After spilling then-No. 7 Texas Tech at Mountain America Stadium in its highest-ranked win in head coach Kenny Dillingham’s tenure, Arizona State stays home for back-to-back games for the first time all season as it hosts Houston in Tempe.
Led by multi-time AAC champion head coach Willie Fritz, the former Tulane man, the Cougars lost one game, a blowout loss to the Red Raiders, but managed to rack up wins against the rest of their Big 12 competition through Week 9.
“They’re 6-1 and they lost to a Top 15 team in the country,” Dillingham said. “I don’t know what else you want, they win games… [Coach Fritz] has won a lot of matches for a long time in many places. That’s what Coach Fritz does… They’re a phenomenal football team because they’re balanced.”
Fritz, in his second year with the program, brought offensive coordinator Slade Nagle with him from the Big Easy in the offseason after the two spent a year apart: Fritz to Houston and Nagle to LSU. Despite the emphasis on the running game, Nagle’s passing attack must be considered.
“They have Air Raid traits in their passing game, so we saw that,” ASU defensive coordinator Brian Ward said. “They run a lot of different types of inside races, they run the quarterback, the g-lead, the follow and the crunch-follow, which we just saw last week.”
While the offensive scheme brings its variation in interior running schemes, according to Ward, Houston’s defensive side of the ball, which has one of the conference’s heaviest blitz teams on third downs after heavy use of the end zone, is also unfamiliar and high-variance in the eyes of offensive coordinator Marcus Arroyo.
“We’ve played so much good defense now, and this is another good defense,” Arroyo said. “It’s a group that plays and is very well coached. They play hard, they know exactly where they’re going to be and they don’t fight. The front does a good job cutting it up; there are several from four. [lineman] against all expectations, their covers are two or three hulls. On the third try, it’s over; There are going to be UFOs everywhere.”
Arroyo avoided Dillingham’s oft-used use of the word “exotic” Cougars to describe what Houston might look like on third downs, an explanation he doubled down on when describing the need for its alien name.
“[UFO]“It’s a term I use when you’re on third down and you have pressure coming from everywhere,” Arroyo said. “They have a multitude of looks in their third down package where they can get all kinds of fronts. You can get tails, coals, twists and edges. You can get zero, one, fire zone or sim. There are cats and there are nickels, so you gotta keep your head turned.
