Tag: Dillingham

WHEN KENNY DILLINGHAM speaks, it is hard not to listen. The sound of his voice, however, is only half the portrait. Watching him speak paints a far more complete picture.

Dillingham’s eyes seem to widen and ignite as if they have been flickered on by a match. Sometimes, his hands join the party while his eyebrows shoot up to the sky and his head bobs up and down, all of it harmonizing with the cadence of his words, which often feel like they are being spoken a mile a minute.

This season, Dillingham’s postgame interviews after wins have become a fascination and a small, but significant manifestation of his character. Whether baptized by a vat of celebratory Gatorade or simply worn out by being planted for three-plus hours under the Arizona sun, Dillingham often appears drenched and out of breath, as if he has gone through an entire game himself or run through a mental marathon. But even so, that only taps into a portion of the energy he possesses. Whatever remains, he seems to channel into his public speaking.

Even through a screen, Dillingham comes alive. His coaching staff and players gravitate toward the combination of youth and bravado that makes him unique. And for those who decide to use the word “quirky” to describe him, they quickly follow it up with a caveat.

“He marches to the beat of his own drum,” ASU assistant head coach and special teams coordinator Charles Ragle said. “But he knows who he is and I think that that combination is what makes him special.”

Once in a press conference room, Dillingham might be slightly more subdued, but he doesn’t hold back. He calls for his players to get paid “what they deserve,” and he has no problem referring to them as “underpaid.” He’ll announce an impromptu kicker tryout in the middle of the season, or he’ll explain matter-of-factly why he will support Arizona State players who decide to enter the portal while letting them stay on the roster throughout the playoff run.

In this new, evolving era of the sport, Dillingham has little issue saying the quiet part out loud. The 34-year-old’s filter is more like a sieve, an approach that stands out against the backdrop of monotone coachspeak machines that equate any display of personality as antithetical to their mission.

Whether he is waxing poetic about his players on national TV or jumping with the ASU student crowd or even arguing with referees after they put one second back on the clock, like they did against BYU, Dillingham — and by extension the Sun Devils — have become the sport’s Energizer Bunnies, speeding past expectations with a combination of fearlessness and chemistry that takes programs years to achieve.

“I love to compete. If you don’t like to compete, you’re not going to like it here,” Dillingam said in a recent interview with ESPN. “That’s really what started the turnaround was just getting guys who are competitive.”

Arizona State has a running back in Cam Skattebo who has supercharged its offense. It has a defense that has improved leaps and bounds in a year, and a quarterback in Sam Leavitt, who could be a Heisman contender next year. But how the Sun Devils went from being picked to finish last in the Big 12 to conference champions and College Football Playoff quarterfinalists (where they’ll face Texas in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl on Wednesday at 1 p.m. ET) can’t be explained without Dillingham, who is at the center of the glorious frenzy he has created. The Arizona native’s edge and competitive zeal have permeated the program and turned the dire situation he inherited into a winning one overnight.

“He’s somebody that stays true to himself. He’s not trying to conform to an image,” cornerbacks coach Bryan Carrington said. “He’s trying to do this in a unique, sincere, organic way, and for him being a Sun Devil, you can tell that he’s very passionate about this place, he’s very calculated about this place. He treats this place like his baby, because it’s his dream.”

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CHARLIE RAGLE SITS in Arizona State coaches meetings these days and listens intently. His brain often fluctuates between nostalgia and mild disbelief.

Ragle isn’t just the Sun Devils’ assistant head coach and special teams coordinator. He isn’t just a longtime football coach who has coached up and down the ranks of Arizona high school football. He’s, maybe most importantly, the one responsible for Dillingham being here, at the head of a meeting room in front of an entire coaching staff, and not anywhere else — especially not a courtroom.

When Dillingham was entering his senior year of high school football at Chaparral High in Arizona, his father John — a lawyer and member of the school’s booster club — asked Ragle to give Kenny a shot despite him coming off a knee surgery. But once Ragle, then the head coach at Chaparral, saw Kenny struggling to move on the field, he offered him a different opportunity.

“His knee was screwed up, and he came to me at some point that spring and was just like, ‘I can’t play. I can’t do it,’” Ragle said. “”I’m basically done with football.’”

Ragle didn’t want to see Dillingham walk away from the sport, so he asked him to stay, not to play, but to help as a student coach. Dillingham agreed. Once the season was over, however, he told Ragle of his uncertain plans: go to Arizona State and maybe become a lawyer, like his dad. Ragle didn’t want to get in the way, but he asked Dillingham to take his classes and then make his way over to Chaparral in the afternoons to continue helping him.

“I just kind of took a liking to him,” Ragle said. “He was full of energy, same way he is now.”

If Ragle was the one who started the fire within Dillingham to coach, neither he nor anyone else had to do much to stoke it. Dillingham was hooked and poured everything into coaching. He quickly went from student coach to quarterbacks coach from 2007 through 2012 at Chaparral. He was the offensive coordinator for the school in 2013 when he willed himself into a job at Arizona State.

