Kenny Dillingham responds to cleared-out home stadium during ASU’s ‘most embarrassing game’

Arizona State head football coach Kenny Dillingham was not the most surprised person to see Mountain America Stadium look deserted during the second half of last weekend’s 55-19 defeat to Baylor.

Dillingham called the game the single most embarrassing loss of his ASU tenure, and it happened in front of ASU’s 10th straight sellout at home. As a Valley native, he knew that putting together such a performance would not keep people in their seats, and his team has to earn that trust back from the fans.

“I was one of those people that probably would have left,” Dillingham told Arizona Sports’ Bickley & Marotta. “That’s the challenge of this place, is you have to put a product on the field. There’s too many things to go do than to watch a bad product. I can’t get mad if people aren’t there, right?

“All I can ask for is the support and belief that we’re going to get it fixed and that we will have good product and that there will be fun games and that it’s going to be entertaining.  … We got to go put a team out there, not just that plays fundamentally sound, that is fun to watch in a manner of we play with passion, we play hard, you can feel our energy on the field.”

He went back to work on Sunday curious about the response from his team.

The Sun Devils are back at home for a nonconference game Saturday against 1-4 Hawai’i, but Dillingham said there were a couple possibilities for what he could have seen this week leading in. Sunday set a quality tone.

“I think a great testament is we have voluntary workout, shakeout runs on Sundays and mandatory stuff on Mondays,” Dillingham said. “And I could I swear I saw everybody in the in the shakeout run on Sunday. … Our building was filled with people getting treatment, coming up and watching tape on their own, like it wasn’t a ghost town. I think if the building would have been a ghost town on Sunday, I would have had a lot of concerns. But the building wasn’t. The building was filled with people and filled with people who are pissed off, rightfully so.”

Kenny Dillingham changes roles

Dillingham is responding to the loss in a personal way, as well, handing the play-calling duties to offensive coordinator Marcus Arroyo in order to focus on the operation of his team as a whole.

As the head coach put it, when adversity starts piling up, he does not want to be hyper fixated on finding “leverage on an inward breaking route.”

This is the arrangement ASU has managed for most of the previous two seasons, and Dillingham suggested it was a mistake to go away from it.

“I need to get more involved and I need to help stop that avalanche,” Dillingham said. “I need to be a guy involved in all three phases and not worrying about which leverage are we going to break and which angles we need to create up front and worry about when good things happen, keeping our guys composed and when bad things happen, getting our guys re-rallied.

“This will be a good test for us because the history here, when we’ve gotten our butts kicked, we’ve responded really well. We lost to Utah last year on the road, came back and beat a top-five team at home. And so I think for us, this is a really good test for where we stand as a football team this year is how we respond.”

ASU lost to Utah, 42-10, last October and bounced back with a 26-22 win over then-No. 7 and eventually-No. 4 Texas Tech.

Arizona State has not lost two regular season games in a row since 2023, Dillingham’s first season.

Dillingham claimed this is not a complete 180-style change in operation internally. He joked that turning to the swinging gate formation, as he did in desperate times during the 2023 season, would be a massive change.

But this is a meaningful philosophy shift to find some answers before the Big 12 schedule really heats up.

“I believe in these guys and this pisses me off that I have not figured out a way to get this football team, who I believe is a good team, to maximize who we are,” Dillingham said. “So I need to go take a big picture approach, be my own consultant and look at this thing from a different angle and say, ‘Where do I think we’re falling short?'”

This is an important game for ASU to regain some footing, considering the Sun Devils go on the road to visit No. 11 Texas Tech the following weekend.

 

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