It's no secret that the expectation level around the Pac-12 and the national media of the Sun Devils' 2023 prospects is quite low. Arizona State's first-year head coach Kenny Dillingham will not be upset with a likely low rank in the preseason poll being published later this week, but at the same time, he knows that his squad's abilities and potential are still unknown.
“I never put wins as expectations,” Dillingham explained. “The whole program is based on success, which is just being the very best you can be. Whatever you're doing all the time. So I don't know, to be honest, I've never seen the guys play football. I've seen them play in practice, and there's a huge difference between people who can perform under the lights in a game atmosphere and people who can perform in practice. Is there a correlation? Yes. But there may be one or two guys that raise their game when the lights turn on and one or two guys that don't, and I won't know that until we kick off.”
Conversely, Dillingham stated that he does believe that the overall aptitude of the 2023 Sun Devil team has been dramatically improved. Nonetheless, he knows that the barometer for that sentiment does have its limitations.
‘Once again, it's your versus yourselves (in practice),” Dillingham said. So, everything is relative to who you're going versus. That's one of the hardest things to do, is determine when you're a new staff how good you're going to be. When you've been a place for three, four, or five years, you can say, ‘Okay, well, this was our team last year; that's how many games you won; this team would have been this much better than last year's team, therefore we should be this.’
“But when you come in, and you're at square one, you don't have that baseline, you used to, to know how good this player is under the lights because you haven't coached them or played with them yet. So I think you're competing versus a lot of unknowns, too. I think we have a chance to be good. Yes. But you're still competing with the unknowns.”
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The talent advancement that Dillingham has witnessed has been only regulated to the current players but also to his staff's recruiting efforts which to date have produced 17 pledges and a 2024 recruiting class ranked in the Top-35. 11 players in this group committed just in the last month and a half in a historic flurry of activity. Many of these recruits have repeatedly said how much they appreciated the straightforwardness of the Arizona staff, and that was certainly a philosophy that Dillingham reiterated today.
“We're gonna recruit people who want to be here,” Dillingham remarked. “That's the number one thing about our philosophy: there are no tricks, there are no gimmicks, there are no promises. In the world of NIL, there's zero NIL talk because I want people who want to be here. I firmly believe that this is a special place, and I have a passion for this place. When people walk into this building, they better have pride in it. They better have a passion about it. And that's what we keep as the main thing when we talk to recruit is, ‘Do you want to be here? Do you want to be a part of this? Do you want to be a part of something that could be special?’ And if you do great, and if you don't, great. There are a lot of athletes out there.
“I don't say, ‘If you come here, you're going to accomplish this.’ Because in reality, I can tell you what I've done in the past and what our offense has done in the past, but anybody who comes to this program is gonna have to work their butt off. And the level of success they have is not based off of what I do; it's based off of what they do. So all we're doing is giving them an opportunity to showcase themselves in a great place to live with, hopefully, really good people around them, coaching them to help them be successful in life.”
With an ASU coaching staff that has a handful of coaches who have either coached in the state of Arizona or have recruited it for decades, there was the natural expectation that its recruiting classes moving forward would be peppered with players who called the Grand Canyon State home. Currently, in-state players have committed to AS in the 2024 class, and ten of their portal transfer addition also hail from Arizona.
While ASU's head coach naturally wants the best prospects in his backyard to don the maroon and gold, he still maintains his overall pragmatic approach regarding his recruiting mantra.
“I'm focusing on people who want to be here, and people sometimes get that confused with Arizona kids,” Dillingham noted. “I want Arizona kids if they want to be here. But I have no issue if an Arizona kid says he doesn't want to be here because he wants to experience things. You have to experience things in life. It's a trend in college football to go and experience. If you look in the states of Texas, Florida, and California, kids are leaving their states at a higher rate than they ever have because of social media. Because of the access, they have to learn about things that they didn't know existed 20 years ago, so you can't get frustrated when a kid wants to go experience something.
“I've actually told a kid in this year's class, ‘Don't come here. You shouldn't come here. I can tell in your eyes that you need to go experience something else. I can see it in you.’ And to be honest, if I would have pushed, I may have been able to get him here. But it wouldn't have been the fit for him. That's not what I want. I want people who want to be here. Would I love that to get the top players in the state, would I love to win, would I love to set a precedent that we’re going to help these guys be successful in life and have those guys flock here? Yes, but only if they want to be here, though. I’m not going to trick them into being here, though, and I’m not going to promise them anything, and I’m not going to give them anything else compared to another kid from another state. The opportunity to work, but the opportunity to do it in front of your friends and family, that’s what should make this place special, is the family aspect of staying home. That is what makes this job special for me, so why should it be special for them?”
