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Morgan: ASU's character smooths out the wrinkles
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Go ahead and dream a little today. Imagine a 5-0, 6-0... oh, why not a 7-0 start? I won’t stop you.
The story line Saturday was too feel-good to let a few troubling facts get in the way.
Arizona State came out flat in its Pac-10 opener against Oregon State.
Two-dimensional, 7-day-old Coke, are they even there kind of flat.
Ryan Torain was running into Beaver dams.
Rudy Carpenter was throwing junk.
The defense was conducting backpedaling drills.
And Oregon State was flirting with a four-score lead — the generally accepted point of no return in the points-rich Pac-10.
“We screwed it all up,” ASU coach Dennis Erickson said. “We weren’t (hitting) on all cylinders.”
But the game was not lost in that biblically bad start — even when the Beavers built a 19-0 lead.
ASU was just getting its mojo on.
“You can do one of two things in that situation,” Carpenter said. “You can go in the tank or you can lead your team back.”
It’s hard to understand how a team that couldn’t run the ball for three and a half quarters managed to rally for a 44-32 win.
It’s hard to understand why a team that could run the ball kept letting its quarterback underthrow receivers to hand the Sun Devil defense five well-timed gifts.
Heck, it’s hard to figure out anything about this ASU team except this: whatever technical blemishes it displays, it evens them out with a smooth base of moxie.
Carpenter’s biggest moments Saturday seemed to come ad-lib on broken plays — like his 64-yard touchdown pass to Mike Jones on which he danced around a half dozen defenders before stepping up and delivering ASU’s first score.
The defense, gashed on OSU’s opening drive of the second half, rallied to produce five interceptions.
The last time that happened was on Nov. 7, 1998 against California.
“We just had guys make plays,” Erickson said.
There is still so much work to be done.
The run game must produce more if the Devils are going to compete against the conference’s elite and the defense won’t escape many opponents that total 514 yards (OSU’s total Saturday).
After Stanford next week, the Sun Devils hit the beef of the Pac-10 schedule and a higher caliber of teams.
But through four games, ASU has displayed something that a team either has or has not: character.
For now, it’s masking deficiencies and widening smiles.
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