After a 53-25 loss to No. 10 Texas Tech, Kenny Dillingham didn’t rush past the damage. He went inward instead, sitting down with his Arizona State staff for a meeting that stretched nearly four hours as the Sun Devils tried to figure out what has gone sideways.
“We just assessed ‘OK, where are we? What are the things we want to get better at in the future?’”
Dillingham said. “‘Why are we where we’re at?
Are there things we could’ve done better structurally, practice-wise, as we were building this thing?’”
That kind of self-scouting is where ASU is right now: 3-3 overall, 1-2 in Big 12 play, and searching for something that feels familiar after the high of last season. Dillingham isn’t acting like the season is beyond repair, either.
“Do we need to make drastic changes? Absolutely not,” Dillingham said. “We still have half of a season left and we haven’t played our best football.”
For players, the message is less about panic and more about resetting the basics. Senior defensive lineman C.J.
Fite put it simply: “Going back to the basics,” senior defensive lineman C.J. Fite said.
“Knowing who we are, our culture, our standard and not trying to do anything special.”
Dillingham has made it clear that he’s looking at his own role in the slump, too. After a 55-19 home loss to unranked Baylor on Oct. 3, he didn’t point fingers outward.
“I am letting our football team down,” he said.
That’s a striking line from a coach who arrived in 2023 to take over a program still picking through the wreckage of the Herm Edwards era. Arizona State went 3-9 that season, matching the previous year for the most losses in school history.
The turnaround came fast. By 2024, Dillingham had the Sun Devils in the College Football Playoff.
ESPN writer Paolo Uggetti captured the scale of that leap in a 2024 assessment, writing: “The program had nothing to play for because of a self-imposed bowl ban that followed coach Herm Edwards’ tenure, which was being investigated by the NCAA because of allegations of repeated recruiting violations,” Uggetti wrote. “The Sun Devils brought in 23 players in the transfer portal (in Dillingham’s first) season (only one of them was a four-star recruit).
“Seventeen of them started in the Big 12 title game.”
That run included a Big 12 championship and a CFP appearance, despite ASU being projected to finish last in the conference. At the time, college football and Washington Post writer Steven Godfrey described the job Dillingham was doing this way: “To truly understand the magnitude of what Dillingham is doing in Tempe, one must first appreciate the idiot-shaped crater left by the Sun Devils’ previous leadership,”
But the momentum didn’t last. Arizona State finished 8-5 last season and lost to Duke in the Sun Bowl, and this year’s team isn’t on that pace.
The next chance to change the mood comes Saturday at Mountain America Stadium against Kansas State. Fite remembers what that can look like when things start clicking.
Arizona State beat No. 16 Kansas State 24-14 in 2024, and he sees a familiar opening now.
“I remember we played a good team that year,” Fite said. “I think after that game, that’s when we really started rolling.”
There is also a significant change coming at quarterback. Mikey Keene, an Arizona native and Chandler High School alumnus, will make his first start for the Sun Devils against Kansas State.
Keene entered last Saturday’s game at halftime for Cutter Boley with Texas Tech leading 43-10, the largest halftime deficit Arizona State has faced since trailing No. 2 Oregon 43-7 at home in 2012. Reed Harris thought Keene handled it well.
“I thought Mikey came out and did pretty good for being on the bench for five-and-a-half games,” wide receiver Reed Harris said. “He handled the challenge well.”
The schedule doesn’t get any kinder after Kansas State. Arizona State still has road games against No.
2 BYU on Oct. 31 and rival No. 25 Arizona on Nov. 28, plus a home date with Oklahoma State on Nov.
- The Cowboys are first among the teams receiving votes in the AP poll.
Dillingham is already 1-2 against Arizona, and another loss to the Wildcats would land hard with a fan base that treats that matchup as one of the clearest measures of success.
The problems run beyond quarterback play, too. Arizona State ranks No. 120 in scoring defense out of 138 teams, allowing 32 points per game. That’s a sharp fall from what many expected after 2024, when fans and analysts believed the Sun Devils had become a Big 12 contender for the long haul.
Instead, the program is back in a place it knows too well: trying to build consistency where it hasn’t stuck before. Dillingham knows the landscape can shift quickly.
“The landscape is changing constantly,” Dillingham said. “The strategy of two years ago may be a horrible strategy right now.”
How ASU responds to this latest setback may say plenty about where the program is headed next. And history at the school suggests the clock on any coach runs fast: no football coach has lasted more than six seasons at ASU since the turn of the millennium, and only one, Bruce Snyder, has done it since 1980.
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Randy Bennetts Arizona State Reset Hinges On One Immediate Test
Randy Bennett has wasted little time putting his stamp on Arizona State, bringing familiar faces from St. Marys with him as he begins reshaping the program around defense, rebounding and a more physical edge. Senior forward Paulius Murauskas and sophomore guard-forward Dillan Shaw, both transfers from the Gaels, have already been elevated into captain roles, a sign that Bennett is leaning on trusted pieces as he installs a system he knows well.
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