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The Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) that has swept college sports in the last two years has been an aspect that seemingly has benefitted as many programs as it has adversely impacted. Although Dillingham is a staunch believer in not making any NIL prospects to prospects, even though he stated that NIL is a component that accounts for 75 percent of your recruiting efforts, he sees NIL from a unique perspective and detailed his vision on the topic.
“I hope the players that choose to come here get paid the maximum amount of money they’ll ever get paid,” Dillingham said, “more than anyone in the country, that’s what I hope. I hope I do such a good job that people that businesses flock to pay our players more than anyone in the country because we have a Valley behind it. If you don’t think your business can make a difference, then you’re false. It’s not true. You’re one business, supporting one player, reaching out to one player on Twitter and saying ‘We’re going to pay you X amount of money per month to do this,’ is critical; it’s huge because there are so many businesses.
“Everybody is important there, and that’s the activating the valley piece. NIL is essential, and I want to reward our guys who are here. I want people to get NIL who wanted to be here, not getting a kid here illegally; by the way, you can’t do that by NCAA rules to entice them with NIL. I want the Valley to support the people who choose to be here at such a high rate. That it gets out that ‘Man, Coach Dillingham was talking about it, but that kid over there, he’s making [blank] amount. He’s everywhere.’ That’s how I want NIL; I want the city to wrap around this team and use this team, You got a charity, and you want your kid into a mentorship program; there’s a company MVP foundation that will get behind our players and start getting our athletes to be mentors for inner-city youth. That’s what it’s for, and that’s what I want people to think about Arizona State. It helps our players, utilizes our players to activate the community, helps everybody, and the recruits will see it, see what we’re doing, and they’ll want to be a part of it, and we won’t even have to discuss it so I can help them be successful in life.”
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It was a given that an alumnus such as Dillingham would revive the ASU preseason tradition of trekking up to the pines near Payson and practicing at Camp Tontozona. The Sun Devils will spend 2.5 days there, and its head coach discussed the benefits this experience will produce.
“Togetherness,” Dillingham stated. “I want people to put their cell phones down. Normally we’re going to have a practice in the morning and a walkthrough at night, meetings, and it’s camp. Well, at Camp T, we’re not doing the walkthrough at night; it’s football, a little bit of meetings to clean up the practice, and it’s from 11-noon on; they’re going to do this thing called ‘hangout,’ and they’re going to have to do it without a cell phone, without a television, without a video game. They’re going to do it with a deck of cards, dice, Jenga set, and they’re going to have to hang out, talk to each other, and build relationships because the one thing that I got from former players here that the most successful teams here is the brotherhood they had, and the only way you build that is doing things like this.
“Putting them in an environment where they don’t want to be. No one wants to stay in a bunk. I don’t even want to stay in a bunk! But you know what, we’re going to tell the stories about how this team and how this culture was created, and they’re going to go back to Camp T, and there’s going to be something that happens where a roach crawls into somebody's pillowcase, and they’ll freak out and tell the story forever.”
Even the biggest proponent of this experience would admit that the camp facilities are outdated and create various challenges. Dillingham also admitted that fact and said that he talked to his players about what kind of improvements can be made to smooth the edges of a challenging experience. Nonetheless, the adversity that the players will go through is analogous to the difficulties the gridiron will present in the Fall.
“I've asked the players what those challenges are,” Dillingham remarked. “I said, ‘Okay, (defensive back) Jordan Clark, you've been there in the past. Tell me a challenge.’ And I have meetings about it. One of them is showers and bathrooms, and we're gonna bring some of that stuff in to help them. The other one is food. The last time they went, they lost a bunch of weight when they went to Camp T. So how are we going to solve that? Well, we've got the nutritionist to solve that issue. Right? So really, what we're talking about is where you sleep now and what do you do for fun in your downtime.
