SEATTLE — It’s been a long year for Arizona State University football coach Dennis Erickson.
Not since Oct. 17 of last year had Erickson’s Sun Devils won a Pacific-10 Conference game. The opponent that night was Washington and ASU, playing on its home turf, took advantage of a late touchdown pass to escape with a 24-17 victory.
Since then, the Sun Devils had played in eight Pac-10 games and lost every one. Arizona State closed last season with defeats against Stanford, California, USC, Oregon, UCLA and Arizona, and then opened its league schedule this season with losses against Oregon and Oregon State.
And in Arizona, the jackals were howling.
On Saturday, Arizona State bought their head coach a respite — or at least a week of quieting the critics — by thumping the Huskies 24-14 on a rainy night in Seattle. The long-awaited win lifted ASU to a 3-3 season record and a 1-2 conference mark.
Snapping the league losing streak “is a relief,” Erickson admitted with a wry laugh. “I certainly didn’t want to go home with an extension of that.”
The 63-year-old Erickson had previous NFL coaching stints in Seattle and San Francisco, but his greatest career successes have come in college. He turned around sagging programs at Washington State and Oregon State, and won national championships at Miami in 1989 and 1991.
Those achievements had the folks in Tempe expecting more of the same when Erickson was hired in 2007. And he made an immediate splash that first season, leading the Sun Devils to a 10-3 record and a 7-2 Pac-10 mark.
Since then, though, Arizona State slipped to 5-7 (4-5) in 2008 and 4-8 (2-7) a year ago. And after opening their season with blowout wins against Portland State and Northern Arizona, the Sun Devils lost at Wisconsin 20-19, fell at home to Oregon 42-31 and were defeated at Oregon State 31-28.
“Without a question, it’s been a hard three weeks for us,” said Erickson, an Everett native. Though the Sun Devils had chances to win those three games, but let them slip away, “our guys never doubted what we were doing.
“And then to come up here and to win this football game in Seattle against a good football team … I just like how we performed offensively in the rain,” he said. “It was really raining. As bad as I’ve seen it, and I’ve been here a lot of years.”
Against the Huskies, he said, “we threw it and caught it and did all the things we needed to. And defensively, we were able to make plays at the end.”
Saturday’s game was the second of three straight road games for the Sun Devils. After a bye next week, Arizona State visits California on Oct. 23 before closing its season with three of its final five regular-season games at home.
To be bowl eligible this year, the Sun Devils still need to win four of their final six games.
And it’s do-able, Erickson believes.
“I think we’re a good football team,” he said. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do, but just to get this win was huge for us right now.
“And obviously we’ve still got half our season left,” he said.
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