Looking ahead to a sexy opponent is a constant feature of college football. As long as teenagers and 20-year-olds are thrust into the spotlight, unpredictable results and uneven emotions will always color the landscape. In the early weeks of every season—no matter the decade or the century, the conference or the locale—a young and talented team will dream about the nationally televised five-star throwdown in the week to come, while giving only minimal interest to the mediocre opponent on the opposite sideline.
Saturday night in Tempe, Ariz., the highly-touted Sun Devils dreamed dreams of No. 2 Georgia, while discounting the threat posed by the UNLV Rebels. And while the home team seemed likely to prevail for most of the evening, even though it brought little energy to the dance, the Devils could never land that one final knockout punch in the game’s latter stages. Still standing in the ring, the Rebels would deal Arizona State a major dose of Payne… Phillip Payne, that is.
For those who didn’t know much about UNLV before this mammoth upset, the hero of this Vegas victory in the Valley of the Sun needs to be introduced to you: Meet Phillip Payne, a freshman wide receiver for the Rebels. He sent this game into overtime by making one of the best catches seen on a football field, anywhere and anytime. On 2nd and goal from the ASU 9 with just 18 seconds left in regulation, Payne took an air-mailed pass from quarterback Omar Clayton and plucked it out of the night sky. His one-handed, right-handed, suction-cup special—a spectacular grab made under enormous pressure—enabled UNLV to get into overtime, that coin-flip, roll-of-the-dice situation that makes a favored team sweat… and increases the odds for the underdog. That one shot of Payne reverberated through both sidelines, giving Vegas the final push it needed to topple the heavily-favored Sun Devils, who couldn’t wait to host Mark Richt’s SEC stalwarts the following week. With the Rebels roused and the Devils dazed, a pedestrian field goal by Vegas was enough to win in overtime, because ASU—after a lackluster series of downs that brought about a 4th and 3—had its tying field goal attempt blocked. Thomas Weber—the Sun Devil placekicker—is virtually automatic, but on a night when the odds sided with Vegas, the unlikeliest of endings capped the most staggering of upsets in week three of this emerging college football season.
As the years and decades go by, ranked teams will continue to look ahead in college football. Most of them will manage to sneak out narrow wins, but as this particular contest showed, coasting against a lesser opponent will bite a ballclub once in a while. Arizona State happens to be one of those victims who played a little too close to the edge and tempted fate for a little longer than it could afford to. Because the Sun Devils couldn’t drive their pitchfork through the heart of the Rebels, the visitors from Vegas gave Dennis Erickson a massive jolt of Payne… and made next week’s Georgia game a matter of survival for a Pac-10 team that will have to emerge from a deep, dark emotional ditch.
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