After ASU loss, Arizona football needs a miracle | Greg Hansen

Or maybe:

“The Team Down South Gets Punched In The Mouth, 49-7.’’

Whatever. No rhyme is necessary. Saturday’s score serves as a standalone for ASU’s 2024 excellence and Arizona’s unexpected demise.

Who saw this coming? Not the voters in the preseason Big 12 media poll, who ranked Arizona No. 3 and ASU No. 16.

Not long-suffering Sun Devil football fans, who have watched the perennial wait-til-next-year ASU footballers go 165-155 the last 25 seasons, getting ranked in the Final AP poll a mere four times (12th in 2014, 16th in 2007, 19th in 2004 and 21st in 2013).

A quarter-century on the fringe of irrelevance.

This season was a stunner. The Sun Devils hired a 34-year-old coach who looks like someone from the old “Happy Days” cast, someone whose name I still can’t process. Is it Kelly Denningham or Kenny Whittingham or maybe Ralph Malph?

Whatever, he is the Big 12’s Coach of the Year, and it isn’t even close. Sorry, Deion.

There are no familiar names on the Sun Devil banner any longer. No Plummer, no Whizzer. No Kush, no Culp. No Haynes, no Heap. This is a start-over, a generation removed from ASU’s long-ago glory days.

Now it’s the Cam Skattebo Show, the best player on the field Saturday, rushing for what seemed to be 400 yards.

Since Arizona decimated the Sun Devils 59-23 a year ago in Tempe, the Sun Devils worked the transfer portal as well or better than any team in college football. They added 46 scholarship transfers and became not just a Top 25 team, but one on the edge of the College Football Playoffs.

There is hope that UA coach Brent Brennan can pull a similar football miracle in the coming months. With diligent work in the transfer business, Kenny Dillingham and his Devils leap-frogged an Arizona team that finished No. 11 in the AP poll.

It is football’s version of “Trading Places.”

Now Arizona athletic director Desiree Reed-Francois takes the stage. She will decide if the school can absorb an $11 million buyout to replace Brennen, or if staff changes — on field and off field — will be more effective.

Not only are millions of dollars at stake, so are the brand and reputation of Arizona’s football program. This is urgency times 10. There will be no time to Pity the Kitty.