ASU’s Kenny Dillingham says Mississippi State matchup will be decided by margins

Following a mistake-filled win against Northern Arizona last week, Arizona State head coach Kenny Dillingham stressed the importance of his team doing the little things ahead of its matchup against Mississippi State on Saturday.

“You have to win the margins. You have to win the middle eight and score the last points of the first half and coming out of halftime. You can’t turn the football over and have pre-snap penalties.  You have to win all the little things that go into a game that flip it drastically,” Dillingham told Arizona Sports’ Bickley & Marotta.

“We were top five in the country in scoring at the end of the first half and at the end of the game and then we were top five in the country in turnover margin. When you win those categories, you’re going to win a lot of football games.”

ASU are coming off a 38-19 win against NAU last week in a game where the team committed 12 penalties for 93 yards while being outscored 6-3 in the second quarter. The Sun Devils were also outgained in time of possession with NAU having 31:34 compared to ASU’s 28:26.

Dillingham said he was impressed with how well his team responded in practice this week and how the team needs to establish the run in order to control the game.

“We talked about how their was too long of a game and our games don’t usually have 13 defensive possessions. That one did so we have to establish the run better on offense because you can’t have your defense for 13 possessions,” Dillingham said. “Our workload in the football game was way higher than our workload in practice, which usually doesn’t happen.

“I showed a chart of how much work a game took versus a practice and our guys have responded and increased their workload in practice by eight to 10 percent just trying to build up that conditioning level for gameday and I’ve been really happy with how they’ve responded.”

Listen to ASU-Mississippi State on the Arizona Sports app, ESPN 620 AM or 98.7 FM HD-2. Kickoff is off at 4:30 p.m. MST and the game can be seen on ESPN2.

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