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Monday Musings: Thoughts and Questions on Sam Leavitt as Arizona State’s starter

Ralph Amsden

I hope Arizona sports fans enjoyed their last weekend before the insanity that is the fall football schedule, NBA preseason, and what is hopefully another exciting Arizona Diamondbacks stretch run. I spend the weekend hanging out with the one and only Chilly as he scouted high school football games at Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina.

And now, it’s time to lock in. My Arizona State Sun Devils are getting ready to square off against my first love- the Wyoming Cowboys, and I’ll be flying in to take the game in as a semi-conflicted fan.

That brings me to this week’s Monday Musings topic- Sam Leavitt as Arizona State’s starting quarterback.

Is Sam Leavitt the Answer for ASU?

Last week, Arizona State named Michigan State transfer Sam Leavitt as the starter headed into the 2024 season, and as it does every season- optimism followed.

Call it battered fan syndrome, but the moment the call was made, I was reminded of the optimism that followed Jayden Daniels’ freshman season. Or the optimism of being up 13 points with less than three minutes remaining against USC to start the 2020 season. Or the optimism headed into the 2021 season with one of the country’s top 2022 recruiting classes, only for the entire staff to collapse due to infighting over NCAA violations. Or the optimism of bringing in Emory Jones and Paul Tyson to replace Jayden Daniels. Or the optimism of bringing in Drew Pyne and Jaden Rashada to replace Emory Jones and Paul Tyson.

Is Sam Leavitt the key out of this hype-train derailment feedback loop? I hope so, but I have some legitimate questions and concerns.

1) Earned or given?

Back in the spring I flew out to Tempe to help with some player and coaching interviews for George Wrighster’s Unafraid Show. The perspective of most people I talked to around the program was that Sam Leavitt was brought in to start. He was receiving the most attention from the coaching staff, and offensive coordinator Marcus Arroyo had even said in our interview that there was a thorough evaluation done of Sam Leavitt, but that when it came to the returning QBs (Trenton Bourguet and Jaden Rashada), it was “hard to know how they were being taught.”

My immediate reaction to that quote was it certainly couldn’t have been harder to evaluate two players that spent a full season under the tutelage of Marcus Arroyo’s new boss, Kenny Dillingham, than it was to do a deep dive into a player that spent the previous season in East Lansing, and had thrown 59 less passes than Rashada last season, and 225 less passes than Bourguet.

“Leavitt is their guy,” I remember telling George Wrighster as we wrapped up our interviews. Wrighster agreed- and a few weeks later, Jaden Rashada seemed to concur, making the decision that if he was going to have to sit out the upcoming season rehabbing a thumb injury, he wanted it to be somewhere where he thought there was an interest in developing him.

I spent the next few months giving the opinion on PHNX podcasts, Wednesday night Sun Devil Spaces on X, or anywhere else that would have me, that I believed Sam Leavitt was going to be given every opportunity to sink or swim as the Sun Devils’ QB, just as Jaden Rashada had been the year before. I believed Kenny Dillingham when he said he didn’t promise Sam Leavitt the job, but I’m also smart enough to know that you don’t have the longest face-to-face recruiting visit of your life with someone you don’t believe in- something Jordan Hamm documented wonderfully on Sports360AZ:

What about Arizona State bringing in Jeff Sims?

It felt like a formality and an insurance policy. Though Sims’ first win at Georgia Tech as a starter came against Kenny Dillingham (while Dilly was on Mike Norvell’s Florida State coaching staff), that was years ago, and Sims’ play in the years since then has deteriorated to inconsistency with periods of extreme ball insecurity.

What about 2021-2023 spot starter Trenton Bourguet?

The coaching staff went out of their way to neglect to mention Trenton Bourguet in so many postgame practice media scrums, that “Trenton name drop watch” became a regular topic of Wednesday night Sun Devil Spaces.

It’s clear this team wants a QB with multiple years of eligibility left to take the proverbial bull by the horns. Sam Leavitt provides that. So was it a competition? Or was it an opportunity that Sam Leavitt took advantage of?

At the end of the day, if Arizona State is winning, no one is going to care.

2) Will the Sun Devils follow Sam Leavitt’s lead?

This is the question that keeps me up at night. COVID eligibility allowances have created a situation in which rosters often have fifth and sixth year players, and Arizona State is no exception. There are close to double-digit combined offensive linemen, running backs, and receivers on Arizona State’s roster that were playing (or at least committed to) collegiate football while Sam Leavitt was still in middle school.

Sam Leavitt told Speak of the Devils’ Brad Denny that when he first arrived in Tempe, his leadership style was “harsh,” and Coach Dillingham has made reference to Leavitt’s tendency to get on guys who make mistakes. Perhaps that has calmed down, but we also haven’t seen Arizona State face adversity in a live-game situation. Are 23-year-olds going to have the humility to positively process sometimes-harsh leadership, and believe in their signal caller when he says it’s all in the name of the pursuit of greatness?

