Anu Solomon limped onto the Arizona Stadium field, favoring his left foot on every step.
He went through pregame warmups with the rest of his team, hardly looking like a quarterback who was 100 percent.
And then magically, when the Territorial Cup began Friday afternoon at Arizona Stadium, the UA’s redshirt freshman quarterback, who was questionable entering the game with a right ankle injury, looked just fine.
It was gamesmanship at its best in one of college football’s most heated rivalries.
Solomon finished 15 for 21 for 208 yards, two touchdowns and no interceptions. The injury was real, but so was the recovery.
The quarterback, who has been dealing with the setback for several weeks, re-aggravated it last week in the UA’s win over Utah. He sat out the second half and deferred to backup Jesse Scroggins.
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His status was up in the air all week, but as Friday’s ASU game approached, Solomon got healthier and healthier.
Friday, he gutted it out and led the Wildcats to a 42-35 win.
“He’s a tough son of a gun, what can you say?” UA senior offensive tackle Mickey Baucus said. “He wasn’t able to play last week and I’m sure he was still feeling it (Friday), but from the way he played and the way he was acting on the sideline, you couldn’t tell. That’s just who Anu is.”
Solomon was a bit limited in his mobility and running ability in the win. He was sacked four times and finished with minus-47 rushing yards on nine attempts.
But the quarterback was still able to do enough to lift the UA offense to 5.7 yards per play in the game. The Wildcats ran 58 plays and gained 333 yards.
It wasn’t the offense’s best performance, but it was good enough.
Coach Rich Rodriguez said he wouldn’t have hesitated to go with Scroggins or even Jerrard Randall. But the coach didn’t have to make such a call.
“(Solomon) was able to do a little more this week than last week,” Rodriguez said. “But I was confident whether we had to play Jesse or Jerrard. Jerrard and Jesse get the same number of reps in practice, so we were confident they could execute the system.”
Rodriguez surely believed that, but Solomon had already proved this season he could run the offense.
The quarterback threw two touchdowns in the win, both to Samajie Grant. The first one was a 69-yard score where the quarterback let Grant do most of the work.
He also hit Grant for a 20-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter to extend the UA’s lead to a 14-point advantage with 8:31 left. He showed off his mobility on that pass, avoiding a sack and rolling out to the right before firing on the run and hitting Grant in the back of the end zone.
“He’s impressive,” Grant said of his quarterback. “He just plays like it’s backyard football. He tries to stay as calm as he can. Even a few times when he got tackled for loss, he was laughing at the lineman, having fun out there. That’s the amazing thing about Anu.”
Wright continues
dominant season
Running back Nick Wilson was named the game’s MVP, but it easily could have gone to linebacker Scooby Wright.
Wright finished with 13 tackles, including an eye-popping five for a loss.
He had two sacks and one forced fumble.
On the season, the sophomore linebacker now has 139 tackles, 27 tackles-for-loss, 14 sacks and six forced fumbles.
Earlier this week, Wright was named a finalist for the Chuck Bednarik Award, given to the top defensive player in the country. He boosted his case with another strong showing Friday.
The five tackles-for-loss were the most since Marcus Bell had five against Iowa in 1998.
“Scooby Wright has proven, I think every game, that he’s one of the best football players, not just best defensive, but one of the best football players in the Pac-12,” Rodriguez said after the game.
Wright, whose Twitter handle is @TwoStarScoob, refused to take credit for his game, instead saying it was the entire defense that rose to the occasion.
“Two-star Scooby rose to the occasion again today,” Rodriguez said.
Extra points
- Arizona had 15 tackles-for-loss as a team. That’s the most in a single game since recording 15 against Utah in 2000. The Wildcats had seven sacks, which is the most since recording seven against Washington State in 2010.
- The UA will play at least 14 games in a season for the first time in program history this season. The 10-2 Wildcats will play Oregon on Friday in the Pac-12 championship, and then head to a bowl game.
- The win gave Arizona three wins over ranked teams in a season for the first time since 1998. The UA knocked off ranked teams in back-to-back weeks for the first time since 2006.
- With Anthony Lopez scoring on a 25-yard fumble recovery in the first quarter, the UA has now had 17 different players score a touchdown this season.
