SALT LAKE CITY - Entering this week, Kenny Dillingham had nothing but praise for his opponent. While this is not uncommon for the first-year head coach, the words of Kyle Whittingham, a respected coach who runs a professional program, were especially complimenting for the patriarch of Utah football.

“This is the program that I envision hopefully having here,” Dillingham told the media on Monday. “A coach who’s been there for 19 years, who’s built it up, who’s established physicality and the program's toughness. That’s what we’re trying to build here, so this is the standard. The gold standard in the league for what a program should look like should feel like.”

Five days later, and in the wake of a historically vicious defeat, his sentiments of the Utes being a model, barometer-like program were unchanged.

“It’s what I knew they were,” Dillingham said after the game. “That’s why I’ve been showing clips of Utah since I got here. It’s because this is the standard, in my opinion, right now, of Pac-12 football.”

“Same thing I see from them every time I’ve played them since I’ve been in college,” Jordan Clark added. “They’re just they’re a program that does things the right way.”

If the Utes’s status as the reigning conference champions is Dillingham’s end goal in Tempe, Saturday’s result will serve as the base camp to a long climb up the Utah mountains, as ASU was trashed in a 55-3 defeat. Just a week after its first win in two months, the one-step forward and five-step back adage can be applied in a nutshell to this scenario, but Dillingham credited the difference in the quality of the opponent almost just as much as his own side’s shortcomings.

“Even though the result wasn’t what we wanna see, doesn’t mean we got worse today,” Dillingham exclaimed. “Doesn’t mean we got worse today. We weren’t a worse football team today than we were last week. Did we miss some plays? Yeah. Were we a worse football team? No. We’re the same football team, if not a little bit better actually than we were last week. We just didn’t make the plays. We did last week, and we played a better team than we did last week.”

In its largest defeat to a Pac-12 team in school history, Arizona State seemed doomed from the start. On their first offensive series of the game, after Utah had marched down the field for an easy opening-drive score, ASU quarterback Trenton Bourguet went down with a leg injury, one that would keep him out for the rest of the game aside from a five-play drive in the middle of the second quarter. Despite his best efforts, the starter couldn’t tough it out.

Having lost Drew Pyne and Jaden Rashada to injury at the position already, the Sun Devils could ill-afford another man down under center. With Jacob Conover thrown into the fire, the Arizona native couldn’t escape the flames, going just 5-22 for 41 yards through the air, including an interception. The run game could provide him no relief either, as the mountain of injuries on the offensive line showed ASU’s depletion at the position against arguably the best trenches unit in the nation. With no time to do anything, ASU was fighting a losing battle offensively, which showed in their minuscule 83 yards of total offense, the second-worst in a game in the team’s history.

While their injury situation was nowhere near as drastic at quarterback, Utah went through a similar ordeal with ASU in that their presumptive day-one signal-caller had missed several games. Even more severe than the cases of Rashada and Pyne, all-conference caliber QB Cam Rising has not taken a snap for the Utes this season, and coming into Saturday, Whittingham’s offense had struggled at times to go without him.

Still, though, Bryson Barnes had led the Utes to a 7-2 record, firmly in the Pac-12 race, while ASU sits on the exact opposite end of the spectrum. Dillingham chalked this discrepancy up to himself rather than the different circumstances, a showing of accountability that he was not alone this week.

“I gotta do a better job getting our players in better positions,” Dillingham commented.

“We weren’t doing what coach was asking of us,” Clark continued. “Guys just not doing their job. We had some mishaps at the beginning. People were trying to over-compensate and help other people do their job when all in all, we gotta play 1/11th football like coach said.”

The lone bright spot in what’s been a depressing season, Arizona State’s defense was no match for the Utes. Even though Utah was coming off a measly six-point performance at home against Oregon last week and had placed dead last in the conference in total yardage, Barnes and running back Ja’Quinden Jackson exploded for a team-high in points and total yards for the season. Even when others see a move of disrespect in Utah’s touchdown with seconds left in the fourth quarter, the team again reiterated that there is no sympathy at this level of the game.

“That’s football,” Clark said.

“If we didn’t come out physically ready to stop running and stuff like that, that’s on us.” Shamari Simmons continued

“They’re playing football, our job’s stopping,” Dillingham added. “I don’t care if they would have thrown it. I mean, this is not Pop Warner. This is collegiate football. If they would have been throwing the ball fourth quarter, I would have been perfectly fine with it.”

Utah’s 60-minute effort ended up contributing to ASU’s worst margin of defeat in a game since 1946, and while the caliber of the opposition was elite at Rice-Eccles Stadium, Dillingham and the Sun Devils know it all starts with the basics on their sideline, which hampered them mightily in their embarrassing loss.

“At the end of the day, football comes down to blocking and tackling,” Dillingham noted. “And if you can’t block them, you can’t tackle them. Nothing else matters. And we gotta go back to work, blocking and tackling. And I gotta do a better job getting our guys better at blocking and tackling the guy in front of us because that’s what this game was about.”

Even so, it takes a lot more than just blocking and tackling to become a class-of-the-conference level team like Utah. Before the Utes captured their first of two Pac-12 titles in 2021, there were 17 years of coming up short under Whittingham, which included two losing seasons in his first three years. Hoping the development curve for his program to reach that echelon will be much faster, Dillingham and the team still understand the process that goes into becoming one of the best, which includes time and determination to improve.

“Everybody should be embarrassed,” Clark emphasized. “Everybody should understand that this is not okay at all…This isn’t Sun Devil football. This isn’t the standard that we wanna play at or compete at. We gotta get back to work and finish.”

“I think the majority of this team understands this is a process and that this is year one in a process that takes time,” Dillingham said. “And that there’s been a lot of unfortunate circumstances, that there’s no excuses for what happened today. But we gotta be able to respond, continue to work, continue to fight. And continue to get better and better and better every single day.”

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