Kenny Dillingham after blowout loss: ‘I am letting our football team down’

TEMPE — For all the pain and frustration Arizona State fans were likely feeling with a 55-19 loss to Baylor, head coach Kenny Dillingham said his was 100 times worse.

“I chose to be here. So if you think anybody is more frustrated than me, you’re wrong,” Dillingham said postgame Saturday. “I don’t think there’s somebody probably even close to (my) level of frustration, but I can try to do something about it.

“I think that was my message to the guys is, ‘OK, we just had an atrocious game, and we can either point the finger at who is wrong, or we can all take extreme ownership and try to fix it.'”

It wasn’t any one thing that doomed ASU, but rather an avalanche of issues across the board.

There was poor tackling by the defense, poor blocking by the offensive line and a rash of other miscues, whether it be a red zone drop from Reed Harris, a fumble by Omarion Miller or Cutter Boley’s first-down field interception as a Sun Devil.

ASU drove inside of Baylor’s 30-yard line seven times but only got 19 points out of a possible 49. (If there’s a silver lining there, it’s that kicker Carson Smith was 4-for-4 on field goals — including a new season-long of 46 yards — and is now 7-for-7 on the year.)

To that end, Dillingham could almost guarantee that the tweaks needed in response to the loss wouldn’t be drastic; they just needed to be better at the fundamentals and operating on the same page.

“We’re not playing as good as we can play. … I am letting our football team down,” Dillingham said. “I am not maximizing the team that we have. We’re falling short of the ability that we have. I got to figure out why and how to get there. I don’t know the answer to that right now. I got to figure it out.”

While he said it’s his first time as a head coach being at such a loss, he does have experience turning the Sun Devils around midseason. The 2024 team that won the Big 12 did so after starting conference play 2-2.

At 1-1 in Big 12 play (2-2 overall) so far, ASU hasn’t been eliminated from anything.

While the Sun Devils will have plenty of chances to face the teams they’d likely have to jump in the standings, it’s not worth even having that conversation if they can’t bounce back from Saturday’s level of play before resuming conference play Oct. 17 at Texas Tech.

Kenny Dillingham stands by ASU’s Cutter Boley

Hawaii is up next in ASU’s only pairing of back-to-back home games this season, and Boley will remain the Sun Devils’ starting quarterback.

“I didn’t think Cutter was, like, the glaring issue of the football team by any way, shape or form,” Dillingham said. “I thought there were a lot of positives in his game. … Do I think (a change) is even close to the realm of possibility right now? Absolutely not.”

The head coach pointed to areas where improvement is needed, such as keeping the ball in bounds more consistently on man-covered throws to give Harris and Miller better chances to go make a play.

Dillingham also said Boley “knows better” than to force shot plays and put the ball in jeopardy the way he did on the interception, especially when it’s third-and-1.

“There’s a few things we got to get him better at, but I think he’s playing good football,” the head coach said. “He’s throwing the ball down the field nice on early downs. I don’t know what he went for today, but I thought he had a pretty good game other than a couple plays.

“We just got to do a better job, got to run the ball better. And you can’t run the ball 30 times for 99 yards. I mean, that’s not going to be productive. There’s not enough balance there.”

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