BYU Football: Score prediction for Arizona State vs BYU

BYU Defense vs Arizona State Offense

Jayden Daniels will win or lose this game for the Sun Devils. While it is a common belief that most quarterbacks will win or lose a game for their team, it isn’t always really that true. In this case it is.

BYU’s defensive line will dominate the ASU front and shut down running lanes for the running backs. While the running backs may have some success on the outside with their speed, eventually outside runs always get figured out and their running attack will come down to what Jayden Daniels can do.

In his last four games, Daniels has rushed the ball 29 times for 271 yards which averages out to 9.3 yards per attempt. Even though the competition wasn’t anything like what they will see against BYU, even halfing that amount can be very dangerous, especially in third and short situations.

Daniels isn’t extremely effective through the air only completing about 60% of his passes, but if his running game gets going, defenses have to give more attention to that which in return opens up more passing opportunities.

Prediction: Jayden Daniels is going to have some nice runs and a few nice deep passes. The Cougars will take a very similar approach to what they did against Arizona in 2018 when Khalil Tate was a running threat. They had their defensive ends rush the ends to keep Tate inside the hashes and kept Bronson Kaufusi on him as a spy to keep him from running. In that game Kaufusi had one job, and that was to contain Tate.

The Cougars will do the same this game keeping Daniels inside the hashes and will likely either keep Pili, Bywater, or Kaufusi inside the box to keep Daniels from getting big runs and forcing him to beat BYU with his arm.