“The energy that he has right now is the same energy he had back then,” said Todd Graham, who was the Sun Devils head coach at the time. “He would come around our program every day and just wear me out wanting to come and sit in on meetings.”

Graham and Mike Norvell, who was then the offensive coordinator at ASU, finally relented and let Dillingham join. The 23-year-old asked if he could attend every day and Graham agreed, not expecting him to actually do it.

“Sure enough, he came every day,” Graham said. “I remember me and Mike watching him and talking about, ‘Man, this guy wants it, he loves ASU, he loves the kids, he loves the program.’ So we let him come around and the next year we hired him as a [graduate assistant].”

Dillingham’s big break turned into a tidal wave of promotions. When Norvell went to be the head coach at Memphis in 2016, Dillingham followed as a graduate assistant. A year later he was the quarterbacks and tight ends coach. A year after that, he was the Tigers’ offensive coordinator at just 28 years old.

“People always told him he was going to be a great coach. That usually means you’re not a very good player,” Ragle said. “But he said they were telling him that when he was a little kid in little league. So I just think that the further he went in this, I think that he saw the success he was having in that. I think he realized he could be pretty good at this.”

Over the years, Dillingham made a name for himself as a youthful personality who could get the most out of quarterbacks such as Jordan Travis and Bo Nix. From starting at Memphis to becoming the offensive coordinator at Auburn, Florida State and Oregon, he was charting a path that seemed to be on an eventual collision course with a head coaching gig. Then, just a few months after he turned 32 years old, his alma mater called.

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WALK INTO THE Arizona State locker room on any given day and you might not be able to differentiate player from head coach so easily. Between the fracas of music blaring and Madden playing, Dillingham is often right in the middle, sticks in his hands, trying to do what he does on Saturdays: win.

“He will be head coach one minute and then he’ll be the guy that’s kicking the player’s ass in Madden in the locker room an hour later,” Carrington said.

“He’s definitely a coach that’s a full-time competitor,” graduate offensive lineman Ben Coleman said. “And I think that’s really cool, because if your coach wants to compete so bad and everything, how can you show up to practice and not want to compete?”

Whether it’s video games, pingpong or any other competitive forum, Coleman and his teammates have noticed something else, too: Dillingham isn’t afraid to lose.

“He does care if he wins, but he’s not scared to put himself in a position where he may not be favored in a situation,” Coleman said. “I think that was a good thing this year, because we saw it everyday. He’s not scared to put himself in a situation where, ‘I know you guys don’t think I’m favored. I don’t really care. I’m confident in my work and my abilities.’”

As Arizona State went into the season coming off back-to-back 3-9 campaigns and into the Big 12 without much fanfare, coaches and players say now that they thrived off letting Dillingham’s self-belief seep into the rest of the roster. It does help, Coleman adds, that Dillingham’s youth is more than just relatable; it’s magnetic.

Motivation and self-belief can only carry you so far in a game decided by slim margins and execution. But Dillingham’s attitude goes hand in hand with his football acumen. Players and coaches rave about his ability to think outside the box when it comes to anything from offensive formations to trick plays.

“It’s just how he looks at things and how his mind works. He sees things differently, he’s really good at seeing numbers, and I think he’s better than most people that I’ve been around when it comes to what football is — a math problem,” Ragle said. “He has a gift with numbers and how his mind works. Sometimes you’re like, ‘Dude, that’s completely ass backwards.’ You know what? Nobody else in here sees it that way and that’s OK.”

“He’s a genius. He is a genius forwards and backwards on both sides of the ball,” Carrington said. “The way this game comes to him and how fast he can regurgitate information, find a competitive edge and seek to be crafty.”

Carrington, who completed his diversity coaching fellowship under Los Angeles Rams coach Sean McVay, often sees the similarities between Dillingham and McVay in terms of their thinking, wittiness and deep wells of football knowledge and concepts.

“From finding ways to exploit teams, to get offenses or defenses in conflict, he’s always got ideas,” Carrington said. “Some of the stuff that we’ve tried this year is almost like he’s playing video games just like he plays Madden against the kids. If that’s a creative field goal fake or a punt, fake or onside kick, he’s always trying to find a competitive edge.”

The edge can often be tangible — a play here, a formation there, a matchup over there — but for Dillingham and ASU, the intangible advantage they have employed this year has come with ease. All season long, Dillingham’s pulpit has professed an often-used “nobody believes in us” mentality that has resonated with a congregation ripe for hearing that message.

Last season, the program had nothing to play for because of a self-imposed bowl ban that followed coach Herm Edwards’ tenure, which was being investigated by the NCAA because of allegations of repeated recruiting violations. The Sun Devils brought in 23 players in the transfer portal last season (only one of them was a four-star recruit). Seventeen of them started in the Big 12 title game.

