ASU Football: Sun Devils hoping up-tempo offense leads to bowl berth

(Photo: Nicholas Badders/WCSN)

After beginning last week’s loss at UCLA with a punt, Arizona State’s offense cranked up the pace.

Two drives later, the Sun Devils had 14 points on the board in the Rose Bowl. They went fast. They found the end zone.

ASU hasn’t been an out-and-out “tempo” team this year, but coach Todd Graham thinks a pacier offense could be key to getting a bowl-clinching sixth win in the season’s final weeks.

He liked the way his offense played early against UCLA.

“Tempo, to me, you’ve seen it in the first half of that UCLA game,” he said. “That was relentless tempo working.”

On back-to-back drives in the first quarter, ASU needed only 18 combined plays and a little more than six minutes of possession to mow down 113 yards and two touchdowns. They went fast between snaps, keeping UCLA’s defense off balance and unable to stop the run.

After Demario Richard scored a 2-yard touchdown run to stretch ASU’s lead to two scores, Graham excitedly turned to offensive coordinator Billy Napier.

“Now, that is tempo,” the head coach said.

“I’ve got you coach,” Napier responded.

Only, the rhythmic tempo faded.

A UCLA pick-six on ASU’s next drive helped squelch the pace and change the game’s moment. The Sun Devils labored on offense the rest of the night.

Though they kept running the ball well, the Devils struggled to sustain drives without big plays or a suffocating pace. Trailing most of the second half, ASU was also forced to throw the ball more, slowing their between snap routines. When they did piece together positive possessions, they couldn’t finish, three times coming up short in the red zone.

As soon as ASU’s pace went away, so did its ability to keep pace with UCLA’s high-scoring offense.

With two games left this year, Graham wants his team to get back to playing with tempo. What worked early against the Bruins needs to work over the entirety of ASU’s final games.

“We’re a tempo team, and we’re starting to get that,” Graham said. “That’s allowing us to be more effective running the football. I think when we weren’t effective running the football, it’s because we weren’t able to run tempo.”

Napier sees the pay-off too.

“I think varying tempo and managing tempo throughout the game is critical,” he said. “If we are able to get some tempo started and it affects the opponent like it did early in that game, I think it is an advantage for us.”

Graham said that running a tempo offense has been a core component of his tenure in Tempe. Past quarterbacks – like Taylor Kelly – helped instill a successful, quick-pace style.

“That was how we were able to have our most success offensively,” Graham said. “…I think that’s why Taylor Kelly’s value was so high. He understood that. He understood how to activate the other 10 guys and to get the tempo going.”

That responsibility now belongs to Manny Wilkins.

“When I get a call in from the sideline that we are running a certain tempo play, it’s my job to yell at them, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ I think we did a really good job of that,” the junior signal caller said. “You see how much it affected UCLA at the beginning of the game.”

Defensive coordinator Phil Bennett knows the different impacts that a quick-paced offense can have on a team’s defense. At Baylor, his most recent job, he had to manage games that sometimes had over 200 total plays.

Asked how the Sun Devils offense compares to Baylor’s, Bennett said, “It doesn’t.”

“We’re not as fast as those guys,” he added.

That might be by design.

“Everybody in the country’s talking about tempo, but not everybody does it the same way,” Graham said.

Instead, he wants an attack that can be sustained, something ASU couldn’t do against UCLA.

“One of the things that we needed to try to maintain was to be able to play four quarters of tempo like that,” he said.

It is what ASU couldn’t do against UCLA.

There is also a fine balance between moving quick and playing too fast.

“You can’t go so fast to the point where your defense is always on the field,” Wilkins said. “It causes people to miss assignments because they are fatigued. You’ve got to mix and match and find the fine tune of it.”

But when done right, ASU can get results like last week’s first quarter. It’s a level of play the Sun Devils might need in order to avoid a second straight postseason-less campaign.

“I like what works. If tempo is working that’s what I like,” offensive line coach Rob Sale said. “Sometimes when they start playing tempo and [the defense] is not lined up, there are benefits of that too. But, tempo was very beneficial. I think we need to use it.”

Graham thinks it could spark a dormant big-play passing game back to life too. After ASU faced 22 third downs last week, the Sun Devils are searching for more chuck plays. A more consistent execution of offensive tempo might be the last component to a more consistent offense.

“We’ve got to get a little bit more explosive,” Graham said. “It’s too hard to score on 16-play drives all the time.”

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