The term rivalry is often tossed around when the ASU football team takes on Northern Arizona.
It more resembles a sibling rivalry, where a younger brother believes he is the rival of his older brother. Despite the older brother regularly beating the younger brother, the possibility of springing the upset on his older sibling motivates the younger to bring his best.
That kind of motivation has ASU (1-0) expecting NAU’s best on Saturday. The Lumberjacks have nothing to lose and would love to beat the bigger in-state school.
“It is going to be different than playing Portland State,” ASU coach Dennis Erickson said. “They know us better. It is a huge game for them. You watched how they played UA last year. They gave them everything they wanted. We expect the same thing. It is going to be a challenge for us.”
It is also a classic trap game for the Sun Devils. After beating up on one FCS team from the Big Sky Conference, ASU has another FCS team on its schedule before the big showdown against Wisconsin on September 18th.
“Well, they shouldn’t,” Erickson said of overlooking NAU (1-0). “They understand; they’ve seen all the games over the years where that happens and they understand that. It’s up to us to have a plan and get them ready to go.”
Erickson believes that he has a group that won’t get caught in the trap, because they just love playing football against anybody.
“What I like about this group is that they really enjoy playing on Saturday,” Erickson said. “If you enjoy playing on Saturday’s and you come out and just fly around and play, you won’t have as many ups and downs as you could have.”
Despite the thrashing of Portland State, Erickson saw lots of mistakes and places that ASU must get better at moving on.
“We have a lot of improvement to still do,” Erickson said. “(A) lot of mistakes technique wise; a lot of assignment mistakes on both sides of the football. Those are things we have to improve obviously.”
One major problem that needs to be cleaned up is the penalties. Erickson brought in officials to practice all throughout spring and fall practice, but Saturday saw ASU still draw too many flags.
“Penalties have to be addressed,” Erickson said. “We've had hustle penalties like that, where you're hustling to get to the ball and you hit someone late. But the dumb penalties, hitting someone when you shouldn't be, it's selfish. It doesn't have anything to do with helping us win.”
Junior quarterback Steven Threet believes that ASU will correct the mistakes they made against PSU.
“Some of the mistakes we made, they’re easily corrected,” Threet said. “It was good for us to sit down as an offense and kind of watch it together and see what everybody is seeing out on the field.”
Threet guided the offense to its best performance in years, but like his coach, knows they are far from where they need to be.
“I think it’s nice to see it come full circle in a game, not just in practice and to see us perform well under the lights,” Threet said. “We’re happy that we won. By no means do we think the offense is there yet. We have a ways to go and we have to get better every week.”
Threet is the clear starter at quarterback for ASU and Erickson stated that the playing time of sophomore Brock Osweiler will be dictated by the game.
The Lumberjacks will have much more talent than PSU on both sides of the football. Despite being picked for fifth in the Big Sky, NAU believes it can contend for the conference title.
“They’ve got an outstanding quarterback transfer from Mississippi, (Michael) Herrick,” Erickson said. “They’re very talented. They’ve got the (Zach) Bauman kid from Hamilton High School at running back (who) had a heck of a game and we had him in camp and he’s an extremely good running back."
With a more talented team coming into Sun Devil Stadium on Saturday and knowing how motivated NAU will be to upset the Sun Devils, it shouldn’t be as easy of a road to victory as week one.
“That's a real big game for those kids up there,” Erickson said, “to come down here, and a lot of guys are from this area. They are going to come and give us everything they’ve got. We have to be ready to play because if we're not, you saw what happened in Mississippi last week"
