(Photo: Scotty Bara/WCSN)
Todd Graham needed this.
He needed it so bad he called for a surprise onside kick in the first half; so desperately that he threw the ball on a third down late in the fourth quarter, in a moment a more conservative coach would have tried to bleed the clock and yield to punt.
Graham’s action Saturday night made it clear. As he put it, he and his team “needed a big win like this.”
“That’s just what I felt,” he said, simplifying his answer after struggling to try and explain his risk-taking rationale. “I felt like we needed to be aggressive in those situations because we needed a win.”
If the 2014 win over Notre Dame is the pinnacle moment of Graham’s ASU career, Saturday night’s 37-35 upset of No. 24 Oregon might be the night that begins his climb back to the top. Without it, the sixth season of the head coach’s tenure could have been sent spiraling out of control.
A 1-3 record would have been the school’s worst four game start since 1994. Another stumble to Oregon would have meant 9 ASU defeats in its last 10 games.
How doomed this season would have looked – and how inevitable Graham’s firing would have felt – if they lost again this week.
But all of those deleterious eventualities have been put aside for now. When Graham needed it most, his team came through.
“Our plan to win here is very specific. It’s written all over the walls, how we go about doing things,” Graham said. “It’s just about us adapting. Keep adapting. Keep learning. Keep your head down. Ignore the noise. Just stay focused on what we are doing, because at the end of the day I feel like we’ve got a lot of heart, got a lot of character, and we got good players.”
His junior quarterback and locker room leader Manny Wilkins had another superb performance, throwing for 347 yards and accounting for 3 touchdowns. His budding superstar receiver N’Keal Harry had a career best 170 receiving yards. Even his true freshman kicker Brandon Ruiz, who had missed two field goals already this season, went a perfect 3 for 3 including knocking through a game-winning 41-yard kick in the fourth quarter.
“Matter of fact I almost didn’t kick the field goal,” Graham said with a laugh after the game. “That would not have been very smart.”
ASU’s defense also showed an edge unseen over the first three games. Despite facing the third-highest scoring offense in the country, the Sun Devils limited Oregon to only 35 points, coming up with two key stops down the stretch to safeguard the two-point lead. They let the Ducks convert just one 3rd down all night.
“Everybody made some really good plays tonight,” Wilkins said. “I think our effort, when we watch it on film, you’re going to see how hard we really played tonight. That’s what I was really proud to see.”
ASU is nowhere near out of the woods yet. Meetings with conference powers Stanford, Washington, Utah and USC are still on the horizon. But for at least one night, Graham’s team found a way to win, a feat not achieved in conference play since early last October.
Coming into Saturday’s game, things around the program were looking bleak. A big fan of MMA, the ASU coach sounded like he was facing the same ultimatum as a fighter pinned to the mat: Tap out or find a way to recover.
He did the latter.
“We’d been getting beat on,” he said, punching his hands together behind the post-game podium. “We (got) up off the ground. Don’t start trying to go to the scorecard.”
It started with the onside kick. ASU had just gone back in front 14-7 courtesy of a touchdown pass from Wilkins to Harry. On the ensuing kickoff, Ruiz ran up to the ball like normal, but slowed down just in time to subtly squib it with his foot, sending it bouncing off the grass only yards in front of him.
Oregon’s kick return unit was blind-sided, already halfway turned to start running downfield to set up blocks. By the time they recovered, Sun Devils freshman Evan Fields was already on the ball.
Fail to recover that kick, and Oregon would have had a short field and an easy chance at points. Instead, it was ASU stealing a field goal to establish a ten-point lead, a multi-score margin that helped the Sun Devils hold off the Ducks’ second half comeback bid.
Not all of Graham’s risky decisions worked out. In the fourth quarter, ASU didn’t convert on a fourth down try near midfield. Then, Wilkins threw an incompletion when the team could have run the ball; that would have forced Oregon to burn its final timeout or watch precious seconds tick off the clock.
But in sticking with the aggressive approach, Graham’s intent was certain. A close loss wouldn’t have cut it; he needed his knockout punch.
“I’m going to make those calls myself because I want to be aggressive at how it fits the personality of the team,” he said.
Graham preached this week that conference play is what really matters. ASU’s two non-conference losses lit aflame the underside of his head coach’s chair in Tempe this month, but he was content to write the defeats off as “preseason” setbacks.
Beating previously unbeaten Oregon helps sell that message.
“I thought our guys needed some energy,” Graham said. “They needed some things like that to push us over the edge.”
Whether or not Saturday’s win was the start of a program turnaround won’t be known until the season’s end. What was important about beating Oregon is that it gives the Sun Devils a chance to reset, their head coach included.
“We’re 1-0, so we are excited,” he said.
Graham made the same claim after last month’s season-opening win over New Mexico State. This new start, though, could be different.
“When you go have a win like that,” he said, “it does something.”
That something might be enough to save him from what was once a seemingly inevitable firing. Graham gambled it all, but he got the win he absolutely needed.
