13 Things David Thinks: An Epic Fan Recap of a Tough Season
Regular commenter David did such a fine job wrapping up the frustrations of this season, that we’re re-running his comment as a post. Here are 13 things David thinks about the Sun Devils’ season — and off-season. (Scroll down for the official Echo from the Buttes take on last night’s game.)
Where to begin? There are so many fingers to point that I may not have enough space to put it all down. In no particular order …
1. Conditioning – This aspect of the program needs to get better and it needs to get better in a hurry. There are way too many players in this program that had nagging injuries affect them all season. The off-season conditioning needs to be looked at, including strength and stamina, and the in-season practice and conditioning regimen needs review. Hearing about all of these piddly little injuries started to sound like excuses.
2. Offensive line – The program is paying the price for the fact that Dirk Koetter was in way over his head and didn’t know how to recruit in the trenches. This group stinks and if there is any justice the entire lot of them will be thrown out and a group of five-star recruits will come in and take their places. I can’t believe how bad this offensive line is – this is ASU for God’s sake. Do you mean to tell me they can’t recruit decent offensive linemen? And as to the fact that they keep dropping like flies due to injury – see No. 1 above.
3. Blocking – It stinks, and I’m not talking about the offensive line. I’m talking about receivers who are afraid and incapable of playing physical. Did you see some of those “blocks” that ASU’s receivers tried to put on UA? I’m talking to you, Kerry Taylor. I’m talking about an 85-man roster that doesn’t have a fullback or a tight end. DE talks about running the ball but until he gets a fullback and a tight end then he is just blowing smoke.
4. Tight end – Remember when ASU used to have tight ends? I hate to say this but Rob Gronkowski is better than Todd Heap and Zach Miller. Meanwhile, ASU doesn’t have one on its roster. OK, maybe it does but he/they aren’t doing squat, which speaks volumes about the recruiting and/or play-calling.
5. Fullback – Get one! The red zone performance is pathetic over the last two years. Why? Because they can’t run the ball without a fullback. How hard can this be to figure out? Do you know why the so-called experts are so dismissive of comments on the Internet? Two reasons: 1) the truth hurts; 2) it reveals that it really isn’t that hard to coach football.
6. Pass Coverage – Do we coach pass coverage? No, ASU coaches the cover man to be in position to make the tackle, i.e., “bend but don’t break”, a.k.a. the girly-man defense. UA’s receivers and backs and TE were wide open all night, continuing a pattern that went on all season. Here is a coaching tip for Dennis Erickson – when your opponent has the ball inside the red zone and only needs a few yards for a first down you don’t line your DBs eight yards off the ball. Watch the game again and look at how ASU’s DBs are lined up – its a freaking joke. They might as well all have a sign on their backs that says, “I’m not fast enough, bright enough, or strong enough to cover you so I’m going to back way off and just hope that you don’t get behind me.” Hey Erickson, here’s another free tip. When you are near the goal line you don’t care about the receiver getting behind you – instead you want to keep him from getting in front of you.
7. ASU Students – A bunch of pansies. Look at the number of UA students who attend UA football games. Now compare this to the number of ASU students who attend ASU football games. And great job protecting the “A”.
8. Rudy Carpenter – Good riddance; a few years from now you’ll be a distant memory, just like the cancer formerly known as Ryan Kealy. You are arrogant, stupid, selfish, and out of shape. If it is possible you have gotten worse every year you played. Good luck in your future career bagging groceries or selling insurance. I hope that you are taking advantage of the education being paid for by the AZ taxpayers. Rudy, you are the Brett Wallace of ASU football. Why? Because you’re a jerk and you can’t deliver in the big game. This silver lining is this cloud is that attitude of the team ought to improve now that you (and players loyal to you) are flushed out of the system.
9. Rich Olson – Does everyone now understand why Miami fans were overjoyed when he left the Hurricanes? I’ve been following ASU football since the mid-60s and I have never seen a more unimaginative offense. Even the teams we beat had better offensive game plans than did ASU.
10. UNLV – No excuses; the ASU program ought to be ashamed of itself and the fans ought to get a refund for showing a ticket stub. This is every bit as bad as the New Mexico State debacle during the Bruce Snyder era or any of the bowl games in Hawaii.
