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AP: 631beda9-6961-464d-a149-38cdf18e5b4f
Arizona State head coach Todd Graham talks to his team during the first half of an NCAA college football game against Northern Arizona, Thursday, Aug. 30, 2012, in Tempe, Ariz. (AP Photo/Rick Scuteri)
In their season-opening win over Northern Arizona last week, the Arizona State Sun Devils' offense racked up over 550 yards and scored eight offensive touchdowns.

You'd think that would be enough to please a coach who just guided a team to victory in his first game on the sidelines, right?

Wrong.

Todd Graham addressed the issue of tempo in his weekly press conference Monday, and was none too pleased about it.

"It was the worst thing about week one, our tempo was really, really, really slow," Graham said. "We're waiting on the defense. It's like we're being courteous to them to let them line up. We need to go."

The Sun Devils ran a total of 71 offensive plays in their 63-6 win, but that's not nearly enough for Graham.

"We talked about it at halftime, we were like 'golly, we've got to go faster'," he said. "What I do when we're on offense is I watch the 40-second clock. We should snap the ball, it should say 25 or 22 seconds -- that's where we ought to be snapping it. It was going way down, it was in the teens most of the night."


Of course, it's hard to maintain a break-neck pace when you manage to build a 42-0 halftime lead. Urgency tends to wane, and Graham acknowledged that was part of the problem.

"We were trying to eat as much clock as we could, and that's something that's hard for us to do and it's very boring to watch," he said. "We can't huddle, because we don't know how to huddle, so we just kind of stand there.

"I could hear people yelling in the stands 'you call this no huddle?' -- well we're trying to be sportsmanlike here and not score any more points."

Graham has said he'd like to have 80 or more offensive snaps per game, and in what will likely be a close game against Illinois, that should be possible since ASU won't be trying to run out the clock.

So, how do you play faster? There are many ingredients that make it possible according to ASU offensive coordinator Mike Norvell.

"It gets down to as simple as the o-line finding the football, getting their hands down and getting ready," Norvell said. "It goes from that to seeing the plays, getting the calls, getting the alignments right and to be able to do that at a quick tempo."

Arizona Sports' Craig Grialou contributed to this report

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