Arizona State names Manny Wilkins starting quarterback
By Jason Parker
Arizona State, ahead of their 2016 season opener Saturday, named Manny Wilkins as their starting quarterback for at least the first game.
Saturday, the Arizona State Sun Devils will open their 2016 football schedule with an always tough opponent: Northern Arizona. Starting off the year with the definition of a cupcake (didn’t even know that was an actual school…thought it was a junior college or something) allows for the team to figure out what it wants to do for the rest of the season.
With that, the Sun Devils announced who will be the starting quarterback for that opener. The winner is Manny Wilkins, a redshirt sophomore who spent last season mostly on the bench for Arizona State.
“We have great confidence in Brady as well, but Manny’s our guy,” Graham said. “He’ll run out with the first group and we’ll go from there.”
The California native, who was once referred to has a “knucklehead” by his own teammates, didn’t throw a single pass last season and ran the ball seven times for 55 total yards. Even with that, he didn’t really have much competition when it came to the starting spot.
The other two quarterbacks who were battling for the starting spot – Brady White and Bryce Perkins – also didn’t throw a pass last season as they both were redshirted. That makes the Sun Devils were one of two teams (Tulane) that had the quarterbacks competing for a starting job having never thrown a pass in college.
Perkins was eliminated earlier in camp to an injury, and head coach Todd Graham didn’t really eliminate White from future consideration:
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Arizona State has a few games to figure out who the permanent starter will be, as they take on Texas Tech and Texas-San Antonio before starting their conference slate with games against Cal, USC and UCLA.