I hope so.

Arizona State is no stranger to signal callers with varied leadership styles. Rudy Carpenter was as fiery as they come. In a 10-win season, it was all good. In a loss at home to UNLV, not as much.

And to speak for all Arizona State fans, I’d much rather see ASU players showing enough passion to blow up at each other on the sidelines when mistakes are made, rather than taking the Jayden Daniels route of giggling to himself after every interception and missed read.

Plus, there’s nothing saying that Sam Leavitt can’t evolve his leadership style from week-to-week or year-to-year. Manny Wilkins underwent several personality shifts to gain, and maintain, control of Arizona State’s offense in his three years at the helm- a tenure that saw him beat out talented teammates in Brady White and Bryce Perkins, only to have to turn around and re-earn the job when ASU tried to bring in former 5-star recruit Blake Barnett.

Is Sam Leavitt ready to have to re-earn the job when the portal presents Marcus Arroyo and Kenny Dillingham with an opportunity to bring in a challenger in 2025, much like the way they brought in Leavitt this year? It’s a question you hate to have to ask, but in this day and age, when Arizona State has seen its last five presumptive starters transfer out with eligibility remaining, you have to ask it. Especially when Arizona State is Sam Leavitt’s fifth school in five years.

I tend to believe that Arizona State’s collegiately geriatric offensive roster won’t have a problem following a redshirt freshman into battle if they know he’s all in. Not just for his own glory, but for the team.

If there’s one thing the team can all rally around before the season starts, it’s the bulletin board material provided by the often-wrong Pro Football Focus, who ranked Sam Leavitt as the second-to-last Big 12 starting QB headed into the 2023 season.

3) Will Sun Devil fans be patient through growing pains?

I’m going to be honest here- I’m not sure Arizona State could have drawn a worse week 1 matchup for Marcus Arroyo and Sam Leavitt. Yes, I realize that my lifelong Wyoming fandom has me lacking some credibility- I mean, whose side am I really on?

Just because I was attending classes with my mother in Laramie before I could walk doesn’t mean that I lack allegiance to my actual alma mater. I’m a Sun Devil.

This obsvervation has nothing to do with my allegiance to either school. It’s just a matter of recent college football history.

Marcus Arroyo went up against Wyoming’s then-DC Jay Sawvel in week 1 of the 2020 season, in Arroyo’s first game as head coach of UNLV. It was a blood bath- with Wyoming leading 38-7 heading into the 4th quarter. Obviously Arizona State’s 2024 talent is leaps and bounds above UNLV’s 2020 roster, but this Wyoming team has a tendency to make everything ugly.

Just ask last year’s College Football Playoff participant Texas Longhorns, who were tied with Wyoming 10-10 heading into the fourth quarter… IN AUSTIN.

Now, you may be asking yourself, what does this have to do with Sam Leavitt? Well, what if I told you that the same offensive coordinator that Sam Leavitt played under at Michigan State last year, is the person that has been prepping Wyoming’s defense to face Leavitt in his first collegiate start?

That’s right, Jay Johnson, who helped recruit Leavitt to East Lansing, is now responsible for running Wyoming’s offense.

To recap, you have ASU’s new offensive coordinator (Marcus Arroyo) going up against a head coach (Jay Sawvel) that has already crushed him on the road (2020 opener), while having the resource of the only college coach in America (Jay Johnson) who might know as much about Sam Leavitt as Arroyo does.

It feels like a lot to overcome, but if Sam Leavitt manages to lead Arizona State’s offense in a competent and confident manner against a defense that has 12 games of 200 or less passing yards allowed in the last two seasons, I’ll be the first one to jump onto a hype train that Kenny Dillingham has already kicked into high gear with Bo Nix comparisons.

But if the more realistic option happens- Arizona State beats Wyoming in an ugly, low-scoring slugfest, fans shouldn’t overreact to the result. Shoot, they probably shouldn’t react at all until Leavitt has a chance to get the next three games under his belt against Mississippi State, Texas State and Texas Tech- all of which gave up four games of 275 yards passing or more in 2023.

My advice to fans would be to give Sam Leavitt four games to see if the mobility, playmaking ability, and lack of turnovers that Kenny Dillingham lauded as reasons for giving him the starting job translate to on-field success.

The best case scenario for Arizona State is to have a multi-year starter that fans can rally around, and that the coaching staff can recruit around in hopes of building a national championship contender. The second best scenario is to do whatever it takes to win right now, and if that includes shaking things up at QB for the third season in a row, so be it.

There’s over 9,000 combined yards of career offensive yards waiting on the bench, just in case.

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