The logjam near the top of the Big 12 Conference is in for a shake-up when Arizona State travels to No. 16 Kansas State on Saturday night for their first matchup as conference foes.
Arizona State owns a 5-1 record all-time against the Wildcats. K-State won the last meeting in the 2002 Holiday Bowl. The teams last met in the regular season in 1989.
Arizona State (7-2, 4-2 Big 12) won consecutive games to join a four-team cluster in third place in the conference. Kansas State (7-2, 4-2) is coming off a bye following a painful loss to Houston two weeks ago.
“We’re 2-2 on the road, so you would hope that we could play well on the road,” Arizona State head coach Kenny Dillingham said Monday. “That’s a really good environment and a really good team, coming off a bye, unfortunately.”
A big question for the Sun Devils is the health of running back Cam Skattebo, who missed ASU’s last game, a win over UCF, with a shoulder injury. Skattebo has rushed for 1,001 yards in eight games played.
“Skatt is questionable for the game,” Dillingham said. “I think he’s going to try to practice, at least jog through some things and run around a little bit. So that’s a positive. He was trying to get me to put him in the game (against UCF) in the middle of the third quarter.
“I was like, âNo, you’re not going to get suited up.’ We’ll see what it looks like for this week.”
K-State returned to practice Monday after the bye week.
“We had a good open week last week,” Wildcats head coach Chris Klieman said. “We gave our older guys who have played a lot of snaps a bit of a break from a recovery standpoint. We have a number of guys who are still nursing injuries, but I believe everyone will be available Saturday.”
Instead of looking back at what went wrong against Houston, Klieman said the focus is on what’s still ahead.
“I think it’s the daily improvement,” he added. “It’s the big picture. What do we have to get better schematically, both offensively and defensively? It sometimes gets forgotten that we’re a 7-2 football team that has a lot of things in front of us to play for. We can’t control what other teams are going to do. I think everyone knows that a lot can still happen.”
The teams are almost identical in terms of scoring offense, with the Sun Devils outscoring the Wildcats by .3 points per game. They both also depend heavily on the run. The Wildcats are third in the conference with 208.3 yards per game on the ground, while Arizona State is fourth at 198.0 yards per game.
Defensively, K-State sits atop the rushing yards allowed list with just 99.4 yards per game. ASU is third at 118.8 yards per game.
“Anybody can beat anybody in this league,” Klieman said. “We’re playing a really good Arizona State team that’s a hot team. So we’ve got to play our best football.”