11. Recruiting – So far I am not impressed. The recruiting this season is well on its way to being top-50, which helps us not one bit. Of the top-10 recruits in Arizona the Devils have only one of them. There are no four- or five-star recruits signed and no signs that we are leading for any recruits of this magnitude. It starts with recruiting – this program will never beat USC (or Cal or Oregon or Oregon State or Georgia or BYU) without better recruiting. Does anyone really think that Danny Sullivan or Samson Szakacsy or Chasen Stangel or Jack Elway is the answer at QB? Does anyone really think that Dmitri Nance or Shaun DeWitty is the answer at running back? Does anyone really think that Kerry Taylor or TJ Simpson is the answer at wide receiver?
12 Punter – For goodness sakes how hard can it be to sign a freaking punter. You are wasting one of the best kickers in the country by making him do double duty.
13. 2009 – Here is my prediction, which assumes that one of the QBs on the roster steps up and is able to play decent football (i.e., better than Kevin Craft at UCLA):
W – Idaho State
L – BYU
L – Georgia
L – Oregon State
W – Washington State
W – Washington
W – Stanford
L – Cal
L – USC
L – Oregon
W – UCLA (but this could go either way)
T – UA
Given that talent (lack thereof) and coaching (lack thereof) ASU will probably be 5-7 again, and there will be serious grumbling about Erickson. If one of the QBs doesn’t step up then ASU will be luck to finish 3-9.
What’s Your Take, Sun Devils?
What’d you take away from the game last night? What are your feelings on this season? Let us know in the comments below.
Wow. That was epic. I think you said everything that anyone could possibly say. Well done.
Wow, that is an epic rant. But, pretty much covers it!
I only have one disagreement with you David. I think we lose to an improved Stanford next year in Palo Alto. Your 3-9 is very realistic.
To me, the Dennis Erickson experiment is over. We have only won the games that we were expected to win, but have lost a few that we should have won – and been blown out in big games we wanted to win. As someone pointed out to me, we are 7-10 since the 2007 Oregon game.
Overall, I am mostly disappointed in how this team showed ZERO improvement all year long. That’s all on the coaching, not the players.
Sadly, I have nothing that leads me to be optimistic toward next season. I know I’m not alone. An empty Sun Devil Stadium will speak volumes.
Enough with the end of the world talk. Yes, things look pretty crappy right now, and there are a lot of unknowns going into next year. But keep in mind this is ASU we’re talking about, not some perennial Top 10 team that’s fallen off a cliff. Since Frank Kush retired, ASU is 201-145-4 is 30 seasons. (I apologize in advance if I’m off a game or two). That’s about 6.7 wins and 4.8 losses a year.
Over the past 30 years, the disappointing seasons outnumber the great ones. That’s just reality. It doesn’t mean you should be happy with mediocrity, but it also ridiculous to write off next year the day after this one ends. This is a 7-5 caliber program. 9-3 or 10-3 after a bowl is great, but odds there will be just as many 5-7 seasons.
I love the Devils, but lets just take a deep breath here.
I think/hope we might be overestimating the suckitude that’s awaiting the pitchfork nation over the 2009 season. In some general sense — I’m under the impression that the entire O-line was turned over from last year to this year, which means next year *shouldn’t* be as bad as this year. Whatever that means.
Whether the next qb steps up (and, really, this should be the biggest problem…shouldn’t it? Vasquez is valuable but at least Davis returns…Nixon is back…Bolden will hopefully, err, progress…there’s lots of athletes outside on O…etc.) — we shouldn’t be taking nearly as many negative plays as in these past years w/ Rudy getting mauled on a regular basis. Regardless of how green the next guy is gonna be…does anybody here feel ASU got *anything* out of the qb position this year? If there’s another team in the country that will lose a full-time starter (for, say, at least 20 games) that will feel less of a hit than ASU, I’d like to see ‘em. Famous last words, I know.
Prediction: UA will feel the qb dropoff next year more than ASU.
I see Gerald Munns still has some eligibility. Now if only we knew someone from his high school alma mater…maybe a prominent member of the ASU media community…who could convince him to focus entirely on football — whoever could do that would be a great man. Munns is a beast.
This team had the hyper-favorable schedule last year and got an inflated 10-2 regular season record. This team had a miserable schedule this year (only one good PAC team came to Tempe) and went 5-7. Well, it’s back to the favorable schedule (for the most part) next year, no? If the boys don’t take the pending Georgia beatdown to heart…we should be back to the upper half of the PAC-10.
