Arizona State Head Coach Kenny Dillingham
On Sam Leavitt’s play vs. Mississippi State:
“He’s through two games, he has no takeaways, we have very limited procedure penalties, he’s getting under good calls, he converted three different third downs with his legs. Everyone wants to look at the 3-4 misses, which for a variety of reasons we can bend her out a little bit better to make it friendlier for him to layer a throw, layering a 16 or 17 yard decoy, or whatever you wanna call a sail route, vs a guy at 9 yards is really hard when you don’t give a guy enough space. Then he just missed a couple throws, okay I can sleep really well at night if our quarterback is just missing a few throws. I can’t sleep if he’s throwing it to the wrong person, if he’s turning the football over, if he's panicking when guys are aligned wrong or if the running back goes the wrong way at the goalline, he (Leavitt) doesn’t do any of that and that’s what gives me great confidence. He’s missing throws that he makes routinely in practice in his second start with no rhythm. I feel really good.”
On the Texas to Tempe pipeline and a many players returning home this week:
“Being in the Big 12 we are going to play more games in Texas, so that’s going to be the footprint. Like I said dating back to when I got here, I felt like that was the trend even before we moved (to the Big 12). So we kind of prepared for that and it came to fruition. I think it's great for us to have more Texas kids on the roster than there have ever been and now we play back to back games there. I think it's awesome for those guys to get to go back home. If you noticed last week, our team captains do something pretty cool. When we go to someone’s home our leadership council actually tries to select somebody from that town or city that we are playing to be a captain. If you notice Sipp (Kyson Brown) was a team captain last week, because he’s originally from Mississippi. So he went out with our captains, and I think that's a cool thing that our leadership council chooses to do. They give out one of their captains and let it be somebody else. So it’ll be interesting to see who they pick this week”
On energy in practice and having a quick turnaround during the short week:
“We drastically changed a normal…This was a Tuesday practice in a normal week. We drastically changed the structure of the practice. We have to get to Thursday as fresh as possible. One of the biggest positives is our Tuesday and Wednesday practices have been higher workloads than the game. But, we still have hit higher top speeds in the game, we had three guys in the skill positions hit over 21 mph in the game. Our mid-skill all hit over 20 mph, one guy hit 19.5. Which are really really good top speeds. It shows us that we aren’t just managing workload but we are managing bodies. This week is different, we have to hit. We have to get our guys fresh for Thursday. This (Texas State) is the best football team we’ve played, these guys play hard. You watch the tape, they play with passion, they play with a chip, they are explosive, they are really good with the ball in their hand. We have to be fresh, We have to be healthy, and we have to be fundamentally sound.”
On Cam Skattebo’s workload and health moving forward:
“Have you seen Austin Powers? We sent him to the ice chamber and sent him back down. So hopefully that got him right, we will find out. He came in and said my toe is sore. I said ‘Well, that is great news. Because I thought you were gonna be a lot more sore than your toe.’ He’s a really tough kid, he puts in the work, I think he can handle that type of workload this year. Which he couldn’t last year, because of the shape he put himself in to handle that type of workload. The way he runs, he punishes people most of the time, which is a positive. He’s obviously gonna have some bumps and bruises but he doesn’t take as much contact because he plays with such pad level. He inflicts the contact more than he does just take hits to the body because of his balance. Kudos to him. We were smart with him today in practice. The number one thing is to get him to Thursday feeling really good.”
On having a guy like Cam Skattebo on both the field and in the locker room:
“For us, I challenge the leadership council, in our individual leadership meetings and in front of the team multiple times, the standard is going to be set by not me but set by the best players. Whatever our best players allow and whatever our best players do is the standard. Not what our best players say, but what our best players do consistently is the standard. The effort they give the physicality, how often they get treatment, how often they are prepared for practice, how often they show up ten minutes early, all of it. And I think, not just Skatt but our leadership council as a whole, they really took it upon themselves to change the culture, change the standards. The standards I set are the minimum expectations, it’s the team and it’s the leaders that push and push to exceed what I could ever push them to be.”
