One week ago, Arizona State football appeared to be headed in the right direction, capturing their first Pac-12 win under head coach Kenny Dillingham. They put together their first complete offensive performance of the year, and the defense made enough plays to come out with the 38-27 win.

One week later, in Salt Lake City, the Sun Devils (2-7, 1-5 Pac-12) suffered a lopsided defeat, falling 55-3 to the No.18 ranked Utah Utes (7-2, 4-2). The 52-point deficit is the worst conference loss in school history, eclipsing a 50-0 shutout to USC in 1988.

“I mean, guys are frustrated,” Dillingham said. “That’s a good thing. I don’t think guys quit. Not being able to really throw it, run it, or do anything offensively, it’s tough. It’s hard to continue to get up and go, and you can’t block them. I think the guys are going to continue to fight.”

On Saturday afternoon, ASU delivered both its worst offensive performance of the season and its worst defensive performance of the season.

The offense got off to a bad start before their charted plane even left Sky Harbor. Junior offensive lineman and starting left tackle Isaia Glass did not travel with the team due to an injury, leaving ASU with just seven scholarship offensive linemen remaining to travel with the team to Utah.

As a result, freshman offensive lineman Sean Na’a replaced Glass as starting left tackle and the responsibility of guarding the junior EDGE Jonah Elliss, who leads the Pac-12 with ten sacks entering Saturday’s game. On ASU’s third offensive play from scrimmage, Elliss came off the edge and fell on ASU junior quarterback Trenton Bourguet’s ankle as he released his throw. Bourguet was unable to put pressure on his left ankle as he left the field.

Bourguet returned for a brief appearance during the second quarter but exited the game again after just one drive. He was later seen on the sidelines with a boot on his left foot.

“You’re facing one of the best lines and fronts in college football, and you’re down eight guys,” Dillingham noted. “I gotta find a way to help them more. We had a few shots open in the game when they were rotating their safeties to the motion. We just couldn’t protect long enough to get it down to them, and we couldn’t establish a run game.”

ASU turned to BYU transfer sophomore fourth-string quarterback Jacob Conover, but with Bourguet out, Dillingham was clearly not as trusting in Conover to run the offense, limiting ASU to just short passes and rushing the football. Gaining yards on the ground is tough against Utah in any circumstance. It is even harder when they know the run is coming.

And to make matters even worse, ASU was also without junior running back DeCarlos Brooks, who rushed for three touchdowns last week against Washington State. Brooks did not practice all week due to a torn hamstring.

Down to their fourth-string quarterback, the dominant Utah defense held ASU to its second-fewest yards in school history (89) and its worst offensive performance since 1946, when they gained just 12 yards against Arizona.

The Sun Devils managed to put three points on the board thanks to junior wide receiver Elijah Badger returning a kickoff 79 yards deep into Utah territory. But ASU followed up the return with just an eight-play, four-yard drive that resulted in a field goal.

“We really couldn’t do one thing offensively,” Dillingham commented. “Normally, you can try to get to the ball to the edge and just run speed sweeps, but this is a good staff who wasn’t going to let you run speed sweeps. They’re bringing double-edge pressure all night, in which you have to run pass protection and run full slide-angle routes. Or you have to run zone schemes at it and read an edge, and then you still got to win your blocks.

“They knew what they were doing. They knew that they could take away our free plays by just pressuring with field and boundary pressure with zone dogs and really make our guys win one-on-ones consistently. I got to do a better job finding ways to do something.”

Ten of ASU’s 14 drives were over in five plays or fewer, and as a result, the ASU defense was on the field for much longer than it could handle. The Utes won the time of possession battle 36:33-23:27, and the more they were on the field, the more tired they got and the more yards they allowed.

Utah finished the day with an unbelievable 513 total yards of offense with a season-high 352 yards on the ground. Dealing with quarterback injury issues of their own, Utah is down to third-string junior quarterback Bryson Barnes, but that didn’t stop them from having an efficient day through the air as well. Barnes threw for 161 yards for four touchdowns, opening the game with back-to-back touchdown passes to junior wide receiver Devaughn Vele.

The night was made worse by senior EDGE Michael Matus and junior EDGE Prince Dorbah, both going down with injuries, shortening the rotation and having more seldom-used defensive linemen struggled in the latter part of the game,

It was the Sun Devil defense’s worst performance of the season, but with the offense unable to stay on the field, Dillingham took full responsibility for both sides of the team’s season-low performance.

“At the end of the day, football comes down to blocking and tackling, “Dillingham said. “If you can’t block them and you can’t tackle them, nothing else matters. We gotta go back to work, blocking and tackling. I gotta do a better job getting our guys better at blocking and tackling the guy in front of us. That’s what this game was about. It wasn’t about a special play. It wasn’t about tricks. It’s about them saying, tackle us. And then my defense saying, we’re not gonna just let you have free plays.”

Dillingham has proven that he will never shy away from taking responsibility for his team’s bad performances. And his philosophy of ‘nobody cares’ forces him to avoid making excuses for the team. Whether it’s the offensive line continues to be the most injured position group reaching a historical number of player absences or their starting signal caller going down on the first drive of the game, ASU’s head coach will not make any excuses.

“It’s definitely extremely challenging, but nobody cares,” Dillingham remarked. “Everybody’s gonna look at the box score, and they’re gonna say that’s who we are. We gotta be able to distract ourselves from that and just know that that’s not who we are, and we gotta go back to work.”

One thing Dillingham does care about is making his team better each and every week, and even though this is the worst loss in school history, that doesn’t mean his team got worse.

“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 remarked. “There’s been a lot of unfortunate circumstances, and 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.

“Even though the result wasn’t what we wanna see, it 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.”

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