“I think we’ve embraced being the underdog, because he’s allowed .us to do that and has ignited a fire within everybody to embrace us being picked 16th,” Carrington said. “We’re in the College Football Playoff a year after having a team with nothing to play for and a disaster situation. We were behind the eight ball. So yeah, the guys that chose to come here already had a chip on their shoulder and they wanted to flip the script.”

Not even those inside, however, expected it to flip this quickly.

In the span of a year, the Sun Devils nearly doubled their combined win total of the past two years. Their offense is averaging over 100 more yards per game than it did last season while nearly doubling its points per game total. Their defense, meanwhile, ranks in the top 30 of SP+ and has forced 22 turnovers this season. Last season, it forced nine — a mark that was better than only four teams in all of FBS.

“I would’ve thought we would’ve probably been probably one year away from it, but I knew with the excitement and plan Kenny brought into this program, I knew it would happen pretty quickly,” running backs coach Shaun Aguano said. “We knew [winning] was going to come along sometime. It just happened faster than we thought.”

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THE MORE GAMES Arizona State won this season, the more Aguano’s phone kept buzzing with calls and texts from local high school coaches.

Aguano, a longtime staple of the Arizona high school scene and one of the winningest high school coaches in the area, became the interim coach at ASU after the school fired Edwards in 2022. In and around the city, there was a lot of support for Aguano, and keeping him on staff was one of Dillingham’s first decisions. It didn’t take long for Aguano to see that Dillingham had the right mindset for the program.

“When he talks about activating the Valley, he’s got the community involved more than I’ve ever seen in the years I’ve been here,” Aguano said. “That same energy that he shows in those interviews is the exact same thing that he projects when he’s in front of the team or in front of the coaches. He’s bouncing around the hallways from five in the morning till 10 at night, and that carries to the rest of the program.”

When it comes to recruiting and the portal, Dillingham’s spark plays well. As Coleman explained, not every coach has the ability to connect with younger players and relate to them. Follow Dillingham on X, and posts and reposts will quickly fill up your timeline. If there’s anything being said about his team or his players that is positive, he is there to amplify it, comment on it or add to the noise. It wouldn’t be far-fetched to say the 34-year-old is one of the most online coaches in FBS.

“How could you not want to go play for somebody who is publicly advocating for you?” Coleman said.

Dillingham’s approach has been to embrace the game’s evolution rather than fight it or even begrudgingly accept it. It’s why he has no problem asking for money publicly, wearing a T-shirt with ASU’s NIL collective postgame or promoting his players on podiums and through posts and connecting them with local businesses for NIL opportunities.

“We’re doing more with guys who just got it out of the mud, but eventually you should get what you deserve,” Dillingham said after the Sun Devils knocked off No. 14 BYU on Nov. 23, while wearing the collective’s shirt. “Our guys deserve more, and that’s why I wore this.”

“He’s more versed in NIL than anyone we have ever had here,” Aguano said. “He understands exactly what’s going on, the rules of everything, how to take advantage of it.”

It’s not just the players’ pockets he’s thinking about, either. When he has been asked about his own contract extension talks, Dillingham has shifted the focus toward assistants and players. And when the program reached nine wins this season, triggering a $200,000 bonus for Dillingham, he promptly redistributed it among 20 off-field staff members.

“This dude is thinking about football nonstop,” Ragle said. “And it’s not just the X’s and O’s, it’s about how the game is changing. You see guys that are in their early 60s, late 50s, I think growing weary of the game and the way that college football is changing in real time, and he’s over here manufacturing ideas that can help his program.”

But those inside the program know that Dillingham’s fervor and strategy, however impressive, has to be backed by substance, and that, ultimately, comes down to winning. After the Sun Devils earned 11 wins this season, coaches who have been out on the trail or recruiting the portal have noticed the difference in the way ASU is perceived.

“It’s a lot of people that are answering the phones that weren’t answering the phone three months ago,” Carrington said. “We’re the flavor of the month now.”

Graham knows well what the Valley can be when it is, in fact, activated. While he was in Tempe for six seasons, Graham saw the highs and lows, including back-to-back double-digit win seasons in 2012 and 2013 and the way that the city and the school were passionate for a winner. Graham believes that Dillingham’s hire came at what was likely the lowest point of the program after the “debilitating” mistakes that preceded it.

“He had a harder job than I had,” Graham said. “And let me tell you, a year ago, at 3-9, there weren’t many people believing in what he was doing. Now? He’s got a whole lot of people believing. It’s a magical place to be right now.”

While Dillingham may shy away from credit at any turn, there is a clear awareness within the program of how crucial he has been to the turnaround. Football is a team sport, but successful program-building always requires more than just a face.

“I’m like, ‘I know you don’t need credit, but we all know that you’re the driving force of this whole program,’” Coleman said. “Because when stuff goes wrong, he’s the first person that gets looked at, so when stuff goes right, I always like to say that he’s the reason why stuff goes right.”

A lot has gone right for Arizona State this season, and though it is not done yet, what Dillingham has been able to do in a flash has given the Sun Devils hope, momentum, but most importantly, a blueprint for success.