Boley leads Arizona State's QB derby with a week to go
Sam Leavitt is at LSU now, and Kenny Dillingham still won't say who replaces him — but Cutter Boley is taking the first-team reps over hometown transfer Mikey Keene with 11 days to the opener.
Boley has the edge, but Dillingham still won't say
The job that ran the offense to an 11-2 record and a Big 12 title in 2024 is open. Sam Leavitt put his name in the portal in January and landed at LSU, and Arizona State has spent camp sorting out who replaces him. As of August 25, that competition had narrowed to two names, and Kentucky transfer Cutter Boley was the one taking first-team reps, according to Yahoo Sports. "I thought today was his best day," Kenny Dillingham said of Boley. "He brings joy every day; he's super consistent."
The other name is a homecoming story on its own — Mikey Keene, a Chandler High product who won two state titles there before bouncing through UCF, Fresno State and Michigan without ever quite locking down a starting job. Arizona State would be his fourth school in six years, and a win here would be the one that finally sticks. Dillingham hadn't picked between them as of that Tuesday presser, saying only, "We'll go through that here in the next week or so" — which puts the announcement somewhere around fall camp's final week, with the opener now 11 days out.
Last season ended on a shootout ASU lost
Whoever wins the job inherits a team that finished last season with real momentum before it slipped away. The Sun Devils won three straight in November last year — at Iowa State 24-19, at home over West Virginia 25-23, then a 42-17 rout at Colorado — before Arizona ended the rivalry game 23-7 in Tempe. The season finished on New Year's Eve with a 39-42 loss to Duke, a track meet that summed up a team built around Leavitt slinging it and Jordyn Tyson catching it.
Both of those players are gone now — Tyson to the NFL Draft, Leavitt to Baton Rouge — which is why last season's finish reads less like recent form and more like a closed chapter. The record sits at 0-0 because nothing has been played yet, not because of anything that happened in that Duke game, and there is no current run to point to. This opener is a genuine reset, not a continuation.
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Per Covers' aggregated injury table, linebacker Z. Fiaseu is out for the year with a knee injury, reported Tuesday, August 25 — a real loss on a defense that now has to replace a starter before it plays a snap. Tight end K. Anderson is listed questionable with a lower-leg issue reported earlier this month, and Covers' own language hedges rather than rules him out: it "remains to be seen" if he's active for Morgan State.
That distinction matters. Fiaseu's IR designation is a fact — he will miss the remainder of the season. Anderson's questionable tag is a guess dressed up as a status, and nobody with the program has confirmed either way whether he plays September 5.
A 41.5-point line to shake off the rust in Tempe
Morgan State comes to Mountain America Stadium on September 5 as a massive underdog, with the line opened at Arizona State -41.5 and the total set at 52.5. The Bears were picked fourth in the MEAC preseason poll under fifth-year coach Damon Wilson, with quarterback Cameron Edge running an offense that returns 15 starters — but they're 0-0 with a road loss to North Carolina A&T on August 29 fresh behind them, and last year they lost 14-33 to North Carolina in a game much like this one.
For a program still sorting out its own quarterback, that number is less about the scoreboard than about the evaluation window it buys. Whichever of Boley or Keene gets the ball first will do it against a MEAC team chasing its first winning season since 2009 — about as clean a look as a staff could ask for before Texas A&M and the Big 12 grind that follows a week later.