Sam Leavitt is a list maker. He’s also an insatiable competitor. Combine those two traits and the result is something of a conquest chart.
If you are a highly ranked quarterback of roughly the same age as the 20-year-old Leavitt, you’ve probably been on one of his lists. He’s gunning for you.
“He’s still got a list,” says Leavitt’s mom, Tania. “It’s a new list, but he’s still got it.”
The old list was from his days as a high school recruit out of Oregon who felt overlooked and undervalued—especially in his Pacific Northwest backyard. Quarterbacks with more stars or higher ratings made that list.
Leavitt was not ranked among Rivals’s top 30 pro-style quarterbacks in the Class of 2023, and was No. 18 in 247 Sports’s rankings. None of the QBs ranked higher than Leavitt by those two recruiting services finished ahead of him in FBS pass efficiency last season. He was No. 23 in the nation in that statistic as a redshirt freshman, helping guide the Arizona State Sun Devils to a surprise College Football Playoff berth and a near-upset of the Texas Longhorns.
Now in search of fresh motivation, Leavitt authored a revised list. The redshirt sophomore is one of just three returning starting quarterbacks from a 2024 Top 10 team, and a fair amount of publicity has flowed from that. But he still has his radar attuned to pick up even the slightest disrespect and turn it into motivational fuel. “He’ll hear the commentary and repurpose it,” Tania Leavitt says.
Media praise for other QBs can be “repurposed” as a slight to Sam. Thus, QBs who may be considered stronger Heisman Trophy candidates or NFL prospects are in his sights.
The current list is written in Magic Marker on a whiteboard in his bedroom. The whiteboard features a longstanding daily internal challenge: “How great do you want to be?” It also features a single word: “Heisman.” And then it has the list.
“Ten names of people I just don’t like,” says Leavitt, declining to identify them beyond saying they’re all QBs.
Punching up at someone bigger—physically or in terms of reputation—comes naturally to Leavitt. He’s done it his whole life, growing up as the youngest of Tania and Jared Leavitt’s four children and as part of a pack of cousins that ran around together. In a household that Tania semi-jokingly described as “psycho” competitive, being the baby of the family didn’t cut Sam much slack.
That mentality flows from the parents down. Jared was a BYU linebacker whose career was cut short by a broken neck—but Tania says he finished the game in which the injury occurred before seeking medical attention, playing with one of his arms numb. Eventually, Jared had surgery to fuse two of his vertebrae, cutting short NFL dreams. Tania is a former trainer at Nike, an avid skier and a triathlete who can turn a routine mountain hike into a race to the top.
Their oldest child, Dallin, was a safety at BYU and Utah State who played six seasons in the NFL after being an undrafted free agent. His approach to the game, according to his mom: “All emotion. One of us is going to die, me or you.”
Between Dallin and Sam are two sisters, neither of whom let their little brother win at any family games.
“I can’t tell you how many card games ended with him throwing down the cards and running upstairs in tears because he lost,” Tania says. “That’s Sam. But he kept trying to win. He would practice Ping-Pong at a neighbor’s house until he could beat Dallin.”
Thus a child who was not easily discouraged has become an undeterred young man. A late scholarship offer from the Michigan State Spartans gave him a starting point, and Leavitt worked his way onto the field in four games as a true freshman while maintaining his redshirt status. But a coaching change was afoot after the firing of Mel Tucker, and the new guy was none other than Jonathan Smith of the Oregon State Beavers—one of the in-state coaches who was lukewarm to Leavitt in the recruiting process.
So Leavitt went through recruiting 2.0, and Arizona State expressed interest. On his official visit, Leavitt wound up diving into a marathon film session with offensive coordinator Marcus Arroyo—it went on for so many hours that Jared Leavitt, who accompanied his son on the visit, fell asleep. With two QB-friendly junkies running the offensive show in Arroyo and head coach Kenny Dillingham, Leavitt was sold.
Just one complication: five-star QB Jaden Rashada, who was the season-opening starter as a true freshman in Dillingham’s first season of 2023, was the presumptive starter. But Leavitt wasn’t into popular presumptions. He was into production and impact.
“It was tough to get people to buy into me, but little by little they did,” Leavitt says.
By the end of spring practice, he’d risen to the top of the depth chart and sent Rashada into the transfer portal. Along the way he captured the attention of the only top-three Heisman finisher in ASU history.
“I saw this kid running around slapping guys on the helmet, getting them going,” says Jake “The Snake” Plummer, who led ASU to a No. 4 ranking in 1996 before becoming a 10-year NFL starter. “I was like, ‘Who is this kid? I like him. He’s got some fire.’ We were coming out of an era where there weren’t a lot of leaders, not a lot of guys will stick their neck out and put it on the line.
