Arizona State is walking into a kind of stage it has never quite seen before.
When the Sun Devils visit No. 10 Texas A&M on Saturday at Kyle Field, they are expected to play in front of the biggest true road crowd in program history - and possibly the largest crowd ever to watch an Arizona State football game. Texas A&M already packed 107,782 fans into the stadium for its season-opening 50-0 win over Missouri State, and if Saturday’s turnout gets close to that figure, ASU’s record book could be rewritten twice over.
The current mark for the largest crowd Arizona State has faced away from home dates back to Sept. 26, 2009, when 92,746 people were in Sanford Stadium for the Sun Devils’ game at Georgia. That one ended in a 20-17 loss when the Bulldogs hit the winning field goal in the final seconds. Since then, Arizona State has played in plenty of massive venues around the Big 12, but none has topped that atmosphere.
For the biggest crowds in program history, though, you have to go back to Pasadena. Arizona State’s all-time attendance record is 103,168, set at the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1, 1987, when the Sun Devils beat Michigan 22-15 to finish one of the best seasons in school history.
A decade later, 100,635 watched ASU’s Rose Bowl game against Ohio State on Jan. 1, 1997, when the Buckeyes scored late to win 20-17. Those remain the only two Arizona State games ever played before crowds of at least 100,000.
Texas A&M blew past both of those numbers in its own opener this year, and the Aggies have every reason to draw another huge crowd. They’re coming off an 11-win season, made their first College Football Playoff appearance, and opened 2026 ranked No. 10 before rolling past Missouri State.
Arizona State arrives with momentum too. The Sun Devils opened with a 70-7 win over Morgan State, and quarterback Cutter Boley delivered a debut that already stands out in the program’s record book.
He went 21 of 27 for 387 yards and six touchdowns without an interception, the most passing yards ever by an Arizona State quarterback in his first game with the team. He also became the first ASU quarterback since Andrew Walter in 2004 to throw six touchdown passes in a game.
Boley has already spent time in hostile SEC settings. Last season at Kentucky, he played in eight SEC games, completed 66.5% of his passes in conference play and threw 12 touchdown passes. Still, Kyle Field is a different kind of assignment, and Texas A&M’s defense made an early statement by holding Missouri State to 67 total yards - the fewest the Aggies have allowed since 1978.
There’s more on the line for Arizona State than just a loud afternoon. The Sun Devils have won six straight regular-season games against AP Top 25 teams, the longest active streak in the country entering the weekend. They are 6-1 against ranked opponents since the start of the 2024 season, and a win over Texas A&M would push that streak to seven.
It would also be a first. Arizona State has only had two true road games against SEC opponents, the 2009 trip to Georgia and last year’s game at Mississippi State, and it has never beaten an SEC team on the road. A victory Saturday would also give the Sun Devils their first road win over a Top 10 team since a 38-23 victory over UCLA at the Rose Bowl in 2015.
If ASU pulls that off, it may do it in front of the biggest crowd the program has ever seen.
In Other News...
Sam Leavitt Faces An Early Big 12 Test Arizona State Fans Should Track
Week 1 gave Big 12 quarterbacks a pretty favorable start, with most of them working against Group of Six or FCS defenses rather than the kind of fronts that expose real issues. For Arizona State fans, that makes the early conversation around Sam Leavitt especially worth watching, because the league-wide sample still says more about how these passers handled the moment than how theyll hold up when the schedule tightens.
Week 2 should tell a much clearer story, as several of the conferences top quarterbacks are headed into matchups against Power Four defenses. Leavitt is part of that group Arizona State supporters need to keep an eye on, because the first real test in league play can quickly separate a clean opening act from something more revealing about what the Sun Devils have at quarterback. [Read more 🡒]