The Blaze

By Josh Green

ASU football head coach Dennis Erickson met with the media today to discuss last Saturday’s win over Portland State, the upcoming game against Northern Arizona, and areas the team needs to improve on. Here’s a bit of what he had to say.

On Northern Arizona

“I’ve got great respect for Jerome (Souers) and what he’s done there, he’s been there a long time. This is a well coached football team, it’s going to be different than playing Portland State because they know us better, and it’s a huge game for them. You watch how they played U of A last year and they gave them everything they wanted, and we expect the same thing.”

On quarterback Steven Threet’s performance against Portland State

“I thought he did some great things in the football game. I thought he had great presence about him out there. I like his command, what he’s doing. He got rid of the ball real quick, which is huge in our offense. Probably more than anything, he had great command of the game.”

On overall performance against Portland State

“We have a lot of improvement still to do. There were some good things, probably effort number one. I thought our effort in all areas, both offensively and defensively, was at the level we want it to be. But guys made a lot of mistakes, a lot of assignment mistakes on both sides of the football. Those are things that have to improve, obviously.”

On problems with penalites

“We’ve talked about it, and we’ll continue to talk about it. We’ve had hustle penalties like that, where you’re hustling to get to the ball and you hit someone late. But the dumb penalties, hitting someone when you shouldn’t be, it’s selfish.”

On seeing the new offense for the first time

“It was good to see it in action against an opponent. You don’t learn until that starts happening and then you start growing as an offensive football team. As we know in that offense, people are going to do things that take away the simple things that we got the other night. We are going to be forced to go to other phases of our offense, which we’re prepared to do.”

On the potential of the run game

“It’s down to the basis of how many people they are going to use to stop the run. How many people are they going to use to stop the passing game? How are they going to deal with your motions? You try to take advantage of whatever the defense is doing and use it to your advantage. There’s a lot of option things before the ball is ever snapped as far as what we’re going to do. There’s a lot on the quarterback in this offense, no question about it. He can see by what happens whether he should run it or whether he feels like he can throw it.”

Overall thoughts of the offense

“We’re where we want to be right now, a lot of our offense isn’t in yet. There are things that we can do and we’ll change every week, there are things that we’ll add. Noel Mazzone likes where we’re at, but he’s like me, we feel like we got a lot of improvement to make. The biggest things that jumps out is the effort that we’ve had with receievers blocking. That’s a total difference from a year ago.”

Erickson also stressed that the Sun Devils are focused on NAU, and shouldn’t have any concerns about possibly looking ahead to Wisconsin. ASU fans may remember back in 2008 that UNLV came into Sun Devil Stadium and shocked ASU in overtime, the week before the Georgia Bulldogs came to town.

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Some injury notes

-Defensive end Toa Tuitea and defensive tackle Corey Adams are doubtful for Saturday’s game. Erickson will give us an update tomorrow at practice.

-Wide Receiver Gerell Robinson is questionable for Saturday. Erickson said the 6’4 junior felt a lot better yesterday, and that he has a chance to play.

-Defensive lineman Lawrence Guy got nicked up against Portland State, but Erickson said he’s fine and expects him to play Saturday.

-Defensive tackle Saia Falahola had some elbow problems, but he should be good to go for Saturday.

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