“He’s got some charisma and confidence, but he’s not cocky. That’s a hard thing to pull off. From what I hear from my little birds in the [football] building, he’s a legit good kid. He’s not one of those guys who they say is a good kid but he’s really an a–hole.”
“He’s got some charisma and confidence, but he’s not cocky. That’s a hard thing to pull off. … He’s not one of those guys who they say is a good kid but he’s really an a–hole.”
– Jake Plummer
Still, he was an unproven QB on a team coming off a 3–9 season with the youngest power-conference head coach in the country. No wonder ASU was picked to finish 16th out of 16 in the Big 12 last season.
What unfolded instead was “like a movie,” in Leavitt’s words.
The Devils started 3–0, with an upset of the Mississippi State Bulldogs and a road victory five days later over the Texas State Bobcats in a Thursday night trap game. They lost their Big 12 opener at the Texas Tech Red Raiders, then won the kind of game that elevates a season—Leavitt threw four touchdowns to beat the Kansas Jayhawks, including the game-winner with 16 seconds left to cap a 75-yard drive.
Before that drive, Leavitt smiled at his teammates and said, “You guys ready to go score?” Dillingham referenced that several times as the season wore on—and kept getting better.
“When that guy comes over that calm, as a freshman … that was the moment that was like, O.K., he plays his best in these biggest moments,” Dillingham said. “That’s what the best quarterbacks do, they thrive in those moments.”
Arizona State lost just once more prior to the playoff, at Cincinnati, when Leavitt missed the game with an injury. When he returned to the lineup, he shredded defenses, throwing 16 touchdown passes and just one interception over the next six games. That included a dominant performance against the rival Arizona Wildcats (an expected obliteration) and a brilliant showing against the Iowa State Cyclones in the Big 12 title game (an unexpected obliteration).
“Every week we weren’t supposed to win, and every week we’d pull it out,” Leavitt says. “Every week was ridiculous. We didn’t know how good we could be, and then we kept getting better.”
Opponents who believed they could rattle the freshman QB kept finding out the hard way that they couldn’t. Extra pressure, disguised coverages—not much confused Leavitt.
“You think, ‘He’s young, we can throw some stuff at him and get to him,’ ” says one Big 12 defensive coordinator who faced Leavitt. “But then you open the film and his experience didn’t marry up to the film. He plays like a veteran player. He’s really sharp. You try some stuff and it doesn’t make a dent.”
The magic finally ran out—barely—in a double-overtime playoff loss to Texas. The heavily favored Longhorns were down to their final play in the first OT when Quinn Ewers threw a fourth-and-13 touchdown pass to extend the game. Then Leavitt threw a pick to end it.
Now the world is waiting to see whether that was the latest one-hit wonder moment in ASU football history.
Much like Arizona itself, which was the 48th state to join the Union and the last of the contiguous 48, ASU football was late to the American party. The school fielded teams going back to the 1800s, but didn’t join a conference until 1931. That was the Border Conference, a league of dusty highways connecting schools in Arizona, New Mexico and West Texas. The hardscrabble cactus conference operated well below the sport’s highest echelon.
Even when Dan Devine began a Hall of Fame college head-coaching career at ASU in the mid-1950s and won immediately, the nation was slow to accord the Sun Devils much respect. The undefeated 1957 team—Devine’s last before leaving for the Missouri Tigers—finished No. 12 in the AP poll, behind the three-loss Texas Longhorns, Notre Dame Fighting Irish and even the Rice Owls.
That season was the beginning of Arizona State’s 70-year tease. The Sun Devils have often been good and occasionally been great, but they have never sustained it as a national contender. Repetitive relevance has been as fleeting as a cool breeze in the Valley of the Sun.
The Devils have been ranked in the final AP Top 10 eight times in history, blips spread across the decades under five different coaches. Just once, in 1970 and ’71, has ASU fielded top 10 teams in consecutive seasons. Just once, in 1996, has ASU sent a player (Plummer) to New York as a Heisman Trophy finalist.
Those high-water marks can be matched this season, perhaps even surpassed.
Why can ASU meet or exceed last year’s 11–3 record, Big 12 championship and CFP berth? Because it returns 16 starters from that team, making it one of the most experienced squads in the nation. Because that returning core includes nine defensive starters and All-America wide receiver Jordyn Tyson (75 catches for 1,101 yards and 10 touchdowns). Because the Devils brought in Army transfer running back Kanye Udoh, a different style runner than Cam Skattebo but highly productive (1,117 rushing yards last year).
And because the quarterback is determined to be better than his breakout season of 2024.
“I think the motivation is huge to prove that last year wasn’t a fluke season, and it wasn’t just Cam,” Tania Leavitt says. “But it’s harder to be a front-runner. I want Sam to stay humble. If you’re the underdog, you have forced humility—that’s a good thing.”
It’s harder than ever before for Sam Leavitt to play the underdog role. But he’s got an updated list—a conquest chart—to help him get into character.
