The Harvard Of Maricopa County

Do you think ASU wishes they still had Jayden Daniels?

The Ducks beat up on USC last week in the most dominant nine point win in program history.

I wish we had won by a lot more points, and if it weren’t for Caleb Williams and Brenden Rice finally realizing that they were actually good at football, it might’ve been a whole lot more points.

But the Ducks failed to cover the 14 and a half point spread while still comfortably beating the most talented team they’ll see until January.

Bo Nix continued his immaculate Heisman run with over 400 passing yards and four touchdowns, including two early bombs to Tez & Troy that set the tone for the kind of day the offense was going to have.

The run game was pretty quiet, but we can attribute that to 1) more commitment to the passing attack by Will Stein, and 2) a brief period of the game where Bucky went into the injury tent to get his ankle taped up.

For a moment, I worried that our injury karma had finally caught up to us, but Buck came back out—limped just a tiny bit—and still found his way into the endzone.

When you put all that together, I think Bucky is a-okay—at least for right now.

The most impressive aspect of the game, in my eyes, was our relentless pass rush.

Caleb was running for his life from the start, and while he definitely still found ways to escape, he didn’t pull an Ed-Norton-in-American-History-X and kill us with his feet.

Our three sacks and two forced fumbles (one of which we recovered) ended up being ginormous factors in making sure the reigning Heisman Trophy winner became a former Heisman Trophy winner.

Caleb’s numbers—and the score itself—might not even had looked as good as they did if it weren’t for the fact that we played the entire second half without our two starting cornerbacks.

Khyree and Jahlil both exited the game with unknown injuries, and even though Nikko Reed and Trikweze Bridges played amicably, they did ultimately end up letting the Trojan air attack back into the game just a teensy bit.*

*However, somebody has to teach Lincoln Riley some basic math because if you already know you’re going to attempt an onside kick, why in the WORLD would you go for two and risk still being down by two possessions?

That’s some of the biggest quitter behavior we’ve seen in the conference since Chris Petersen literally quit.

In Dan’s weekly presser, he indicated that both corners would be available to, “help the team,” this weekend, but we all know Dan has quickly become a master at keeping injuries and availability a secret.

I don’t think we’ll need them this weekend against an Arizona State team that is at the bottom of the barrel in terms of quarterback depth, so I wouldn’t be too afraid if they got the full weekend off.

The most heartening sign of their progress, however, would be if we got to see them play a quarter or two down in Tempe, and then they’d get to rest up for the Beaver game.

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Speaking of Arizona State, I guess it’s time to talk about Kenny Dillingham and his Devils.

Our former offensive coordinator (and Tempe’s native son) has had himself quite a spunky season already.

They came into the year knowing that they couldn’t play in a bowl game, and yet the three-win Sun Devils have played their little hearts and pushed some really good teams to the edge.

They went into Husky Stadium and did something we couldn’t even do: they held the Washington offense to a single touchdown.

The only reason the Devils didn’t pull off the funniest upset in Pac-12 history is because one of their bottom-of-the-barrel QBs ended up, throwing a pick-six that barely put the Huskies on top, 15-7.

They played Colorado incredibly close. They gave USC an early scare. And just last week they went into Pasadena and held Chip Kelly to seven points.

Dilly beat UCLA with basically no offensive line—and might have gotten Chip fired—so it’s hard not to be at least a little scared of a late-November trip to the desert.

We were in this position back in 2019, and that time Mario & Herbert (but mostly Mario) lost to a historically-underutilized Jayden Daniels, and we lost out on our last real chance to sniff the Playoff.

But that might as well be a decade ago now because we know that Dan doesn't lose to stinker teams—he only loses to Washington.

And the Sun Devils don’t have Bo’s only competition for the Heisman playing QB anymore either, they simply have a young spark plug named Cameron Skattebo (#4).

You may Skettebo as the transfer RB that broke like six tackles in a row on his way to the endzone against USC, and I know that UCLA remembers him as the dude who somehow THREW for a 25-yard touchdown pass last weekend.

He is essentially what would happen if Scrappy Doo and Aaron Pflugrad had a baby.

He is an all-time glue guy. Undersized, fights like hell for that extra yard, and is exactly the type of guy I would imagine Dilly dreaming of for his first season as Head Coach.

If you haven’t watched Skattebo play yet this season, you’re in for a treat.

I hope you walk away from the game tomorrow having enjoyed his leave-it-all-out-on-the-field style of football—as long as it’s in a valiant, losing effort—but man it is going to kill me when I have to watch him get cut on Hard Knocks in a few years.

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Dilly definitely has something interesting cooking down in the desert, but I don’t think we have anything to worry about.

Oregon 42, Arizona State 16.

Go Ducks.