Bienvenido a Hawaii? Maybe. I hope it’s not as bad as everyone thinks.
I am hoping that we will be pleasantly surprised by the 2009 edition of the Sun Devils. Personally, I say good riddance to Rudy. Even last year when we went 10-2, I found him to be unwatchable. Also, the biggest game he won, in my opinion, was the Insight Bowl, which really isn’t saying much. So, it is safe to say that I have never been a fan of his and I thought Koetter should have been fired the day he announced Rudy over Keller… the negative impact of that decision has resonnated for a long time.
Much like I have mentioned before, I have always been baffled by the fact that we do average 7-5 and opposed to 10-2. I know that Larry Marmie and Koetter were both marginal coaches but we have also had good coaching in John Cooper since the Kush era ended. What a shame, we couldn’t convince Cooper to stay here! The legacy he would have left might have been more epic than Kush’s.
As fans, I think we have the right to demand better. Historically, mediocre seasons like 7-5. 6-6, 5-7 hasn’t been ASU football (recently, yes). Those seasons resemble records from the the pathetic school from the south. We once had a tradition of being extremely dominant (having a great running game and a nasty D) and playing regularly on New Years’ Day.
Clearly, we have one of the best places to play football in America, play in a great conference, and not to mention have the hottest looking girls on campus. It should be easy to recruit players great players to come here. We should be reloading every year like USC, Florida, and Ohio St., et al and not constantly rebuilding. In fact, I am sick of rebuilding every year. It’s not like we are being decimated by the NFL.
Dennis Erickson: please bring back the tradition of winning before you either bolt for the NFL again or retire. We have been waiting patiently for a number of years, you have been hyped as a big name coach, and we simply expect results such as winning the PAC10 outright and going to a BCS Bowl . Is that too much to ask for?
One thing hasn’t changed during the past several seasons, and that is that being a Sun Devil fan is exhausting. I’m not trying to be negative or make an excuse for why we have all been so disappointed this season, but it is true.
Almost every season we start off ranked, and every year we get through NAU and a few other teams, then we drop off both the rankings list and the college football map after we lose to USC, Cal, or like this year shockingly go down to UNLV. As an alumna who bleeds maroon and gold and no longer lives in AZ, it’s absolutely embarrasing that people know our school more for the beautiful people and great weather than they know about our athletic teams (especially football, because we have deemed ourselves a football school).
Can’t we just beat USC ONCE, and surprise the football community? It’s like we’re cursed- in the past two years, Stanford and Oregon St have knocked off the Trojans. Every year, I think this is going to be the year that we finally beat them. But no, we come so close, and regardless of our OB, coach, O coordinator/ line we let it slip away.
This may sound dumb, but is our football team distracted by the attractive people, parties and general excitement about ASU football before the season? I guess I just don’t know what to think anymore, but someone needs to figure it out. We are one of the biggest schools in the country with great academic and great athletic programs, but we HAVE to find a way to be a Pac-10 and national powerhouse. It’s ridiculous.
That being said, good riddance, Rudy. I know that we’re looking for someone to blame, and that happens to be you, but you have been a large contributor to the failure that is this season. You aren’t a leader in any sense of the word, I’ve heard bad things internally about your relationships with the players (especially the freshman who couldn’t or maybe just didn’t want to protect you on the o line this year) and you have gradually gotten worse over the past couple of years. It really is a shame.
Looking forward now to Hoops…
I understand people’s frustration and I too am a little concerned about Erickson getting a free pass.
He failed to recognize and counter the weakness of our team until right before the Oregon State game. He should’ve known early on that the OL was broken and that he had to use the two-TE sets that finally got some semblance of a running game going. Unfortunately, once he did recognize and adjust, injuries knocked out some of the promising young linemen that helped turn the offense around.
But, yeah, I’m not ready to jump off a bridge or fire him or anything. I am looking forward to being distracted by hoops and baseball for a few months and then taking another run at the upper half of the conference next fall.
Yes, what a lot of you guys are asking for is too much to expect.
As a general rule I think, in sports, expecting something to be vastly different than a standard set of a period of 30 years is usually foolish (as the stupid Arizona Cardinals go and prove to be an exception to my rule, but I digress).
Do you know how many of the top 150 recruits in America are from Arizona? Exactly three, according to ESPNU. Top 150 players… three from Arizona.
