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ASU Football: Week 1 Twitter Mailbag

We take your questions about key players, win totals and more in this week's mailbag.

By Ryan Bafaloukos
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

With the Arizona State football season rolling around, we thought we would start a new weekly column where we answer your questions about all things ASU. We came up with the obvious and original name of Twitter Mailbag.

If you would like to submit a question, shoot us a tweet and our writers will answer here every Friday during the season.

Ryan Bafaloukos: The easy answer here for the ASU offense is Demario Richard. Richard stepped up last season, compiling over 1,000 yards on the ground and stepped up during the offseason as a leader off the field. Richard figures to be the focal point of the ASU offense, at least he should be the focal point of the offense.

Other names that came to mind on offense were Tim White and Kalen Ballage and don't be surprised if freshman N'Keal Harry has a huge first season in Tempe.

Defensively there are quite a few names that I thought of going with including Christian Sam, Salamo Fiso, JoJo Wicker and Kareem Orr. I am going to go with Sam as the best defensive player for the Sun Devils. He just does so much for the ASU defense and he might be the top draft prospect on this team.

RB: In our annual preseason media roundtable, I predicted 6-6 for the Sun Devils in 2016. I have seen ASU picked to finish anywhere from 5-7 to 8-4 depending on which publication you read. The point is, expectations are not high for ASU this season, which is actually when the team seems to succeed the most if you look back at their history.

I think the good comparison I saw is to Todd Graham's first season in Tempe in 2012. ASU had a quarterback battle in fall camp and relatively low expectations. That team finished 7-5 in the regular season with a win over Arizona and a bowl win over Navy to get them to eight wins. I think something similar would be a success this season.

RB: This is a really good question. In today's college football quarterbacks rarely wait around especially ones that had a lot of options out of high school. Best case for ASU is Wilkins has three successful years at ASU I think you could logically assume both Brady White and Dillion Sterling-Cole would be transfer risks if that were to happen.

That being said, we have not seen Wilkins throw a pass in a collegiate game. There are a lot of unknowns and I wouldn't be surprised if we saw White against NAU and then again at points during the course of the season.

On the bright side, the ASU quarterback position has never been deeper and it will only get better with Ryan Kelley coming into the fold for the 2017 season.

RB: Todd Graham was very complimentary of his kicking units on Monday, with Zane Gonzalez and Matt Haack returning this season. Gonzalez will likely become ASU's all-tim leading scorer in 2016 and Haack has improved in each of his seasons in Tempe. There is no reason to believe that the kicking game will take a step back in 2016 (no pun intended).

As far is kick coverage goes, it will be hard to tell that until we see this team on the field. Plenty of new faces on both coverage units.

RB: David to be honest with you we are trying. The majority of our staff is still in school and some of them work other jobs on top of school and HoS. I think we are taking big steps to start this academic year. We have covered ASU volleyball and women's soccer thus far and we just hired a golf writer. We will also cover swim and dive when the time comes so I think you will see a lot more olympic sports coverage on the site this year than ever before.

RB: Not touching this question from former editor Nick Krueger.

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