ASU Football: First look at Washington

The Arizona State Sun Devils will be coming of their first loss of the Herm Edwards era. There will be another first as Edwards will coach his first Pac-12 game on Saturday. Edwards and the Sun Devils will travel to Seattle to face the 10th-ranked Washington Huskies.

Husky Stadium

Head coach Herm Edwards doesn’t like the bubble. But he said the bubble may be used to this week in practice to prepare for the crowd noise. The Huskies are 13-1 at home over the past two years, in short it’s a tough place to play.

Washington’s head coach Chris Petersen talked on Monday in his press conference about the advantage the hometown faithful gives them.

“That’s what it’s all about. When this place gets packed, huge advantage for us. Huge advantage for any team. You go into any stadium. That’s why I was so proud of our guys going into Utah,” Petersen said. “That’s really hard to weather that storm. It’s just another element that comes into the stadium, whether it’s wind or rain or noise and that energy. Over time it makes a difference. So it’s exciting to be home and hopefully be able to fill the stadium up. That’s when it is the greatest setting.”

From run-first to pass-first

Last week, the Sun Devils had the test against San Diego State, who focuses on relying on the run. Washington throws a lot more, but will have a lot more balanced attack. For instance, SDSU has 513 passing yards and 619 rushing yards through three games. The Huskies have 888 yards through the air and 469 yards on the ground.

“Well they’re a vertical team and they’re going to throw it down the field. They’ll take vertical shots similar to what we do. They got some explosive players but they’re very balanced. They can run the football,” Edwards said on Monday. “They rush it for about 156 yards per game so that’s gotta be a concern too. You watch our last (game) tape and we weren’t very good against the run. A lot of alignment errors and basically misses in tackles that allowed them big plays. Prior to that we were pretty good versus the run. We gotta get that corrected. They’re going to take their shots. They’ve got a veteran quarterback, good receivers. This is a good football team. They’ve been (ranked) inside the Top 10. It’s not by accident. They’re a good football team.”

It’ll be interesting to see if senior quarterback Jake Browning will have extra motivation after having a poor performance last year in Tempe. In the Sun Devils upset win, Browning went 17-for-30 for 139 yards.