On Saturday, Arizona State football is going to welcome No.6 ranked Oregon to Tempe. The Ducks record sits at 9-1 with just two weeks remaining in the regular season, and they are prime contenders for the College Football Playoff.
Sound familiar?
Almost four years ago, to the day, the exact same scenario occurred. The 5-5 Sun Devils welcomed the 9-1 Ducks to Tempe, but ASU freshman quarterback Jayden Daniels hit Brandon Aiyuk on a deep ball for an 81-yard touchdown that secured the game for the Sun Devils. The game ended any possibility of current Los Angeles Chargers starting quarterback Justin Herbert making it to the CFP in his final season as a Duck.
Now, the 2023 Sun Devils have the same opportunity to end Oregon’s and senior quarterback Bo Nix’s season without a trip to the. It is made even wackier when there is the potential for a new freshman quarterback wearing number five and owning the name Jaden to be under center.
Freshman quarterback Jaden Rashada took team reps in practice this week for the first time in eight weeks, but head coach Kenny Dillingham announced after Wednesday’s session that Rashada is likely to be sidelined this week.
“He’s not gonna be ready this week to play,” he announced. “His goal, our goal, is just to continually get him back and ready. I mean, he could be maybe an emergency guy, but I’m not gonna throw him in there. He’s practiced really one week of football as a true freshman to say, ‘Hey, go get him, Tiger,” like that ain’t fair.”
Dillingham said earlier this week that Rashada would not play until he is ‘fully 100%,’ but that doesn’t have to mean just physically. Even if Rashada’s body is totally ready to go, making sure that the freshman is fully up to speed mentally and fully ready emotionally to go back out there is a high priority. Sending Rashada out against Oregon as a freshman with two games of experience and coming off of an eight-week injury could be a recipe for disaster.
Similarly to ASU’s opponents in the last two weeks, Oregon possesses one of the best defenses in the conference. Just ahead of UCLA and Utah, Oregon allows the fewest points per game in the Pac-12 (16.4) and the third-fewest yards per game (301.7), behind only UCLA and Utah. The last three games for the Sun Devils have truly been a gauntlet for the offense.
“You can’t do the same thing back-to-back weeks versus really good teams,” Dillingham said about facing great defenses in consecutive weeks. “Eventually, we want to be a team that does the dictating, which means we do what we do. We change up how we run the plays that we run, and then defenses have to change for us. We’re not there yet.
“We’re not an offense that a team’s going to change for, so we’ve got to be able to adapt and change ourselves. That puts more pressure on being able to learn new things throughout a week because you’ve got to be able to find advantages other than just, hey, we’ve got good numbers, leverage, and grass.”
However, the thing that separates Oregon from Utah and UCLA, alongside that stingy defense, is one of the nation’s best offenses. According to the NCAA, Oregon’s 46.3 points per game is the best in the country, and their 540 yards per game is good for second, behind just Jayden Daniels and LSU at 560.2.
“It’s just one of those games that you have to have really, really timely calls,” Dillingham said about facing the Oregon offense. “[The blitzes] have to not be easy to see, and you have to confuse them. Every team’s tried to do this year, and nobody’s been able to execute. So a great challenge for our defense to go out there and try to execute a plan to really kind of make [Nix] uncomfortable.”
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The Oregon offense is one of the best in the country, but defensive coordinator Brian Ward’s defense has surprised a lot of people paying attention to ASU football. The last time ASU went up against an offense as elite as the Ducks, Washington left the game without scoring an offensive touchdown. Plus, the defense is coming off one of their best performances of the year last week in the Rose Bowl, holding the Bruins to just one score in a 17-7 win.
“The guys played really, really hard, and they prepared really well,” Ward noted. “It just says a lot about this group in terms of responding to the performance we had the week before. Those guys coming out playing hard, it’s really just who we are. These guys really focus on doing their 1/11, and every guy wants to just do his job.”
At the heart of the defense’s performance against UCLA, and the whole season, graduate defensive tackle Dashaun Mallory was awarded with the Pac-12 Defensive Lineman of the Week for his amazing performance against the Bruins. Mallory finished the night with nine total tackles, six solo tackles, a half-sack, and two pass breakups. Additionally, he was right in the middle of ASU’s two fourth-down stops deep inside their own territory.
Saturday after the game, Dillingham said that Mallory’s decision to come to ASU ‘changed his life,’ and Ward is just thankful the Michigan State transfer decided to make Tempe his home for the final season of college football.
“He’s been better than advertised,” Ward said. “We brought him in, and we thought he was going to be a good player for us. But he’s exceeded our expectations. He just keeps on getting better. I’ve said it once. I’ve said it 100 times: he’s just the guy who comes to work and doesn’t say a whole lot. He’s a good teammate, but when he puts the pads on, he just becomes another person.”
Mallory will undoubtedly be a huge piece of the puzzle that is figuring out a way to slow down the Oregon offense. Ward faced the Ducks last year as the defensive coordinator at Washington State, so he is familiar with all the weapons head coach Dan Lanning, the man who replaced Dillingham as offensive coordinator Will Stein, have at their disposal.
“Not really possible,” Dillingham said when asked if it’s possible to make Oregon’s offense one-dimensional. “The goal is to take away what we believe are their strengths, and they’ve got a ton of strengths. But to take away what we think are the plays and the philosophy that gets them into a rhythm.
“If we can take away the plays that get people into rhythm, then maybe the explosives won’t happen as much. But to say you’re gonna take away everything is fool’s gold. To say you’re gonna take away and make them one dimensional is not gonna happen because they’ll just run the ball for 340 [yards] on you.”
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