“So we've mitigated those issues on the front end; that way, we’ve tried to get the best of both worlds. But part of this is to be uncomfortable. Part of this is that football is not comfortable, right? You go on the road at Washington State, Oregon State; those are are very uncomfortable games. You stay 45 minutes away, you drive, and it's cold and raining. That's why nobody's ever gone undefeated in Pac-12 play. It's because the league is so diverse in terms of the different places you play. So I think you need to put your players in these adverse situations to get them to wake up, and their back hurts because they slept on a single (size bed), but they still have to go practice. That's part of life. That's part of football. That's week nine (of the season), right? And if you think that's not week nine, it’s false. What do we look like through adversity? You can try to create it, but you don't know until you're in it. Nobody knows how they respond. Those are the unknowns that define games.”
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Dillingham has an impressive record as an offensive coordinator at several stops in the Power Five ranks, but did state that his offensive coordinator, Beau Baldwin, will be the one calling plays on Saturdays. Even though Dillingham will have the proverbial last word on plays in case of differing opinions, he specified that he does intend to give Baldwin considerable autonomy in light of his own body of work.
“I think Beau is a really, really good offensive mind. That's why I brought him here,” Dillingham commented. “I think he's done more with less the majority of his career, and I think that's what makes him special. He's won a national championship as a head coach and as a leader. So we're gonna work together to create a game plan, but I have full faith in him on game day, and he's called plays way longer than I have. He’s the leader of the offense, and he's going to run it. But I am on both sides of the ball. I'm going to have a say in both game plans. I believe that's what a head coach should do is help both sides of the football.
‘You have to have a unified attack. You can't say, ‘Okay, this team is really good on offense, and us go out and run 85 plays, because now our defense is going to play 95 snaps. Well, are we deep on defense? Maybe their 2’s are better than our 2’s? Well, if that's the case, then we need to shorten the game. We need to make this a 65 to 72-snap game. Maybe we're deeper than them, and we need to play as fast as possible to get into their depth. So there's so much more that goes into winning, not just scoring, not just stopping, that I think that's why I want to have a role in what is the philosophy to win the game. There was a game last year that I coached in. We ended up losing, but we ran the ball, and we took 13 minutes off the clock in one drive because it was what I felt was necessary to give ourselves the best chance to win. Is that going to make our stats look great? No, we probably should have kept on scoring; that what would have looked good. But we tried to win the football game, and how was that? We had to shorten it that week. So that's going to be my job is how do we create the best plan to win football games.”
Dillingham added that on game day, he expected Baldwin to be up in the coaches’ booth, and on defense right now, it’s undecided whether coordinator Brian Ward or linebackers coach AJ Cooper will sit alongside Baldwin.
“I've been in the box since I was in varsity as a high school coach,” Dillingham recalled. “So golly, how loud is it gonna be (on the field)? There are some unknowns that I have from a football perspective that I didn't go through as a coach. But I could be a freshman high school coach, and you still have to manage timeouts and do everything you would do as a head coach. In a college football game, there's no difference in anything. College is easier because you get TV timeouts and more breaks. That is the type of stuff I'm not worried about. It's more just the differences of the ebbs and flows of not being able to be in the box to see the field. That's different. It's a video game up there, seeing the schemes. That's a change, and that's why I have a guy I trust up there.”
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ASU's head coach said that the only two players who won’t be fully healthy when Fall Camp begins on July 31 are both transfers who are still recovering from serious injuries, offensive lineman Ben Coleman who arrived from Cal, and Colorado wide receiver transfer Jordan Tyson. Dillingham noted that Nevada offensive lineman transfer Aaron Frost who missed Spring practice due to his own recovery is a full go for the preseason sessions and is one newcomer that Dillingham is excited to see in action; the other is USC wide receiver and local product Jake Smith; who was Gatorade National Player of the Year during his senior season at Scottsdale Notre Dame Prep.
“Jake Smith missed the majority of spring ball, but he really jumped out,” Dillingham noted. “He's back up to 197 (lbs.). He's moving really well. He ran high 22s (mph) the other day. Frost has done a really good job coming back. It's hard when there are no pads, just running around. I would say that just athletically, those two guys have really shown up, but we'll really find out when camp starts. We have six days in a row to start, and we practice outside in the heat. We're not going in the bubble unless there's a heat advisory.
“We're gonna practice outside, it's gonna be 113 degrees, and people are going to be super hot. And we're gonna see who really wants it.”
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