Andrew Walter has a simple answer on how to follow up his record-setting season: Get greedy. The 6-foot-5, 220-pound junior, who emerged from a backup role to win over his coaches and pass for an astounding 3,877 yards, says to take the next step as a quarterback he has to learn to take the easy things.

"Last year, I'd throw for 400 yards and miss on six or seven hitches," says Walter. "Those are easy yards I need to get because you gotta keep the chains moving."

Walter explains that it wasn't a case of making the wrong reads, it was just a function of being lazy and airing it out for an empty incompletion when a deep man's not open. "I need to constantly get on myself to be focused on getting the easy stuff."

	Andrew Walter threw for 3,877 yards and 28 TDs last season.

It's hard to fault Walter for not wanting to go downfield. When you talk to Pac-10 coaches, the thing that they'll say when asked what makes Walter special is his great touch on the deep ball. "He has a great arm," says Oregon coach Mike Bellotti. He should know last October, Walter set the Pac-10 single-game passing record with 536 yards in ASU's upset at No. 6 Oregon.

The Oregon game was what made Walter a national name. Funny thing was, it was just a few weeks early that Walter's teammates found out about what he could do. That was when Walter led one of the great comeback wins in ASU history. The Sun Devils were trailing 22-0 in the second quarter when coach Dirk Koetter grabbed Walter off the bench. Walter says he didn't really feel much pressure because ASU was down by so much. His first throw: a 72-yard touchdown down the seam to streaking wideout Shaun McDonald. After an ASU takeaway, Walter's next pass was a 33-yarder to McDonald for another score. The two TDs came within a 27-second span.

At that point, Koetter realized maybe his QB knew what he was talking about. After all, wasn't Walter the one who was always telling him how if the coach turned him loose in a game the kid would deliver? Trouble was Koetter's rule is if he didn't see it in practice, you didn't get the chance in games.

It didn't matter to Koetter that his predecessor Bruce Snyder had predicted that Walter would be all-Pac-10 by his sophomore year. Koetter wasn't comfortable with Walter's mechanics and demanded consistency. In the spring of 2002, Walter, a kid who was born in Phoenix and is the child of two Sun Devils, considered transferring after Koetter named Chad Christensen his starter. Koetter met with Walter and his parents and told them what the QB needed to do to get better. Much of that was technical work.

"He wanted me to hold the ball up higher, improve my footwork, take the right drops," says Walter. "Those were the things he wanted me to key on."

Koetter says it was a case of Walter's mechanics not allowing him to be a consistent accurate passer. "Here was Andrew always telling me he had the intangibles it took to be a big-time quarterback," he says. "Unfortunately, those things just couldn't come out."

The two spent hours reviewing film of what Koetter wanted -- and what he didn't. "We found a happy medium," Walter says. Actually, the coach got exactly what he wanted. And Walter got better. The byproduct was the best season ever by a Sun Devil passer.

This season Walter has a new challenge: working without his go-to guy McDonald, which means Walter will have to spread the ball around more. He also realizes he has become a Heisman candidate, and he laughs about that now considering where he was at this time last year.

So what is possible now that he has a year playing in the system? Walter is quite candid about what his goals are: "If I throw for a thousand less yards, but we win 10 or 11 or 12 games, I'd consider it a more successful year," he says. "I'd prefer to have more stats and more wins, but I could totally accept less stats and more wins."

Bruce Feldman covers college football for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at bruce.feldman@espnmag.com.