BYU 5-Star QB Commit Stuns College Football World with Decision to Flip and Join Sun devil’s over Alabama and Tennessee…
BYU 5-Star QB Commit Stuns College Football World with Decision to Flip and Join Sun devil’s over Alabama and Tennessee…
No. 4 Arizona State has made it to the College Football Playoff for the first time in school history. The Sun Devils will take on the Texas Longhorns on Wednesday in the Peach Bowl quarterfinal with a national semifinal berth on the line.
The Sun Devils’ 2024 season represents a massive turnaround, led by second-year head coach Kenny Dillingham. Despite a down season in 2023, Arizona State orchestrated a wildly impressive turnaround to make it to college football’s biggest stage.
Arizona State finished with a 3-9 record just a season ago, second to last in the Pac-12 behind Deion Sanders and Colorado. The Sun Devils also were playing under a self-imposed bowl ban stemming from an NCAA investigation into recruiting violations committed under former ASU head coach Herm Edwards.
As Arizona State moved to a revamped Big 12 conference in 2024, the expectations for the Sun Devils weren’t exactly high. In fact, the preseason media poll had the team finishing dead last. The Sun Devils were expected to finish 16th overall, behind Utah, Kansas State and Oklahoma State.
Defying all odds, Arizona State won the Big 12 anyway, beating a 10-win Iowa State team in the conference title game, 45-19. The Sun Devils are 11-2 on the season, a tremendous improvement from their 2023 and 2022 finishes, which saw a combined 6-18 record.
“I would’ve thought we would’ve probably been probably one year away from it, but I knew with the excitement and plan Kenny brought into this program, I knew it would happen pretty quickly,” ASU running backs coach Shaun Aguano told ESPN. “We knew [winning] was going to come along sometime. It just happened faster than we thought.”
But the Sun Devils didn’t exactly look like the Big 12 frontrunners from the get-go in 2024. In fact, they started out 5-2 with road losses to Texas Tech and Cincinnati.
Arizona State burst into the Big 12 title game conversation in mid-November. The Sun Devils had back-to-back wins over ranked opponents in Kansas State and BYU, ultimately going 5-0 that month.
