Poor ASU practices have translated into poor games

To find the biggest reason that Arizona State has failed miserably under the gameday spotlight the last two weeks, look no further than the much less modest setting of the Kajikawa Practice Facility on campus.

There, the Sun Devils have not had the kind of dress rehearsals required to perform on the same stage with nationally ranked teams California and Oregon, who outscored ASU by a combined 97-34.

“When you’re in the season, you are practicing only three days a week. You cannot afford to give days away,” coach Dirk Koetter said on Sunday. “We have done that, and it’s shown up in the games.”

Koetter said that ASU (3-2 overall, 0-2 Pac-10) has had subpar practices the last two Wednesdays, which happens to be the day the team works on red-zone and thirddown situations.

In their 48-13 loss against Oregon on Saturday, the Sun Devils converted 1-of-13 third downs on offense and allowed the Ducks to go 8-for-13 in such situations. As far as failing to finish drives inside opponents’ 20-yard line, well, that has been a problem all season.

Two straight losses plus bad practice habits plus a contest at three-time defending Pac-10 champion Southern California on Oct. 14 . . . equals a lot of reflection by ASU during the upcoming bye week.

“When you lose two in a row and play the way we have, you do a lot of soul searching and looking at yourself and wondering about why we are not performing the way we are capable of,” defensive tackle Jordan Hill said. “Our timing is off. We’re not on the same page.”

The Sun Devils are most out of sync in what has been the identity of the program — the passing game.

Be its blocking, route running, throwing or catching, ASU has broken down in every facet. The poor execution reached its nadir on Saturday, when quarterback Rudy Carpenter was 6-of-19 for 33 yards.

“I’ve had times when we’ve been off in one of those areas,” Koetter said, “but we are off in all three of them. That would be at the top of my list of things we need to fix.”

Defensively, improving one-onone coverage and tackling are also on the to-do list, but Koetter added that, “It’s still hard to be mad at our defense when our offense didn’t give us a chance to be in the game.”

ASU was trapped in a similar valley not long ago, as a three-game losing streak in the middle of last season left the team with a 3-4 record. Players criticized how the Sun Devils were practicing, and coaches admitted that they did not have many answers.

The team rallied to win four of its last five games, including the Insight Bowl. Koetter said ASU can — and needs to — draw on that experience to help it out of its current funk.

“It’s bad to look back and see that we’ve gone through this before,” Hill said. “We have to get back to the fundamentals and doing the things that we can take care of. It’s not about our opponent. It’s about what the Sun Devils can do for ourselves.”