Brad Cesmat
After being thoroughly whipped by Texas A&M, Arizona State has two weeks to clean up the issues on special teams and offense. Arizona was sloppy in their opener against UTSA, but found a way to win even without their best player on the field.
This Saturday the Wildcats travel to Reno to play the Nevada Wolf Pack. On the surface this should be a blowout, but the Wildcats will be without the 2014 Pac-12 defensive player of the year, Scooby Wright, who went down with a knee injury and won’t be back till the first of October at the earliest.
The Cats didn’t have two of their talented receivers, Samajie Grant and Trey Griffey last week. Their starting left tackle Freddie Tagaloa was missing too. Add it all up and I thought Arizona played like it was a first game. Sloppy in some places, pretty good in others.
Arizona State plays late this Saturday night(8pm) against Cal Poly.
This is more about Arizona State competing against themselves than the opponent. Anyone who didn’t think that the Sun Devils were badly outplayed last week by the Aggies, needs to remove their maroon and gold-colored glasses.
Todd Graham needs to restore order for his team the next two weeks before meeting USC in the Pac-12 South opener on the 26th. The goal now is clean up all the bad stuff(and there was plenty of that Saturday) and be razor sharp in conference play.
The offensive tackles for ASU really struggled against the speed of A&M. These next two games are about trying to plug the holes on the line and also trying to put the “special” back into special teams.
Both the Wildcats and Sun Devils should roll this week, but these are the types of games that need to be played much cleaner than the opening weekend.
