ASU’s culture, standard not lost on Texas A&M’s Mike Elko

With the first slate of college football games in the books, attention is now turned to Week 2 of the season. The Arizona State Sun Devils will play what could be the toughest game on their schedule — a road matchup with SEC powerhouse Texas A&M, the No. 10 team in the nation.

The Sun Devils are riding high after a 70-7 throttling of Morgan State, but will have an equally motivated team on the other side as the Aggies also won their first game in dominant fashion, a 50-0 victory over Missouri State.

Still, Texas A&M is not taking ASU lightly going into Saturday. During a Monday press conference, Aggies head coach Mike Elko recognized a true test in front of his team.

“They’re going to present a lot of challenges,” Elko told reporters. “They got a really talented defensive line, they got two NFL corners, they got two NFL wideouts. They got a quarterback who’s really big and talented. They’re really aggressive on special teams. The only thing I’m focused on is these four quarters and whether or not we can figure out a way to win a football game.”

But perhaps Elko’s biggest praise was reserved for the opposing head coach, Kenny Dillingham.

Like Elko did last season, Dillingham has also led a team to the College Football Playoff when he did so with the Sun Devils in 2024. Both have experienced rapid rises in their coaching careers since becoming first-year head coaches within the last four years.

“He’s a really bright football guy,” Elko said of Dillingham. “He’s got a great football mind, and he’s got a really charismatic personality. I think people gravitate towards him, you can see it in how they play. I think one of the things that jumps out on tape is how hard those kids play. That’s usually a really good sign of culture and leadership, and the standard he demands.

“For him to have the success that he’s had so quickly at Arizona State, which was not a place that had been winning a lot of football games before he got there, I think that’s always a testament to a guy as a coach.”

The two coached against each other in 2019, when Dillingham was the offensive coordinator at Auburn and Elko was the defensive coordinator for the Aggies.

Auburn won a close one, 28-20, but Elko noted how both coaches have “grown and evolved schematically quite a bit since then,” in evaluating how much weight that game carries going into this week.

Round 2 of Elko and Dillingham will say a lot about where the trajectory of each program is heading this season. For ASU, a road upset of a top-10 team will surely catapult it into ranked conversations and the upper echelon of the Big 12 hierarchy. For Texas A&M, avoiding an early stumble to unranked ASU will be crucial with a tough conference schedule ahead.

“Games like this are important. … This is a really really talented team,” Elko said. “I know a lot of people like to look at logos and think logos mean things. They really don’t. This is a really talented team that’s been producing a lot of NFL players, has a bunch of them on the field this weekend, and this will be a really big challenge for us.”

The Sun Devils and Aggies face off at 9 a.m. MST this Saturday, Sept. 12. You can listen on Arizona Sports 98.7 FM and watch on ABC.

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