ASU Football: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly vs. Washington

Good teams lose games occasionally, but for every bad loss there is a get right game to steady the ship.

For the elite teams in the Big 10, or the SEC, or the Big 12, tough games and cakewalks come in steady mixes. But for the Pac-12, every game should be a get right game.

And yet for the Arizona State Sun Devils, every game looks like it may be against a top 15 team fighting for a spot in its conference championship. The issue is, the Sun Devils opponents are lackluster, underperforming, pitiful teams with interim coaches in the midst of lost seasons.

Again, that was the case this past weekend. The 4-5 Washington Huskies, without now former head coach Jimmy Lake, gave the 7-3 preseason Rose Bowl shoe in Sun Devils all they could handle on a rainy Saturday in Seattle.

Like usual, there was a little bit of good (Rachaad White), a lot of bad, and a whole bunch of ugly.

The Good - Rachaad White

The ASU offense; Give Rachaad white 30 looks a game, hope he scores a bunch of touchdowns. White week in and week out has proven that he is the most important guy on the Sun Devils roster by a long shot.

White carried the ball 32 times, gashed the Huskies for 184 yards on the ground and two touchdowns while adding five receptions (which unsurprisingly led the Sun Devils) for 53 yards.

White makes a downright terrible offense with bad personal look good when he’s healthy. When he’s hurt, the Devils true colors come out, and everything looks hard.

White is that good, and without him the Sun Devils would be a lot worse than 7-3.

The Bad-The offense

Like I said above, without White, everything in Zak Hill’s offense looks hard. Every week it feels like the game plan is engineered to get as close to zero passing yards as possible. Jayden Daniels went 10 for 16 with 90 yards. Ninety? In modern day college football? You aren’t Army or Navy, you can throw the ball more than 16 times. Oh right, your offense stinks and you aren’t capable of doing so.

I feel like a broken record every week. Where are all the great weapons the coaches said we had? Where is the creativity and offensive diversity that Zak Hill apparently had when he came to Tempe? Where is it?

The Ugly - This season

Everything was set up for Herm Edward this season. The Pac-12 was bad, ASU had the most experienced roster in the conference, and they didn’t have to play Oregon in the regular season and they still couldn’t capitalize on the opportunity. With all the talk of “how hard it is” to be a top 25 team and how they still “have a lot to play for” all that can be taken out of that is that Edwards has been spewing nothing but loser talk.

Who cares if you make the Sun Bowl again in year four? Nobody. You had to will your way back into a game against a team in the midst of a lost season with an interim head coach and a whole lot of disappointment.