A shiny new student section, sleek new Adidas uniforms on the backs of players and fans alike and a renewed sense of hope hung in the dry, warm air outside Sun Devil Stadium before kickoff — a scene of elaborate pageantry fit for a homecoming court.
A team looking to rid itself of the demons and defects exposed in a showcase game on national television a week ago was pinned against a wall by an FCS opponent and very nearly allowed it to land a knockout punch that would permanently derail the hype train that had been gathering significant steam in a seemingly endless offseason.
If you balked at the box score displaying ASU's 531 total yards during ASU's 35-21 win over Cal Poly at Sun Devil Stadium Saturday night, you were far from alone. Sun Devil receivers racked up nearly as many receiving yards as the Cal Poly offense amassed in total.
The ASU defense that drew rave reviews despite allowing 38 points against Texas A&M — a game upon which an asterisk was stamped as not indicative of the unit's true performance — swarmed senior quarterback Chris Brown and was keyed in on containing him inside the pocket. He completed four passes and only attempted eight.
The same logic, then, must concede that the 21 points allowed Saturday shouldn't have come as comfortably as the Mustangs made it seem.
Brown's second completion was a 21-yard touchdown pass that tied the game at 21 all with 11:47 to go in the third quarter, thrown as Brown rolled to his right and leaned off his back foot and fired to to Reagan Enger. The redshirt sophomore tight end found himself with ample space between him, redshirt senior corner Lloyd Carrington and sophomore safety Armand Perry, and the end zone.
It shocked a Sun Devil defense that was having a difficult enough time containing a nimble group of running backs. Led by Brown, the Mustangs rushed for 175 yards in the first half (284 total) and rallied after being down 21-7 to pull within seven points at the half.
With 10:32 to go in the second quarter, sophomore running back Joe Protheroe knifed through the heart of ASU's goal line defense and hammered past redshirt junior linebacker Laiu Moeakiola and redshirt senior nose tackle Demetrius Cherry for a four-yard touchdown to bring the Mustangs within seven.
Protheroe was the game's leading rusher and at 130 yards on 28 carries, outgained his fellow backs by a wide margin. But sophomore fullback Jared Mohamed chipped in with 71 yards on 10 carries and set up Brown's one-yard touchdown — a delayed sneak out of a jumbo package that caused ASU's front line to bite on a fake handoff and allowed the team's leading rusher in 2014 to waltz into the end zone untouched.
Head coach Tim Walsh was adamant in his postgame speech to his team that the loss was not acceptable, though ASU's FCS opponent certainly put a scare into a team that was a preseason dark horse pick to reach the College Football Playoff.
"In our first two weeks of the season, we've played in two tremendously difficult environments," Walsh said of games at Montana and in Tempe. "Anyone who looks at us and watches us play is going to look and say 'that team has the character it takes to win games.' ''
ASU head coach Todd Graham went anecdotal in his postgame press conference, citing Auburn head coach Gus Malzahn and his team's trouble in dispatching Jacksonville State earlier that afternoon and said he was wary of suffering a similar fate.
ASU tried to close this game on cruise control, when it clearly needed another gear to dispatch this scrappy Mustang squad. The fear of that gear being nonexistent is a very real one, and the end result did not come without dire external consequences.
Armand Perry left the game on crutches, and Gump Hayes, Vilami Latu and Billy McGehee left the game due to unspecified injuries and didn't return in the second half.
Even workhorse Demario Richard (121 rushing yards, two touchdowns) was slow to get up after absorbing a big hit in the third quarter that caused the 46,500 in attendance to momentarily lose their breath.
This win came at a significant physical and emotional cost to a team that was in desperate need of regaining any semblance of positive mojo that would come as a byproduct of a convincing victory.
Should you start pounding the panic button now, ASU fans? Probably not, though a sense of genuine urgency (which seems to be masked in pure shock for the time being) and an honest internal self-evaluation definitely wouldn't hurt.
There's plenty of time to sell a playoff committee on this team but right now, no one's buying.
Some cupcake.
Reach the sports editor at smodrich@asu.edu or follow @StefanJModrich on Twitter.
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