If you didn’t make it to Saturday’s ASU football game, you have probably been deceived.
You might have looked at the score and thought, “Wow, we won by three touchdowns. No surprise, it was Northern Arizona!”
The 41-20 win may have made you think, “Bring on Wisconsin!”
You couldn’t be more wrong.
Saturday’s win was, at times, hard to watch. Between endless penalties (13 for 131 yards) and dropped passes, this looked like the team that won just four games last season.
Coach Dennis Erickson called the effort “sloppy” and the penalties “ridiculous.” And if a head coach isn’t singing his team’s praises after a three-touchdown victory, there is clearly a problem.
The student section often starts clearing out at halftime, but usually only when ASU is up a lot or down a lot. This one was close — just seven points separated the two teams — and still half of the gold-clad students thought shots and beer pong were more worth their time.
If NAU had won this game, they certainly would have deserved it. With a little more depth (they are allowed 22 fewer scholarships than ASU), the Lumberjacks just might have walked out of Tempe with a win.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re happy the Sun Devils pulled it out and moved to 2-0, but the slapdash showing we saw Saturday doesn’t exactly build our confidences about having to take on the No. 11 Wisconsin Badgers in their own territory next weekend.
The atmosphere at Camp Randall Stadium in Madison will be brutal. The 80,000-plus capacity stadium will be packed with Badger red. ASU isn’t exactly accustomed to sell-out crowds, let alone those of the football-rabid Big Ten Conference.
Put simply, this game will almost certainly spell out what kind of team the 2010 Sun Devils are.
A win would give good reason to believe this team will be bowl-bound. It would make us believe the team has a shot against teams like Oregon and Southern California.
A loss would make us think that we could be in for another long season of trudging through an unforgiving record.
While we understand that not just anyone can strap on pads and play Division I football, we don’t understand how a team keeps making the same silly mistakes week after week. Erickson doesn’t seem to have an answer either.
Throwing an interception or dropping a pass is one thing, but costing your team 15 yards because you lost your cool and got an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty is another.
Despite it all, there were some positives in this game.
Junior wide receiver Mike Willie looked fantastic. Redshirt junior quarterback Steven Threet passed for almost 400 yards to go with three touchdowns. And sophomore linebacker Vontaze Burfict was ferocious on defense despite his continuing difficulty with controlling his emotions.
That’s all well and good, but it’s going to take more than that to top UW on the road. Unless the Sun Devils want to (for some reason) read the inevitable corny headlines about how they were “Badgered” by Wisconsin or “mauled by the Badgers,” they better get on the same page.
