Arizona State Won in London. Its Offense Lost the Argument.

Arizona State is flying home with a Big 12 win, a Wembley trophy and exactly zero reason to feel good about its offense.

That sounds harsh after a 24–17 victory over Kansas. Then you look at how the points were created.

The Sun Devils gained 228 yards. Kansas gained 414. Arizona State managed 13 first downs, 95 passing yards and 3.5 yards per play. Its only sustained scoring drive covered 44 yards and ended in a field goal. Its two offensive touchdowns came on drives of 25 yards and two yards.

That is not nitpicking a neutral-site win. It is identifying who actually won it.

Defense and special teams carried the passport

Jaren Hamilton returned the second-half kickoff 100 yards for a touchdown. Hyrum Veaono returned a Kansas fumble 77 yards to the 2, setting up Cutter Boley’s sneak. Arizona State forced three turnovers without committing one.

In a game decided by seven points, that is the whole argument.

Kansas even produced the afternoon’s other return touchdown, a 72-yard punt return by Tate Nagy. The difference was that Arizona State stacked its special-teams score with takeaways while Kansas handed back the field position its offense had earned.

Look at the scoring sequence. Arizona State’s 25-yard touchdown pass came with 20 seconds left in the half. Hamilton then took the opening kickoff of the third quarter all the way back. The Sun Devils turned a 7–3 deficit into a 17–7 lead without asking the offense to assemble a normal touchdown drive. That was brilliant complementary football—and an enormous cover for the unit with Boley at quarterback.

The official Kansas recap makes the contrast impossible to ignore. The Jayhawks finished with 22 first downs to Arizona State’s 13, ran for 179 yards and threw for 235. They held the Sun Devils to 3.5 yards per snap. Yet Kansas opened Big 12 play 0–1 because its three turnovers created more leverage than 186 extra yards.

Arizona State deserves credit for taking the game available to it. Boley hit Reed Harris for a 25-yard touchdown with 20 seconds left in the first half. The offense protected the football, then ran out the final 3:51 when Kansas had cut the margin to seven. Winning ugly is a skill, especially after an international trip that scrambles every normal routine.

That is the strongest counterargument: style points do not count in the conference standings, and an offense that does not turn the ball over gives its defense room to be decisive.

Fair. But “did enough” becomes dangerous when the enough includes a 100-yard kickoff return and a 77-yard fumble return. Those plays are real; they are not a weekly plan. An offense with 95 passing yards and no touchdown drive longer than 25 yards is not complementary. It is being rescued.

The win still revealed something valuable about Arizona State. The Sun Devils can defend, tackle in space, protect the football and survive when their preferred script disappears. That makes them hard to beat. It does not make the offense healthy.

My verdict: defense and special teams earned every ounce of this trophy. The offense should accept the ride home quietly. Arizona State proved it has more than one way to win—and also proved the least reliable of those ways is the one that touches the ball most.