Bye-week practices tend to give freshmen a bigger stage to showcase their skills, and the end result of that aspect has been pleasing for ASU head coach Kenny Dillingham. Defensive players such as freshmen cornerbacks Plas Johnson, Chris Johnson II, and Rodney Bimage Jr. have all performed well, and on the defensive lineman, freshman Albert Smith III has also galvanized coaches. While this season, they most likely won’t take the field all that often on defense, barring injuries, they can still contribute in other ways throughout the year.
“We’re focusing on special teams with those guys,” Dillingham said. “We’ve spent about 30 minutes on it in two days with that group to see who can help us there while maintaining their red shirts. It’s impressive with Plas, Rodney, Albert, and Chris Johnson that pretty soon here those guys can help us. Our young guys are athletic and fast.”
Out of the previous players mentioned, Bimage has the best chance to take defensive snaps, as he has been a member of the second-team defense all season, and an injury to starting cornerback redshirt sophomore Javan Robinson last week threw the starting position up in the air. Although junior Laterrence Welch will most likely start in place of Robinson, Bimage has the opportunity to carry his weight for the team.
“He 100% could step up,” Dillingham stated. “Javan is doing well, though. Things are better than what we expected for him, but he did have a real injury, so we still have to progress him back, according to the doctors.”
With the rise of the NIL element in college football, the topic of redshirting has been mentioned, along with the new ability to make even more money in college. This could keep players from entering the transfer portal and allow them to use an extra year of eligibility. The team has already decided to redshirt senior receiver Malik McClain and could very well do that with more players who aren’t seeing the field as much as they hoped.
“I think redshirting is more important now than ever,” Dillingham expressed. “I think you can get guys to come back later in their career more than if they already had a degree or a master’s. Now, you can still make an income in college football as this thing starts to evolve toward revenue share (model).”
Heading into the first bye week of the season, Dillingham mentioned the team “needed to do some self-scouting” to remedy the issues that led to ASU’s then- first loss of the year against Texas Tech. Now in their second week-long hiatus this year, Arizona State's head coach feels that fewer tweaks will or need to be made. Still, the Sun Devils will take full advantage of the extra week to hone on certain aspects.
“Our red zone is way better,” Dillingham noted. “For us right now, it’s not as much situational as when we went in the last bye week. Obviously, on defense, we gotta get better on third down and offensively we need to get better on third and short. It’s more about what packages we want to put together and what third-down presentations do we want to bring. What have we done in practice that we can pull from and show a little different wrinkle here in the next five weeks?”
The game against Cincinnati marked the first time this year that the Sun Devils offense showcased more prominently two-running backs in formations and did so effectively, as the unit's health and depth problems prevented that earlier in the season. Dillingham expects that trend to continue in the right direction, but it might take some time to use it as much as he wants.
“It was a really good thing for us,” Dillingham remarked. “I’ve been a split-back guy for most of my career. I’ve lived in the 20 and 21-personnel probably more than the average team in college football, so it’s nice to have backs to do that. I think as we progress, maybe not this year, but in the future, I hope we have the ability to be split back more than we were earlier this year.”
In only his second year as a head coach, Dillingham has quickly developed a reputation as someone who isn’t afraid to take risks. When it comes to fourth-and-short situations, especially around midfield, broadcasters have fully expected him to go for it. The Bearcats held ASU to 0-for-2 on fourth-down conversions, which led to a 10-point swing in the game that wound up being the difference.
Dillingham is progressing in his decision-making each game he coaches and makes minor tweaks to progress in his aim to better the team’s conversion rates. While his method to do that may be unorthodox, he still is confident in his methods.
“I don’t use the book,” Dillingham commented. “I’ve used the book everywhere else, and that book doesn’t change very much week by week. I have a very strong opinion of what are the automatic 'go's.' I kind of go off the feel of the game combined with what I know, but I never just use that. It’s a combination of the analytics and the book. In terms of sports as a whole, people are going for it at a much higher rate.”
Now, seven games through the season, Dillingham has seen what plays have worked better than others facing certain schemes and coverages. This second bye week gives him the chance to reflect on the statistics of what yielded the most success as well as produce below-average results. While he won’t change his playcalling solely based on what he’s seen, he can also look ahead at the schedule and what has worked against those teams thus far.
“It allows you to tilt what plays you’re putting in and installing to your strengths,” Dillingham explained. “I don’t know if a new play is technically that, but it’s more saying to maybe call certain plays more or less. Nothing should be new; the percentage of what you’re doing should be stronger based on strengths and weaknesses. You also have to look at your future opponents and what you’re going to see, so it’s kind of that melting pot of things.”
Dillingham finds himself in uncharted territory with the way the bye weeks are set up this year. Normally, the bye weeks would be closer to each other at the beginning or end of the season, but they’re instead balanced out between several games. With that being said, Dillingham had to decide to focus on adding depth back to the team rather than taking advantage and pushing the players to better themselves.
“I’ve never coached where you have two midseason byes like this,” Dillingham recalled. “You get another week of rest. You have to have a lot of depth to go through a bye and bang. Some of the best teams in the country get to a bye, and they go to work. It’s a grind, and that’s more where my belief leans to. We have way more depth than last year, but for us to come out here and bang, I think, would do us a disservice.”
Bye week can sometimes come at the worst timing, but for the Sun Devils, both in-season breaks couldn’t have come at a better juncture. The first bye week was after the first loss of the season for the Sun Devils, and the second bye week was a case of Déjà vu. The Sun Devils also experienced a pair of weekday games in the first half of the season, so this bye week gives them a chance to reset and focus on finding a groove for the back half of the year.
“Maybe if you were in a rhythm (a bye week can hurt),” Dillingham proclaimed. “Luckily for us, we’ve lost both games before the bye. We haven’t really had a normal week this year. Here in the back half of the season, we’ll have four straight weeks of a normal college football schedule in terms of rhythm.”
The Sun Devils are undefeated at home this year but are 1-2 on the road. Dillingham has yet to find a successful process that would yield a Big 12 win away from Tempe, and taking to the road out of the bye week is a perfect test for the team to show that they have been able to draw the necessary conclusions from their two losses of the year. It forces the players to control the median part of the first half, a period that has seen all three road games start to slip away from ASU, albeit saw the Sun Devsl survive a scare at Texas State.
“I gotta find a way to not have our team have that lapse,” Dillingham admitted. “It hasn’t been the entire game; we’ve played pretty well in the second half of most of those road games. It’s this quarter, in between the middle of the first and the middle of the second, that we’ve let three games spurt out of control. We’ve gotta find a way to mitigate that area of time, and I’m working through that right now.”
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