Pac-12 Countdown: South #1 Arizona State
If you didn’t see last year’s Duel in the Desert, you missed one of the great football games of the 2010 college football season. Arizona was coming down off a roller-coaster that saw them ascend to as high as #9 in the AP Poll before three straight humbling losses against USC, Stanford and Oregon.
Arizona State was a 5-6, and had never sniffed the polls but the Devils were much better than their record showed. They lost to Wisconsin, Oregon, Stanford and USC by a combined 16 points. Aside from a head scratching 17-50 loss at Cal, the Devils had been pretty consistent. Better than the bad teams and not quite up to snuff with the good ones. They had a great defense, but seemed like they were just one little piece away from completing their puzzle.
The Duel in the Desert was an epic back and forth battle that will be remembered for it’s wild finish. Arizona scored what would have been the winning TD with :27 left but the PAT was blocked, forcing overtime. The game went to a 2nd OT, where ASU scored a TD, and then UA answered with one of their own, but ASU blocked extra point to earn an improbable one point win.
The blocked kicks were incredible and they helped ASU to win it’s most meaningful game of the year, but ultimately that game was significant because it revealed the piece to the puzzle ASU had been looking for. But as it turned out, the piece wasn’t little at all.
It was 6’ 8’’ sophomore quarterback Brock Osweiller who started that night for only the 2nd time in his career (and first time of the season). The underclassman from Kalispell, MT who just a year earlier had been committed to playing basketball at Gonzaga showed a charisma that belied his inexperience and out-dueled Nick Foles on Arizona’s biggest football stage.
For every Sun Devil Football team that has disappointed over the last 10 years, there’s an equally disappointing quarterback to go with it. Walter, Keller, Carpenter, Sullivan, Threet. We all know the story with ASU. Big names, big expectations, sometimes even big numbers (Walter and Carpenter both threw for over 10,000 yards), but at the end of the season, the wins aren’t there. Only once in the last 10 years has ASU won ten games, and that season they were 1-3 against top 25 competition including blowout losses to #11 USC and #17 Texas.
For all the smoke that comes out of Tempe, there’s been very little fire from the Sun Devils. They get big billing, but never come through when the chips are down. In the last five seasons, they have had only one losing season, but their record against AP ranked opponents is a putrid 1-13.
But something is changing in the desert under Dennis Erikson. The Devils that shut it down at the first sign of trouble are gone, replaced by a new tenacity. USC used to blow the Devils out with regularity, the last two seasons, the Trojans have beaten ASU by only one point. The Devils gave Oregon, USC, Wisconsin and Stanford some of their toughest scares of the year last season, and with Osweiller, may just have enough to get over the hump in 2010.
Last year’s Duel in Arizona was red-hot, but Osweiler was cool as a Montana breeze leading ASU to a 2OT win in his first start
Rather than starting with an anointed quarterback and assuming the rest of the team would fall into place, the new ASU is built on a killer defense, and lucked into the Charismatic basketball player when Steven Threet had to sit with a concussion.
Osweiler jumped into the UCLA game cold and all he did was throw for 380 yards and 4 touchdowns against Rahim Morre and Akeem Ayers. The following week he threw for more yards than Arizona star QB Nick Foles. But more important than the numbers was the leadership. Typically, when a backup QB comes into the game, the body language of the entire offense changes. You can see the lowered expectations in the receiver’s gait and the linemen’s stance.
With Osweiller, the opposite occurred. The offense seemed energized and self assured with the bit Montanan under center. With the game on the line late, ASU’s offense acted like it was supposed to score those late touchdowns, supposed to beat the heavily favored Wildcats. And when the team carried Osweiler off the field at the end of the game, it wasn’t just because they’d beaten Arizona, it was because they knew they had the leader who would take them to new heights in their first year of Pac-12 play.
With the nation’s best linebacker, Vontaze Burfict still roaming the middle on a defense that returns six of its top seven tacklers, ASU’s defense should be even stronger than last year. The offense not only returns Osweiler, but seven of it’s top eight pass catchers, all it’s tailbacks and basically the entire 2-deep on their offensive line. Fifteen returning starters all-told makes this the most experienced and the most talented team of Dennis Erickson’s tenure in the Desert.
The Schedule looks good for the Devils too. They have five Pac-12 home games and one of their road games is Washington State. They play at Oregon, but avoid Stanford and get Arizona and USC at home. Dennis Erickson is entering his 5th year at Arizona State and I look for the Devils to match or exceed the 10 wins (and bowl loss) of Erikson’s best team in 2007.
With Utah transitioning to a new offense (and stuck with a lousy quarterback), and USC still stuck under the NCAA’s raincloud, the Arizona State Sun Devils will win the Pac-12 South this season. And if they don’t have to play a Pac-12 Championship Game at Autzen Stadium, the Sun Devils may go even farther than that.