Bordow: ASU needs helps on defense

You want the truth about Arizona State’s defense? Just ask new coordinator Craig Bray. He’ll tell you.

His thoughts when he watched film of the Sun Devils’ defense last season:

“I saw a lack of overall athleticism and speed, especially in the front seven. I was disappointed. As you visualize a place like this you would assume the one thing you can recruit is speed because speed likes warm weather and we get plenty of warm weather. So I was disappointed in that.”

His take on the defensive line:

“We’re not big and we’re not quick. Probably the only legitimate guy up front where you could say he’s a Pac-10 guy is (tackle Michael) Marquardt.”

His view of the cornerback position opposite Justin Tryon:

“We need a guy like Chris Baloney to finally say, 'Hey, I want to be the guy.’ That’s something he hasn’t done. I don’t know if he’s going to.”

His opinion on how long it will take for ASU to have a Pac-10 championship-caliber defense:

“I think we’re a couple of recruiting classes away.”

The good news? Bray likes ASU’s safeties.

It’s unusual for an incoming college coach to fire away at his personnel. Usually you hear platitudes or rationalizations. But Bray and head coach Dennis Erickson have been around too long to worry about bruised egos. And they recognize a truth that seemed to escape offensive-minded coach Dirk Koetter:

“For us to win we have to become a great defensive football team,” Erickson said.

The Devils were anything but great during Koetter’s six-year run. They allowed more than 25 points per game in five of the six seasons (they gave up 24.5 ppg in 2004). The numbers in Pac-10 play were even worse: The 28.5 points per game allowed last year was the lowest total in Koetter’s tenure.

There was some thought that Koetter’s quick-strike offense actually hurt the defense in that it didn’t have time to catch its breath on the sideline.

Bray isn’t buying it. His belief, one that he’s already expressed several times to the Sun Devils:

“You want to rest, get your butts out of there after third down.”

This will tell you a lot about the state of ASU’s defense: It was better last season than it had been in years, and it still ranked fifth or lower in the Pac-10 in scoring defense, pass defense, rushing defense, total defense, red-zone defense, turnover margin and third-down conversions.

What jumped out at Bray was how slow the Sun Devils looked in comparison to other conference clubs.

“One thing you gotta have in today’s game is speed,” Bray said. “You can’t live without it.”

Bray and Erickson tried to improve the Sun Devils’ quickness with their first recruiting class. Freshman Omar Bolden could start at cornerback, junior-college transfer Morris Wooten is expected to start at middle linebacker, and 247-pound junior-college defensive end Luis Vasquez is lining up with the first unit.

That’s a start, but as Bray noted, ASU will need at least two more solid recruiting classes before the defense can slug it out with the Pac-10’s heavyweights.

Until then?

Well, try, if you can, to take comfort in this quote:

“I think it (success) comes from evaluation in recruiting, it comes from an attitude you try to develop on defense and it always comes from the head coach,” Bray said. “Is the head coach going to believe in defense and emphasize defense or is he going to be an offensive coach and that’s all he does?

“Dennis is a guy who knows what it takes to win championships. When he won his (two) championships at Miami, he had big-time defenses.

“We can do that. We can get the quality players here.”

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Listen to Scott Bordow every Monday on The Fan (1060 AM) with Bob Kemp.