TUCSON – Arizona State coach Herm Edwards doesn’t consider a winning season and a bowl bid a success — not even when his program secured those accomplishments in his first season with a 19-point, fourth-quarter comeback on the road at Arizona Stadium.

Not even when it keeps Arizona out of a bowl and ensures the Wildcats will finish with a losing debut season under Kevin Sumlin.

“A success? I don’t know about that.” Edwards said after beating Arizona 41-40 on Saturday evening in Tucson. “We didn’t win the Pac-12. We had an opportunity to do that, and we didn’t win last week.”

It’s exactly what ASU (7-5, 5-4 Pac 12) fans should want to hear as they wait to find out where they’ll be headed for the postseason.

The Territorial Cup was a thriller. ASU went down early to UA (5-7, 4-5), and at the start of the fourth quarter the Sun Devils were trailing 40-21. It was the most points they had given up all season, and it could have been more.

To that point, ASU’s Eno Benjamin had gained only 51 yards rushing, compared with 117 for UA’s J.J. Taylor. ASU had just 13 first downs, whereas UA had 21. And the Sun Devils had been outgained 280 to 446 in total yards.

They kicked a field goal early in the third, but it looked inconsequential.

Not to Coach Herm. Not to his players.

“I ain’t a panic kind of guy,” he said. “I’ve been in too many of these. Football, it’s a funny game. It’s momentum. And it’s a play or two.”

One-score games

All season, his players have been in close games. Michigan State. San Diego State. Washington. Colorado. Stanford. USC. UCLA. Oregon.

Nine one-score games.

“Won four and lost five,” Edwards said. “Something to build on.”

They’re already building.

Under Todd Graham, ASU was 5-4 in three-point games. Under Dennis Erickson, ASU was 3-10 when a field goal was the margin of victory. Under Edwards, ASU is 4-1 in the closest of games.

“This is crazy to say, but we’re very comfortable there,” Edwards said. “We’re not in a panic mode. … We just kinda keep fighting. And that’s just kinda the DNA of the players.”

For Edwards, it’s about nothing more than belief.

“The thing that I’m probably most proud of as a coach is that I’ve earned their trust,” he said. “Just keep battling. That’s what you do.”

His players have heard him, even when they were down big and it looked like they would head into an offseason of explanations and justifications where a lowest-tier bowl would be the difference between finishing above or below .500.

“We stayed with it,” said running back Eno Benjamin, who finished with 80 rushing yards and three touchdowns. “All it takes is one play to pop everything open. That’s what I was telling Manny (Wilkins) when we were sitting on the sidelines. There was no one pointing fingers. There was no one not trusting the game plan. We put our trust in our coaches, and that came through for us.”

It was the same on defense, even after the unit gave up a season-high 40 points.

“I told the defense, even after I got scored on, keep going, keep playing,” corner Kobe Williams said. “Keep playing, this team’s gonna fold. Keep playing. And that’s how our team is, man. We grind.”

Big goals

ASU’s win hushes naysayers and critics who picked the program to finish last and said Edwards was a bad hire — all before he had coached a snap.

But Edwards wants more.

“I said that when I took this job, and a lot of you people looked at me like I didn’t know what I was talking about,” he said. “That’s gonna be our goal: Win the Pac-12 championship. We want to be in position to do that every year. … Maybe that’s lofty goals, but why do you do this stuff if that’s not what you want try to achieve?”

He needs more players. No program can win consistently with a defense that starts seven freshmen.

But he has a huge edge in recruiting, having beaten his rival, keeping Arizona out of the postseason.

He can point to what he’s already done, rather than what he plans to do. There’s built-in credibility there that Sumlin, right now, can’t match in this state.

Still, Edwards is thinking big.

“For some people, they’ll say, yeah it was good. It’s a good season. We got in a bowl, which is good for the kids. Not the bowl I’d like to play in, but it’s a bowl. And we’ll improve. We’ve got a long way to go,” he said.

“Big thing now for us is to get in recruiting mode. … We’ve got some players to go get.”

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Reach Moore at gmoore@azcentral.com or 602-444-2236. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @WritingMoore.