A.J. Carter was face-to-face with an onslaught. Flanked out to the right side of quarterback Jayden Daniels, Carter initially motioned himself as a blocker. He bent his knees, outstretched his arms and stood firm as eight Sacramento State defenders blitzed toward him.
Then space cleared and like a still fly sensing an open-faced human palm crashing toward it, Carter ducked through the fray. The Sun Devil running back burst up the right seam and, five yards before the end zone, peeked his head around his left shoulder and welcomed a third-down pass into his hands.
By the time his body jerked around, Carter’s head was over the goal line. The ball was not. Instead, Carter had the ball … or it was on its way out … or Sac State cornerback Daron Bland knocked it out.
The replays and variety of angles still make a definitive verdict fuzzy. It doesn’t matter. Bland met Carter at the goal line in a collision that had the feel of an over-dramatized Gatorade commercial and the look of two Mack trucks ramming into each other head-on at 40 mph.
The ball popped out. Sacramento State recovered. And in its 19-7 victory, it would take Arizona State (2-0) nearly three quarters to finally break the plane.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years and I’ve never seen anything like that,” offensive coordinator Rob Likens said. “We were always one guy away from doing something right.”
In Year 2 under coach Herm Edwards, ASU expects to breakthrough. The definition of what that means varies based on who speaks. Edwards has said he simply wants to be in the hunt late in the season. Defensive coordinator Danny Gonzales has been adamant in his goals, amplifying his self-made catchphrase about ASU capturing another conference championship. “Win 18,” he often says.
Senior quarterback Kobe Williams isn’t afraid of verbalizing his expectations either. Ask the Long Beach Poly alum about his goals for this season, chances are he’ll bring up the Rose Bowl (which, by winning an 18th conference championship, ASU would likely play in).
It seemed just as Bland jarred the ball away from Carter, he also smacked the Sun Devils lofty goals further away from them. His blow became Arizona State’s reality check. About what it can accomplish this season. About how far it is away from its potential. And about the green and white wake-up call that could be on the horizon next Saturday.
“We have to find what this team can do good, like this collection of players,” Likens said. “Our offense isn’t last year’s offense. We can’t say, going into a game, ‘We’ll be able to do this.’
“Well, we’re finding out that there are some things we can’t do.”
Waiting on defensive coordinator Danny Gonzales to finish speaking to the media in the hallway, Likens sat in a chair outside of the media room. He bent his head over so that the bill of his black, Adidas hat almost touched his knees. For a second, his wife walked over and spoke with him.
Over at the white wall, though, Gonzales’ 11-minute media session was passionate. For the second straight week, he was irked that his defense couldn’t finish the job and preserve a shutout. He brought up a pair of assignment errors in the secondary at least three times, each mention firing him up more than the last.
He wasn’t happy because perfection, as of Friday, has yet to be attained. Not even close.
ASU’s less-than-rousing win over Kent State followed up by a close call against Sacramento State (1-1) feels like the Devils are walking a tightrope. With every step, the margin for error seems to shrink. These were supposed to be the easy games. Now, next week’s trip to Michigan State seems like a red flag in the distance.
Gonzales can feel the pressure. Though his unit has given up just 14 points in two weeks, he hasn’t been pleased -- especially because both touchdowns came late in the fourth quarter.
Would the defense’s job have been easier had the Sun Devil offense hung a 30-spot in the first half? Sure. But as he told his players during winter conditioning, “This is the world we’re going to live in. And I have no problem with it.”
In that, Gonzales refused to accept the thought that the defense is shouldering the burden of the offense’s inexperience. This is, after all, a team game.
“When you’re playing a true freshman quarterback, there’s a lot of things the offense can’t do because they’re trying to make sure he has success and grows in this deal,” Gonzales said. “I have no problem living in that world.”
With pinpoint timing out of an Aaron Sorkin screenplay, the moment Gonzales uttered the words “true freshman quarterback,” Daniels was two steps out of the media room and just a few feet away from Gonzales. He heard his month-old three-word title, turning his head left towards his defensive coordinator with a look that seemed to contain both discontent and anger.
Not anger at Gonzales, but rather at himself. Daniels’ entire football career has been a video game set to the lowest difficulty. As his uncle Mark Greenhouse said last week of Daniels’ high school career, “It was too easy.”
ASU’s offense. Collegiate defensive looks. Those are not “too easy.” Early success from collegiate quarterbacks is often determined by the acumen of their offensive line or their years invested in a program. At the moment, Daniels has little of each.
On Friday, as one stalled red-zone drive turned into four and sure-fire touchdowns gone wrong piled up, that showed. Not that they were all his fault, they weren’t. That includes both Carter’s fumble and Brandon Aiyuk’s blindsided-block penalty which nullified a 68-yard touchdown pass to Frank Darby.
But there were some decisions, mainly inside of 10 yards, that Daniels holds the blame for. One drive sticks out. After Daniels hit Aiyuk on a 52-yard bomb that set up ASU on the Sac State 5-yard line, the freshman quarterback handed the ball off on three straight run-pass-option plays. Each time, running back Eno Benjamin lost a yard.
“We had several RPOs on tonight,” Likens said. “We just didn’t throw them. I have to watch the film but Jayden, he struggled a little bit. But that’s on me, I’m his coach. Once we watch the film, I’ll get a pretty good idea of what happened up front, in the run game particularly.”
At the moment, ASU isn’t trying to hide its deficiencies behind the curtain of 2-0 record. It hasn’t been pretty. They haven’t been good. The fans who showered Sun Devil Stadium in boos on multiple occasions acknowledged it Friday night. So, too, did the ASU coaches, who are now tasked with finding a better way to walk on a thinner rope.
“They have to look within the group now,” Edwards said. “We’re all together here. We’re not going anywhere, and we got to get this fixed.”
