of the ball on their first offensive drive, nearly having a safety because of penalties and poor decision-making.

After that sequence, it was only 7-0, but it felt like a big collapse on both sides of the ball, and it only got much worse from there.

We knew of the Beavers’ road struggles amidst a bevy of injuries with the debacle in Reno several weeks ago, but nobody could have expected the Beavers to look and be this bad.

Save the final excuse-me touchdown from the offense; this was a failure nearly across the board from the Oregon State football team. Sure, you can nitpick a few positives, as we will throughout these takeaways, but you cannot gloss over what was just a terrible performance.

Questions will arise about Trent Bray and the Beavers’ coordinators no doubt, but I think this was the case of everything going wrong all at once against a team that was foaming at the mouth to end their four-game losing streak. The Beavers were on the wrong end of a team playing with a killer instinct, and they didn’t have any sort of counterpunch.

Regardless of how it happened, there must be serious conversations about this football team as even in the tough losses these past couple of weeks, the Beavers were right in those games.

One could argue the Beavers were never in this game, and that’s a shocking statement considering how competitive this team has been in games outside of the second half against Oregon this season.

The way the Beavers lost this game, and the way they didn’t and couldn’t fight back harkened me back to the early days of the Jonathan Smith era, and perhaps even before, which is not the company Trent Bray wants to keep.

The Beavers were thoroughly beaten in every aspect of the game, and in many ways, have to go back to the drawing board because so little went right against the Bears.

2. Beavers’ QB Carousel Spins

When you have three quarterbacks, you have no quarterback, and the Beavers right now don’t have a quarterback.

Gevani McCoy, who won the starting job in camp, was benched early in the second quarter for a combination of quarterback play from Ben Gulbranson and Gabarri Johnson for a spark of offense.

McCoy looked ineffective in the passing game, putting it nicely, only mustering up three yards of passing. You read that right, Beaver Nation: three yards of passing.

Now, McCoy has had his moments, but he has also delivered some head-scratching moments, like the interception on a pass intended for Trent Walker, where he stared him down the entire way, leading to the turnover.

However, if you exclude his game against Idaho State, he has barely completed sixty percent of his passes and has a three-touchdown to six-interception ratio.

Sure, the blame doesn’t reside on him either. Have the receivers and the offensive line not done him favors? Has the playing call not been the best, either? The answer to both of those is yes, but I think we’re at a point in the season where you can be critical of McCoy’s performance, and this afternoon, I think, is the epitome of the struggles the Beavers have had offensively all season.

Gulbranson and Johnson looked far better than McCoy, as Ben had a touchdown in the game. Given the injuries on defense, how much of a difference do they make in the team's offensive performance? To be honest, I don’t know how much it makes, but I think you’ve also seen McCoy's ceiling.

McCoy is also dealing with several injuries, which have likely hampered his ability to be what he was at the start of the season; if he is not genuinely healthy, go to Johson or Gulbranson. We saw how McCoy fared during Nevada, but was not fully healthy and should’ve sat in that game.

Will Trent Bray and Ryan Gunderson commit to McCoy as their starter going forward? They should likely give Johnson or Gulbranson the start; based on McCoy’s past eight-game performances, we know what McCoy is as a quarterback, and most importantly, he still needs to adjust to the FBS competition of play.

3. Oregon State’s Run Defense Improves, Secondary Ripped

Oregon State finally learned to defend the run, which was this unit's Achilles heel the entire season. However, defending the pass was a completely different story with all the injuries in the secondary.

The Beavers held Cal to 114 yards on the ground and gave up 364 passing yards through the air to Fernando Mendoza. Oregon State couldn’t get to Mendoza in the backfield or even bring him down in the open field when he escaped the pocket.

The defense made Mendoza look like the second coming of Tom Brady, Patrick Mahomes, Dan Marino—you take your pick. However, at the same time, they are dealing with a ton of injuries, particularly in the secondary, which is missing Amarion York, Kobe Singleton, Noble Thomas, and Jaden Robinson. The lack of experience and depth showed up where it was easy for Mendoza to complete pass after pass all game.

We saw this happen last week against UNLV at home, and it, along with the self-inflicted mistakes, hurt the Beavers at the end of the game. The Beavers, simply put, were flat-out beaten by the Cal Golden Bears up and down the field.

You can do so much when your offense doesn’t give you a chance to stay off the field for an extended period during the game. Although they continued over that better performance in defending the run, there aren’t any moral victories in football, and you play to win the game, as former ASU HC Herm Edwards said.

Simply put, another bad defensive performance for the Beavers against a team that nearly scored on all of their possessions. For coaches that pride themselves on defense in Trent Bray and Keith Heyward sure didn’t see much of it defending the pass today.