Saturday’s matchup with California was a crucial one for both teams. The winner was realistically still alive in the bowl hunt; the loser would face daunting odds to get eligible.
The ASU football team was beaten in every aspect of the game on Saturday and for the first time in 2010, was never in a football game.
“I guess you can just shake it off as one of those games, but I have a little trouble doing that,” ASU coach Dennis Erickson said. “In the games that we have played, even the ones we’ve lost, we’ve been competitive until the end. That wasn’t the case Saturday at all. That bothers me.”
The aftermath leaves a team with a lot of questions going forward and needing to win four of their last five contests to avoid missing a bowl for the third straight season.
“That is one of our goals,” Erickson said. “Until they tell us we don’t [have a chance], we can’t make too many mistakes. Obviously, that is our number one goal right now, but winning our fourth game is what’s in front of us.”
To win their fourth game, improvements need to be made, even if Washington State is next on the schedule.
“It is about accountability for everyone on this team,” Erickson said. “I am talking about offense, defense, coaches. We all have to be accountable. Saturday, we didn’t play like we are capable of playing. We are better than that. We can say that, but we have to show it.”
Coming into the season, the defense was supposed to lead the way for ASU. Giving up 50 points to any team would have probably been laughed off.
Thus far, Erickson says that the defense has not met his expectations.
“We are not playing defense the way we are capable of playing,” Erickson said. “We have at some times, but we are not nearly as consistent as coach [Craig] Bray wants us to be, or I want us to be or our defensive football team wants to be.”
On Saturday, it was the same script that has haunted the Sun Devils’ defense all season. ASU will show flashes of last season’s top defense, but then give up a few big plays that let the game get away.
“It is the same thing,” Erickson said. “We give up three big plays in the second quarter, pass plays that created some problems for us. We didn’t tackle well.”
Cal exposed ASU’s defense in ways it hasn’t often been in the Erickson era. It is even more puzzling because a lot of the players that made last year’s defense so successful are the same players that are struggling this season.
“We are better than that,” Erickson said. “It is something we have to deal with, and we have to get better. We have some guys that played pretty well last year that aren’t playing as well as they need to. We need to get better. There aren’t any ifs or ands about it.”
Erickson is even willing to pull players that have had success and make changes on the defense if necessary.
“We have to look at who we are putting in position to make those plays,” Erickson said. “There were plays out there defensively that we could have made and should have made and we didn’t make.”
The players met on Sunday to watch film and discuss what went wrong on Saturday. While putting the game behind them is key, Erickson wants his team to take something from the blowout loss.
“Our guys have a lot of pride,” Erickson said. “Their pride was hurt. It should have been hurt. We’ve talked about it. We know what we have to get done. We can’t dwell on it; it’s behind us now, but we do have to learn from something like that. Something good has to come from it.”
The learning will have to come quick, because there is no longer a margin for error. Four wins are needed in five games. That on its own is tough, but add in that three of those five teams are ranked in the top 25 makes it nearly impossible.
No matter the odds, Erickson sees reason to believe in his locker room.
“We have good leadership, and we have good character,” Erickson said. “We played pretty well all year. If this was happening every week, then I’d say ‘Oh, my golly’, but that’s not the case. I look for them to respond extremely well. If this happens to us five other times, then we have some issues.”
Reach the reporter at andrew.gruman@asu.edu
