Arizona State football positively reflects on rollercoaster season after Territorial Cup Defeat

(Photo: Evan Barcanic/WCSN)

TEMPE – When members of the Arizona State football team walked into Mountain America Stadium ahead of he 99th iteration of the Territorial Cup, they knew the potential to repeat as Big 12 Champions hung in the balance.

An opportunity to defend their title was in their hands.

A win over Arizona would’ve put the Sun Devils one step closer to Arlington, Texas, only awaiting a UCF upset victory.

A Knights’ victory Saturday morning might be unlikely – ESPN’s matchup predictor gives No.11 BYU a 93.6% chance of pulling out on top, but the game offered a sliver of hope if ASU could take care of business at home.

Instead of waking up to watch that game in angst and excitement, Sun Devil fans will wake up on Saturday knowing all hope is anguished.

No. 20 Arizona State (8-4, 6-3 Big 12) struggled mightily against No. 25 Arizona. The Wildcats outgained the Sun Devils 374 yards to 214, won the turnover battle 5-1, and when the clock showed zeroes across the board for the final time, they had won 23-7.

“One moment does not define a football team,” ASU head coach Kenny Dillingham said. “It sucks. It defines being able to talk s— for a year, which that sucks, because I can’t, but it does not define the direction we’re going in. It does not define the excitement that was in that stadium. It does not define our players.”

One moment might not define a season, but a loss to an arch-rival isn’t an easy pill to swallow.

A year removed from beating Arizona 49-7 in Tucson, Dillingham’s Sun Devils capped off their first 10-win season in over a decade. High expectations the following year were a guarantee; in addition, Friday night’s matchup was the first time that both parties were ranked since 2014. That was the last time ASU won 10 games in one year, but the No. 11 Wildcats beat the No. 13 Sun Devils 42-35. Setting the stage for Friday’s affair to become the most important Territorial Cup game in recent memory.

A season ago, ASU jumped out to a 14-0 lead in the first quarter against U of A. This year, however, not only did the Sun Devils not score, they only registered 15 yards of offense after controlling the ball for 3:41.

Miraculously, ASU didn’t fall behind in the first quarter, and even got the first lead of the game in the second, as redshirt senior quarterback Jeff Sims scampered into the end zone for a 27-yard rushing touchdown.

As the game continued, though, the five turnovers, all involving Sims, stalled the offense. In his last game at Mountain America Stadium, he found opposing defensive players’ arms three times, fumbled once and was involved in a rare team fumble, when a handoff attempt to redshirt junior running back Raleek Brown went wrong.

“Clearly, we started slow, and the result was 23-7,” redshirt senior Chamon Metayer said. “We got to help the defense out. … We just failed tonight, that’s more on us than them. (The) defense gave us a fighting chance every time.

The turnovers forced the defense to stay on the field for 40 minutes of game action, and put them in tough field positions time and time again. The unit did what it could, recording six tackles for loss and a forced fumble, but you can only allow so many turnovers before they come back to bite you.

“You can’t have five turnovers,” Dillingham said. “That’s pretty (much) it. All the other stuff is kind of irrelevant.”

The loss is a tough pill to swallow, eliminating the Sun Devils from a chance at the conference championship and giving them a worse record than the one they had a season prior. On paper, that’s a step in the wrong direction, but context is everything.

When Dillingham took over the program in 2023, the team had to take a self-imposed bowl ban due to the actions of the previous regime, and finished 3-9. Now, the team is a bowl win away from 20 wins in the past two seasons.

Rome wasn’t built overnight, and neither will ASU’s football program, but everything is trending in the right direction.

“This is as low as you can get,” Dillingham said. “But, to put it in perspective, we’d all say ‘yes,’ if I said, even if we didn’t have a season last year, if we just said, ‘Year three, we’d be 8-4,’ people would be like, ‘Yup, we’ll sign up for that.’”

Friday night’s affair also isn’t the last time this iteration of the Sun Devils will take the field. Arizona State will play in a bowl game sometime during the months of December or January. Where they’ll go and who they’ll face is still up in the air, but the Sun Devils will play again.

When they take that field, Sims will still be the man under center, and despite disappointing performance against U of A – 11-of-25 passing (44%), 114 yards, three interceptions and a fumble – his teammates know he’ll be ready to perform.

“I believe Jeff has the character trait of picking himself up,” Metayer said. “You open social media (people are) trying to bring him down, and some way, he still finds a way to show up every day. There’s nothing he can’t bounce back from.”

Regardless of the result when the Sun Devils play their bowl game and the extent to which Sims bounces back, the program is still building in a positive direction under Dillingham.

College football is a ruthless landscape, though, which makes it all the more important that Dillingham has a roadmap for the team’s successes to carry on.

“I think we have to do a good job evaluating people, and keep looking for who we should add in the program,” Dillingham said. “I think we’re going to have a really good chance to get really good players to add to the program. We’ve done this before, where we had to go get a lot of players. The difference is our depth, and I really like the young guys we have in our program. I feel really good about the guys we’ve signed, and I think those guys are going to get better and better.”

Friday might’ve been a dark day, but the future is still bright.