The Sun Devils and the Big 12

The one team nobody picked to win the Big 12 won the Big 12, what's next for Kenny Dillingham and Arizona State?

Last offseason I decided to wade into old waters in the Big 12 and try to prognosticate how the league might turn out without Texas and Oklahoma around. I’ve had two big contentions about the Big 12 and its future without those two big programs to anchor it.

1. The “crab bucket” effect of the league in which no one could establish dominance because no one held meaningful resources relative to the others would be much more pronounced. OU tended to be holding the crab bucket and using it to make cakes while Texas got itself trapped inside and had only just escaped before making the bigger leap to the SEC.

2. Utah might be the one school that could emerge from the bucket and sustain success because of their higher capacity than anyone else to recruit and develop “core four” big men at offensive tackle, Edge, defensive tackle, and nose tackle. The reason for this? Their superior recruiting of Pacific Islanders.

I wasn’t as up to date on the rosters and progress of the Big 12 after moving more attention to Texas’ new home in the SEC but I still produced some thoughts on who looked best positioned to win in year one. My sense of the teams I explored in that article was actually pretty good.

Guess which team I didn’t even look at? Arizona State.

Photo by Christoph von Gellhorn on Unsplash

I barely even knew who the coach was. I learned quite a good deal more about Arizona State, who gradually impressed me over the course of the season and then came within a 4th-and-13 conversion by Quinn Ewers of pulling off an impressive comeback to beat Texas in the quarterfinal despite not having their star receiver and best player Jordyn Tyson.

Did they happen to be just another Big 12 co-equal on the upside of a boom/bust cycle? Or could they sustain their run for at least another season?