The Sun Devils' first practice after their blowout 48-7 win on Saturday lacked the energy head coach head coach Kenny Dillingham wanted to see. The players didn’t seem to be putting in their full effort but rather going through the motions at practice. Although they picked up the pace toward the end of the session, Dillingham criticized the players’ over-confidence after playing just one game this season. Furthermore, today was certainly not an indication of how well or poorly the team would do if they encountered adversity in a contest.
“Our kids thought they won the Super Bowl on Saturday,” Dillingham said. “We practiced like a 1-11 team today, but luckily, they responded the last six periods, and we had a really good ending of practice. We got comfortable, and I’m trying to prevent that from happening, but human nature seeps in. We haven’t done anything yet, we’re still a nobody. I lost my mind a couple of times in practice, but deservingly so.
“You haven’t done crap yet. We played one football game and got up big on them. Who knows if we would have been in a dogfight? Sometimes, you blow out a team that you’re not that much better than, and sometimes, they blow you out. That’s the crazy part about football, if you take away our first interception the momentum changes. For us, we can’t let that one moment make us think anything different and make us work any differently, and I thought we did today at the start. That’s unacceptable, and I have to do a better job getting our guys to understand that.”
Dillingham believes that if the Sun Devils have any chance of winning Saturday’s game, it starts with their mental approach, an element that was lacking today. The ASU head coach wants the team to play as a collective unit because he knows that gives his team a good chance to maximize their potential and ability.
“It’s about us,” Dillingham professed. “Our program is being the very best at whatever you’re doing all the time. If we do that and we bring passion, nobody is going to want to play us. Nobody wants a team that plays hard every single snap, is physical, and plays together. Nobody wants to play those teams, and those teams consistently win in college football.”
With Mississippi State coming into town, Dillingham knows that a much higher caliber opponent awaits the Sun Devils. The Bulldogs, much like Arizona State, entered the season with low expectations and were picked near last in the SEC media preseason poll. It’s a team that undoubtedly wants to prove that their own week one lopsided win, 56-7 over Eastern Kentucky, was anything but an aberration and does signal a true turnaround from 2023. Dillingham wants his team to have that same demeanor, especially because of how little adversity they faced last week.
“I’m excited for our guys to get this opportunity to perform against good players,” Dillingham reamrked. “This is an SEC school that’s going to play the best teams week in and week out, and they look at us as a must-win game for them. I’ve been in the SEC, and that’s how they think when they travel to the West Coast if they want to have a good season. We’ve got to come out and be violent and physical and play with some passion.”
The Sun Devils efficiently balanced the run game (241 yards) with the passing game (258 yards), and that proved to define the rest of the game. Dillingham focused heavily on the run game last year but couldn’t build off of it enough to have an effective passing game. Although this season is still a small sample size, both offensive facets complementing each other like they did on Saturday, showcased the array of weapons in their arsenal, and spoke to the potential this side of the ball has.
“When you’re balanced like that, that’s the first step,” Dillingham noted. “If you can run the football, everything else in football is easy. You have to have the ability to run the football a little bit to create balance to control the clock and win football games. I think the fact we did that is going to open it up because we do have some talent on the edge. If you can establish the run, you can throw the ball deep, and that’s what the big challenge is.”
Dillingham has mentioned all week long after the win that he’s still waiting to see the team in its rawest form. In a demanding Big 12 conference, he’s more likely than not going to see them in that vein, but until then, Dillingham wants his players to keep that next-play mentality and not dwell on their mistakes.
“Not one game will tell us how far we’ve come,” Dillingham admitted. “Not even the Wyoming game tells us how far we’ve come, in my opinion, because we haven’t responded to adversity. We’ll find out where we are as a team the week after we get out butt kicked. That’s when we’re going to find out and where the program is going.”
The Wyoming game marked the first time since 2022 that junior safety Xavion Alford played in a regular season game, as an injury and eligibility issues sidelined him for those two years. With the play style of Mississippi State a little more attractive to Alford’s free safety position than Wyoming’s run-first, second, and third mentality, he is eager for that aerial challenge.
“It felt good to be back there in my element,” Alford recognized. “I felt like I was back at home when I was back there, but I feel like I’m the type of player that the more I play football, the better I’ll get. I’m excited about this week with the way they (Mississippi State) throw the ball, so I feel like it’s my type of game. I wasn’t nervous before the game, I had a little bit of tears before the game, thinking about all the workouts and late nights, all the work I put in, but once I strap up it’s go time.”
Dillingham talked about Alford in his Monday press conference, mentioning his pregame speech and admitting that his safety does a much better job than he can. Alford embraces that leadership role, and he thinks the respect that the players show him plays an important role in how they respond to him and his words.
“I know I do,” Alford laughed as he agreed with his head coach. “It’s different coming from a player, and me being a leader and a guy they’ve seen go through adversity, so I feel like my voice carries more. We try to breed battle-tested guys here, and I just try to get them motivated. I say a guy who hasn’t played in a thousand days has to be a self-starter, so even when I’m talking to the team, I’m talking to myself. I look at myself as an inspirational guy, so why not spread it throughout the team and create a fire before we run out there.”
Alford and the rest of the team have adopted the narrative of being the “rejects” and players that their previous team did not want to see on their roster. He feels that this narrative lights a fire underneath the team, and it’s displayed on the gridiron. Every player on the team holds that mantra close to them and uses it as motivation.
“I think it’s a part of us, and it’s here at ASU,” Alford acclaimed. “If you look at the roster, it’s a lot of guys that were slept on or were highly recruited and went through some type of adversity. I feel like our whole team is assembled from adversity, so we’re going to use that as fuel to our fire. We’re going to play like we’ve been through something, and as you can see out there, it was all explosive, and we were putting our foot down, so that’s going to be our identity, and we're going to try to stick to our identity.”
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