Kenny Dillingham doesn’t need a reminder of how unfriendly Kyle Field can be. He’s seen Texas A&M once before, back when he was Auburn’s offensive coordinator in 2019, and he has done his best to wipe another meeting with the Aggies from memory.
That other game came in 2015, when Arizona State lost 38-17 at NRG Stadium in Houston and Dillingham was an offensive assistant under Todd Graham. On Monday, he was blunt about how much of that day he has left behind.
"I've tried to erase [the 2015 matchup] from memory," Dillingham said on Monday. "I think (reigning NFL defensive player of the year and former No. 1 overall pick) Myles Garrett set the record for sacks in a game in the first quarter. I think he had it."
This time, the setting is even less forgiving. Arizona State heads to No.
8 Texas A&M on Saturday, and Dillingham will be the only one of ASU’s 104 scholarship players who has already lived through the full force of that atmosphere. The Sun Devils have plenty of newcomers, more than 40 of them, and many have played in big games.
None of those experiences came in front of the 12th man.
"You can try to practice it, but nothing is like the game," Dillingham said. "There'll be some guys that it's new for. It can be fun, it can be exciting, it can be loud, but I can listen to the loudest music I want, and still think how I want to think."
The numbers around the challenge are hard to ignore. Dillingham’s team has won its last six games against ranked opponents in the regular season, the best streak of its kind in the country.
Texas A&M, meanwhile, went 7-0 at home in the regular season in 2025 and won those games by nearly three touchdowns on average. Kyle Field holds 102,733, a number that dwarfs the biggest and smallest stadiums in the Big 12 combined.
For Dillingham, the answer is the same as it always is in that kind of environment.
"You got to be able to block it out," Dillingham said. "Block out the noise.
Take what you know and execute the play. All the other stuff is noise.
It's the definition of noise. We gotta be able to do our job as many times as we can do it, over and over again, as hard as we can for 60 minutes."
And then comes the travel. Hours after the game, Arizona State will head across the Atlantic Ocean for the first college football game in London. It leaves the Sun Devils in the middle of a 10-day road trip - really more of a plane trip - that reflects how strange scheduling can get in modern college football.
Dillingham didn’t pretend the trip is free of complications.
"There are some natural distractions," Dillingham admitted regarding ASU's travel plans. "We're not hiding away from that.
There's nothing we can do about it, so we're going to embrace it. We've got to get ready to go play a football game."
The bigger concern may be what the stretch does later in the season. Arizona State will have only one bye week after returning from London, a drop from the two-bye-week schedules it had in 2024 and 2025. After dealing with injuries late last season, the Sun Devils chose to trim back their rest opportunities in 2026.
Dillingham’s more physical, aggressive practice approach this year is part of that bigger picture. It’s a clear shift from last season’s method, and it appears designed to give Arizona State confidence in its depth even with fewer built-in breaks.
He isn’t spending much time worrying about whether the schedule is kind or cruel. That, in his view, misses the point.
"I don't care if you have the easiest schedule or the hardest schedule," Dillingham said. "The coach is usually going to get in front of people and explain why it's okay if he loses.
That's usually what it boils down to. At the end of the day, nobody cares…You're either going to get it done, or you're not, and we're going to try to get it done.
We're not really focusing on the challenge of it. We're focusing on the goal, which is to find ways to win football games and play our best football consistently."
In Other News...
Sam Leavitt Faces An Early Big 12 Test Arizona State Fans Should Track
Week 1 gave Big 12 quarterbacks a pretty favorable start, with most of them working against Group of Six or FCS defenses rather than the kind of fronts that expose real issues. For Arizona State fans, that makes the early conversation around Sam Leavitt especially worth watching, because the league-wide sample still says more about how these passers handled the moment than how theyll hold up when the schedule tightens.
Week 2 should tell a much clearer story, as several of the conferences top quarterbacks are headed into matchups against Power Four defenses. Leavitt is part of that group Arizona State supporters need to keep an eye on, because the first real test in league play can quickly separate a clean opening act from something more revealing about what the Sun Devils have at quarterback. [Read more 🡒]