The Sun Devils almost wrote a hell of a story

Arizona State took on Texas , determined to give the CFP the upset story it needed, but fell short in overtime.

Kenny Dillingham

Arizona State University is unmistakable. It has over 57,000 students on its Tempe campus and another 62,000 in the world of online education that it has helped pioneer. It has a $4.1 billion operating budget. It also has the reputation of underwriting the operating budget of several liquor conglomerates, thanks to weekend activities on Mill Street. Its athletic alumni include Barry Bonds, Reggie Jackson and Phil Mickelson.

On Wednesday, ASU came frustratingly close to another distinction. College football had been clamoring for a Cinderella, an underdog in a sport where superior size, speed and resources are always the way to bet. The crazy upset has been the lifeblood of the NCAA tournament, but football is no country for a Gonzaga or a Butler or even a UMBC. Yet the Sun Devils were playing that role against Texas. In doing so, they were doing their best to justify the new, 12-team College Football Playoff.

They were down 24-8 in the fourth quarter when Cam Skattebo, their Incredible Bulk, began to burst out of his uniform. The fifth-place finisher in the Heisman Trophy voting threw a touchdown pass, caught Sam Leavitt’s pass to set up the Sun Devils, and when Texas tried to throw up a wall on the goal line, Skattebo battered his way into the other side. Throw up? Yeah, Skattebo was doing some of that, too, during plays. He said later his stomach felt “sloshy.” Steve Sarkisian, the Texas coach, wasn’t feeling so good himself. Arizona State had just tied it with five minutes left.

It got wilder. Bert Auburn, one of the most experienced kickers in college football, missed two would-be game-winners for Texas. Leavitt opened the first overtime by darting 16 yards on a third-and-14, setting up another head-first touchdown by Skattebo. The Longhorns had to score to stay alive, and All-American tackle Kelvin Banks made that more difficult by false-starting and setting up fourth-and-13. But Quinn Ewers, the Fansville star, coolly lofted a 28-yard TD pass to Matthew Golden, who had slipped past Arizona State defenders, and not for the first time.

Before Arizona State could properly digest this gut-punch, Ewers was firing another touchdown pass to tight end Gunnar Helm on the first play of Overtime 2. When Alfred Mukuba stepped in to intercept Leavitt and clinch the 39-31 win, Longhorns’ fans didn’t know whether to party or recuperate. “It was like one of those NCAA March Madness games,” Sarkisian said later. “All those swings of emotion.”

Kenny Dillingham’s emotions don’t swing, they lurch, and there was no reeling them in when this one ended. Specifically, the 34-year-old coach felt his Sun Devils got forked at the end of regulation. Arizona State had a third-and-15 when Leavitt threw to Melquan Stovall, who was blasted by Texas’ Michael Taaffe. Even though Stovall fit the definition of a “defenseless receiver” and absorbed a hard shot to the head, the officials reviewed it and declined to call targeting. That’s a first down near midfield if targeting is called, with a minute left in a tie game. Veteran NFL referee Terry McCauley disagreed, though not as intensely as Dillingham.

“I don’t know what targeting is,” Dillingham said, but he knew that nickelback Shamari Simmons had missed the first half of this game because he had been whistled for targeting in the Big 12 Championship, and Ewers had taken advantage, as he built the Texas lead.

Beyond that, Texas needed this win almost as much as the CFP needed the dramatics. In the seven games so far, the average score is 37-19, and that includes this game. Ohio State followed this up with a 41-21 carpet-bombing of Oregon, the only undefeated team and the resident No. 1. At one point in the second quarter, Ohio State freshman Jeremiah Smith had caught passes for 161 yards, and Oregon had 60 yards total. Dillon Gabriel was sacked eight times by Ohio State, and, for all the Oregon pass rushers knew, Buckeyes’ quarterback Will Howard spent the entire day throwing passes from the Hollywood sign.

The Buckeyes aren’t the team Oregon should have been playing this early in the tournament, and they also seemed to profit from playing a first-round game, as Penn State did in its Fiesta Bowl win over Boise State. We’ll see if Notre Dame has the same advantage when it plays Georgia Thursday in the Sugar Bowl, which was moved back a day after the unspeakable events of Wednesday morning on Bourbon Street. Georgia and Oregon — and for that matter Arizona State — had been off since Dec. 7.

If you went back to a 4-team playoff or even settled for an 8-team, you wouldn’t have such rest disparities. There would be no need for byes. A simple ASU online math class would explain the phenomenon of numbers that are a geometric sequence beginning with two, four and eight. Unfortunately, the CFP is likely to solve this by going to 16 teams someday. After all, that’s how it works in the era of grade inflation.

The irony is that Ohio State probably would have missed the boat in a 4-team format. It had lost to Oregon and then folded against Michigan in the season finale. At that point, the selection committee might have leaned toward Georgia, Oregon, Notre Dame and Texas, even though Texas had lost twice to Georgia. Of course, Ohio State might have brought a little more zeal to the Michigan game had it known it would need to win it. As it turned out, that loss seemingly meant nothing and had no consequences, except for the food-taster that Buckeyes coach Ryan Day had to consider hiring. But on Wednesday the Buckeyes said they couldn’t have reached these heights without losing their fourth consecutive game to their blood rivals. As cornerback Davison Igbinosun said, “We needed That Team Up North to beat us,” according to Columbus Dispatch columnist Rob Oller.

Meanwhile, Arizona State won national respect and would have traded every drop for a trip to the semifinals. The Sun Devils were 4-2 after a 24-14 loss to Cincinnati. They finished 5-0 and then trashed Iowa State in the conference title game, and Dillingham got a contract extension, but only after he took the $200,000 bonus he got for winning nine regular-season games and gave it to ASU support staff members.

Dillingham is an ASU alum who got hurt as he pursued his Sun Devil dreams. The story goes that ASU coach Todd Graham interviewed him for an assistant’s position, and when Graham asked him about his future ambitions, Dillingham replied, “To get your job.” He’s just as unfiltered on the sideline, with the soul the program needed. Dillingham was limited by NCAA sanctions, pertaining to Herm Edwards’ coaching tenure. So he established his knack for general-managing by dominating the transfer portal. Nineteen of ASU’s 22 starters, going into this game, had played somewhere else first, and that includes Leavitt (Michigan State) and Skattebo (Sacramento State).

This is the first ASU team to win 11 games since 1996, when Bruce Snyder coached and Jake Plummer quarterbacked the Sun Devils to an 11-0 regular season. That ended when Ohio State beat ASU, 20-17, in the Rose Bowl. That was also five coaches ago. In the interim, ASU was known as a sleeping giant, although it might have just been hung over, and its fans were waiting for the next Frank Kush, who built absurdly talented ASU teams in the 60s and 70s that national TV audiences never saw.

Beginning in 1970 the Sun Devils went 43-4 and were 4-for-4 in bowl games, including a Fiesta Bowl upset of Nebraska. Dillingham thinks that’s a reasonable standard for today’s ASU, especially since it’s in the Big 12, and not under it.

He also knows that football’s brackets are generally unbustable, as much as he tried to prove otherwise.