And how many programs succeed by building almost solely from talent out of state? Oklahoma, perhaps, but most of their players are from Texas, and Texas – Dallas and northward – is as much UO territory as anything.
ASU can put together a nice nucleus of players from in state to build depth, but they can’t reasonably rely on those players to be stars. Your skill-position players are going to have to come from elsewhere, and one of two things has to happen there. Either you’ve got to get an elite player to spurn his hometown team, or you get Sean Avery’s favorite term after the USCs and Texases have picked through all the good fruit.
Your anger toward the incoming talent at ASU shouldn’t just be aimed at Sun Devils coaches. You should be saving some for the high school coaches that aren’t producing BCS-level talent out of the fourth-biggest metropolitan area in the country. (And not to badly quibble the point, but according to ESPNU, ASU actually has verbals from TWO of the top 10 in Arizona, Kody Kobensky from Saguaro and Anthony Rose from Marcos.)
It’s nice if you want to be like Florida or Texas or Southern California or Ohio State, but the problem with that logic is that those teams can pretty well build from high school kids in Florida, Texas, southern California and Ohio.
I think Erickson got way too much credit last year, and way too much blame this year. The way some people were ready to canonize him last year was ridiculous, but it’s equally silly to say that he’s already on the hot seat. Hopefully he will realize that changes need to be made and will be willing to ask himself the tough questions about how he wants to run this program and maybe get out of his comfort zone with respect to his assistants.
Living in Florida, I agree with you in terms of UF and others being able to build their program primarily from the Florida high schools. However, if you take some of other programs, they tend to recruit well locally and nationally. Alot of them seem make an effort to recruit Florida very well. I am surprised DE, through his experience @ Miami, isn’t tapping more into FL. Note that , Ohio St.’s top skill players are either from PA or Florida and not Ohio.
Also, keep in mind that prior to Pete Carroll, we were beating USC and UCLA for some of the really good players from Southern California. Also, we used to recruit very well in PA and other places… There is no reason why we couldn’t do that again. Likewise, there are a number of players that USC, et al are passing on who are excellent football players.
Some times, its a matter of producing good coaching and building team chemistry. For instance, I was never really blown away by the 1996 team because of their gifted skill but their team chemistry was unbelievable!
I suppose we argue this all day, and I don’t want to be a jerk and belabor little points because I respect your overall point, Tom (that there’s no excuse for recruiting poorly), but since we’re on the discussion…
OSU only has 8 players from Florida on the whole roster, and all but one are freshmen or sophomores, which probably has something to do with OSU playing for national championships lately. Furthermore, they have only two from California and one from Texas. That ain’t much of a national recruiting base.
For skill positions, they carry 11 running backs, and 10 are from Ohio, including Beanie Wells. They carry 16 WRs and 12 are from Ohio (including Robiske — and, for good measure, Troy Smith, Ginn and Gonzalez were all from Cleveland). They have 4 QBs, and 2 are from Ohio (including Todd Boeckman) and then Pryor, who is something of a special case anyway, is from just outside Pittsburgh, only 3 hours from Columbus.
OSU has 112 players listed on their roster, and 72 (64 percent) are from Ohio alone.
Yeah, there probably are kids all around the country dying to go play for the big schools — including OSU — but go look at the BCS bowl rosters… those teams are largely built in-state (except, to a degree, Utah, obviously).
I don’t mean to go pointing fingers and disagreeing with you, it’s just that it seems to be a common idea that big teams recruit nationally. Sure, they can get some big stars from other places, but the bulk of their rosters are local.
And ASU just doesn’t have a lot of good local talent around.
I can’t comment on Rudy Carpenter because I haven’t met him, but Brett Wallace is not a jerk, by any stretch of the imagination.
That comment was incredibly unwarranted.
Let’s not jump of the butte. Yes this season sucked but let’s not forget the total number of either Red Shirt Freshman or True Freshman that played.
The Dennis experiement wil get another couple years to see how his recruits play. Last years class was top 20 does anyone remember that.
Let’s see how this class finishes up. A bunch of big names are in town this weekend to see ASU. Hopefully the Dennis charm will get them to be Sun Devils!
One amazing season and one terrible one, as hard as this season was on my nerves we need to have some patience.
Go Devils!
[...] regular commenter David’s legendary post after football season ended will lead directly to better conditioning, the use of a fullback, and for the Sun Devils to “sign [...]