Arizona State football coach Dennis Erickson was on with Gambo and Burns early this afternoon, and the two KTAR-AM hosts reviewed Saturday’s loss to Oregon with Erickson.
"There’s no question in my mind, we can beat them," Erickson said when asked if he learned enough about the Ducks to correct the mistakes that cost the Devils, and beat them next time.
"But we had our opportunity. Who knows what’s going to happen in the next six weeks? But we’ll see. I think we learned a lot from that game. I think we felt like we had a chance to win and we were positioned to win."
There may not be a next time this year. Oregon must go to Stanford in a battle of what figures to be top-10 teams later this season and win, and before that beat a very much improved Washington team on the road in Seattle before earning a spot in the Pac-12 championship game.
ASU is in grand position to represent the Pac-12 South in that title game.
The Devils clearly caved in to the magnitude of the game and were affected by mental mistakes and key penalties, with the atmosphere at Autzen Stadium also more than they could handle, apparently.
"You get in a game like that, nobody has penalties on purpose," Erickson said. "We will talk about that (Tuesday) when we have our team meeting."
The good news is DE Junior Onyeali will be back for the Colorado game on Oct. 29, a game that means a lot to the sophomore from Denver. It’s a game the Devils should win handily the way the Buffaloes (1-6) have played this season.
Regarding the Oregon game, Erickson isn’t into moral victories. "We could have won the football game had we did some things right that we didn’t do… we didn’t do the little things that we needed to to win."