Last week against Utah, Arizona State football had its worst performance of the season on both sides of the ball. The offense, wrecked by injuries, found moving the ball impossible, and as the defense was on the field most of the game due to the lack of offense, Utah was able to put up 55 points in a monster 55-3 win.
Defensive coordinator Brian Ward has put together a defense that has performed better than expected, earning him an extension through 2027. Head coach Kenny Dillingham also had a year added on to the end of his contract, pairing the two together for the next four seasons. Extending Ward before the end of a season in which ASU will be lucky to win three games is a demonstration of the confidence President Michael Crow and athletic director Ray Anderson have in their coaching pair despite the ugly record.
“I really think it says that our administration knows what they’re doing and that they’re moving forward and understanding what it’s going to take to be successful,” Ward said. “Consistency is the biggest, biggest thing that’s going to lead to success in the end, in anything you do.”
A lot of the reason why Ward was trusted with the extension has to do with his ability to be the leader of the defense and make sure that every Saturday, they are as prepared as possible to play. This week, Ward has the task of making sure his defense forgets the tough loss to the Utes and prepares for another difficult opponent in UCLA.
“It’s like anything else. It’s a learning experience,” Ward noted. “The older you get, you start understanding that I’ve been here before. I know how to respond to it. And for these guys, as players, these guys have been in this situation before. They know the only way to respond to it is to keep pushing and learning.”
Heading into the game, the Utes were coming off an embarrassing 35-6 home loss to the Oregon Ducks, and it appears they used the ASU game in order to vent some of the frustration from losing badly. The Sun Devils believed they had a good game plan, but sometimes that just isn’t enough.
“We played last week up at [Utah’s] place coming off their last home loss in 15 years and are the two-time defending PAC 12 champions,” Ward remarked. “There’s a lot of experience on that team. That was a hungry football team, and things just broke down little by little last week. Sometimes, as a coordinator and as a football coach, you feel like a ship captain out in the ocean. I mean, like, you can have everything dialed in and manage your process and not change what you do in your weekly approach to things, but it’s still the ocean.”
The Utes were able to expose ASU on the ground, rushing for 352 yards while averaging 7.2 yards per carry. Utah was able to rush the ball nearly 49 times and was effective seemingly every time. Coming up this week, ASU will face a rushing offense led by head coach Chip Kelly that has been an even better running team than Utah, averaging 204.6 yards per game on the ground, which is good for second in the Pac-12 behind Kelly’s former school, the Oregon Ducks.
Kelly is one of college football’s most influential coaches, designing an offense that has routinely been near the top of the nation in his ten years as a head coach at the collegiate level. His time as the head coach of the Ducks produced a National Championship berth and the 2014 Heisman winner Marcus Mariota. Using Mariota’s ability on the ground, Kelly was able to tear up college football and succeed on the highest level.
When both Ward and Dillingham were asked about what makes Kelly’s offense so great, they had similar responses. They both were gushing over how Kelly has the unique ability to design his base offense to look different every week, making coaching against him a nightmare in terms of preparation. He might present something that you saw on film but then run a completely different play out of the same formation.
“He does probably the best job that I’ve ever seen in terms of being able to package his offense differently every week,” Ward noted. “No matter what we’re planning for formationally, they’re going to show something completely different, which means our system is going to have to rest on its rules. That’s what our challenge is going to be. It’s not going to be that they’re scheming up the run game. It’s going to be coming out in different looks every single week.”
“You just practice all of the pictures they create from just random things,” Dillingham said. “You don’t practice what they’ve done. You just practice random things that fit what they do. That’s a philosophy. There are a lot of defenses that practice like that. When you play teams that aren’t copycat teams, which means they don’t copycat what they did the week prior, you just gotta go out there and do random formations that they haven’t done and run their plays with their motions so your guys can just fit random things correctly. It’s not about the actual formation of the motion. It’s about the fit based off of where the people are.”
One other wrinkle heading into Saturday’s matchup at the Rose Bowl is the UCLA quarterback situation. True freshman quarterback Dante Moore and junior quarterback Ethan Garbers were both injured in UCLA’s 27-10 loss to Arizona, forcing third-string Collin Schlee to close the game. All three of the quarterbacks presented some game film to Dillingham and his staff, but that doesn’t make it easier to prepare for.
“It’s really hard,” Dillingham said. “You got to say, “Okay, What are these guys’ strengths, and what has the coordinator done in the past with people like these strengths? What I don’t think you can just carbon copy and say, ‘This guy’s thrown it 80% of the time, he’s been in and run it 20,’ but while he’s been in the fourth quarter when they were down. I think you have to kind of read and predict a little bit what’s going to happen based on what the coordinator likes to do and the skill set of the player.”
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