(Photo: Brady Klain/WCSN)
Down 40-21. 15 minutes left to play. In enemy territory.
In what has become the identity of the Arizona State football team (7-5, 5-4 Pac-12) under Herm Edwards, the Sun Devils never blinked.
They kept fighting, they kept battling, they kept believing, and they rode those emotions all the way to one of the most thrilling victories in Territorial Cup history, knocking off the Arizona Wildcats (5-7, 4-5 Pac-12) 41-40.
Rivalry games are always filled with emotions which is what makes them so memorable, but they boiled over in this contest before the teams even suited up in pads.
Two separate skirmishes broke out during pregame warmups, with players and coaches from both sides getting involved with one another, seriously enough that uniformed police officers were stationed on the 50-yard line throughout the remainder of warmups.
“They were talking a lot of s***, I had coaches coming up to me talking c***, and you know, that’s just ignorant,” quarterback Manny Wilkins said post-game. “I told the team, I said, ‘Listen, they’re gonna start talking trash, they’re gonna start doing all this… so when they start talking, take a step back and look him in his eyes like a psychopath. Just stare at him. And he’ll know what type of time we’re on.’ That’s what we did.”
True to the words of their quarterback, the Sun Devils let their play on the field do the talking.
“We just stayed poised, trusted the game plan, there was nobody pointing fingers when something went wrong,” Wilkins said. “And that’s why we finished with one more point than they did.”
In order to finish with one more point than the hated rivals from down south, a series of unusual events had to unfold for the Sun Devils to claw their way back into this one.
Following a Brandon Ruiz field goal to cut the deficit to 40-24 less than two minutes into the fourth and a Wilkins touchdown run combined with a Tommy Hudson two-point conversion catch, ASU found themselves down eight with just over six and a half minutes to play.
“If you think about our football team, if you really look at it, this whole season we play in games like this where it’s one score,” Edwards said. “Do the math… We’re very comfortable there. We’re not in panic mode.”
“I kept saying it on the sideline, ‘Just get it within a score. Just get it within a score.'”
Cue the madness.
On a third-and-ten from his own 23, Arizona quarterback Khalil Tate tried to scramble out of the pocket and make a play down the field, but ASU’s freshman cornerback Aashari Crosswell jumped in front of his pass and returned it to the Arizona 22.
“[Crosswell] doesn’t understand how big of a play he just made,” Wilkins said. “In a Territorial Cup, in the situation that we were in, as a seventeen, eighteen-year-old kid he just doesn’t understand. 30 years down the road, people are going to remember him.”
“Can’t say enough about that young guy, made a bunch of plays today in pass coverage,” Edwards said.
The Sun Devils turned the Crosswell interception into three more points before getting another turnover on a Tyler Johnson forced fumble against Wildcat running back J.J. Taylor on the ensuing drive.
Eno Benjamin took the very next snap 22 yards for the go-ahead score. 41-40 Arizona State.
Despite having just 42 yards rushing in total at halftime and being bottled up for large portions of the game, the Sun Devils never lost faith in what had gotten them to this point.
“We stayed with it,” Benjamin said. “All it takes is one play to pop everything open. That’s what I was telling [Wilkins] while we were sitting on the sideline. Like he said, there was no one pointing fingers, there was no one not trusting the game plan, I put our trust in our coaches and they came through for us.”
The Sun Devils were able to hold off a last-ditch comeback attempt by the Wildcats, as senior kicker Josh Pollack pushed a 45-yard game winning attempt wide right in his final game at Arizona Stadium, with Wilkins and the offense needing just one snap to run out the final 11 seconds.
In a season that started with so much uncertainty and went through more ups and downs than the greatest of roller coasters, the one core piece of this new Sun Devil regime’s mindset rang truer than ever on the field in Tucson on Saturday.
“Everything we do in this program is about competing, they compete until the very end,” defensive coordinator Danny Gonzales said. “The team that plays the hardest the longest wins. And that was what took place tonight.”
Bobby Kraus is a football beat writer for the Walter Cronkite Sports Network. You can follow him on Twitter @bobbykraus22