On how practice went and facing adversity again:
“I think the guys realized that you can’t get lazy. For how good we played for the first 42 minutes of the game, and for how good you play in that time frame, it all got erased by 13 bad minutes. It was a wake up call for our guys on both sides… If we ever get down like that, we’re not out of it, and if we get a lead like that we’ve got to finish them.”
On the guys’ mentality in practice given how the second half of the last game went:
“It’s hard to put them in a situation like that in practice. Hopefully we’ll find out. We’re not just going to knock somebody down four times again like we did the last game. I mean the first six quarters of football have been pure domination from our standpoint and we’re not going to have that [again]... It’s not real. We’re going to face a team that starts fast like us and we have to be able to go back and forth throughout the flow of the game. We’ve got to be able to control the emotion, handle it and respond to the emotional highs and lows of the game. That’s what I was proud of the other day. We eventually snapped out of it. A lot of teams can’t snap out of it.”
On what he’s seen from the OL group:
“I couldn’t tell you one time since last season that anyone in that group has been late to anything. It’s the standard that Coach Saga demands, but between Leif [Fautanu] and Ben Coleman and what they demand is as good as I have ever been around. We do these fun competitions where we do Sun Devil Olympics where you pick a team and have to show up to class and you show up and you get points. Leif is 3 for 3. We’ve done three competitions since I’ve been here over a long period of time… His team has won all three. And I think that tells you everything you need to know. It sounds so amateur, but it’s funny how the leader of that team is now leading one of the best units. It’s not a coincidence. How you do one thing is how you do everything… Leif [Fautanu] and Ben [Coleman] have done an unbelievable job all offseason. This isn’t an accident, this is the work that they put in.”
On Elijah O’Neil:
“He just stepped up. That was a guy who got here last year and he was just so new to football and the dude just worked and worked and worked. At the end of last year you started to see it click and then unfortunately Prince went down at camp this year and Elijah got to step up. You saw his confidence grow and now he’s playing at a really high rate, playing physical, impacting the passer, playing smart, understanding twist games, he’s just a completely different player.”
On confidence and coaching each player differently:
“I do think confidence is important and you have to coach everybody differently. I think if you just coach everybody the same, that’s not good coaching. Everybody ticks differently and I think understanding your players in year two is part of that.”
On Cam Skattebo’s national media recognition:
“It's cool for him, I think it's a team award. You see Jordyn Tyson on the last run of the game, blocking one of their best defenders 45 yards down the field and then getting up with passion. Our entire line all night, you see our tight ends winning at the point of attack. He's (Skattebo) the one that got the ball and he dominated and he played great. We all know that. He played like a man possessed in the football game in a positive way. But I think anytime you get an individual award like that, I think it's more of a team award. This is the guy who got the stats, but this is everybody's recognition for the work that everybody put in.”
On who Cam Skattebo reminds him of:
“Skattebo is a unique player, and I've been telling scouts all offseason to watch him. The player he actually kind of reminds me of is a guy I coached at Oregon named Bucky Irving. Very similar, short area quickness, and really good hands out of the backfield. Stockier and strong build with really great contact balance. That’s who his playstyle really reminds me of.”
On what to expect from Texas State’s defense:
“They're going to blitz and they're gonna blitz a lot on early downs. Their D-line is really athletic. They create chaos. These guys play very, very aggressive defensively, and we have to be ready to combat that in early downs. That's who they are, and I don't care that they know that we know that. That's why you watch film, right? We have to be able to combat that pressure, how they attack. I think that's a little bit of the unknown. We can watch all of last year's film that we want, but they're a little bit different this year in terms of how the new coordinator (Dexter McCoil, Sr.) attacks. Obviously, he's one of the younger coordinators in college football and I think he's done an unbelievable job in his first two games. He was a guy who used to be a high school coach and he took a team to heights that the program never saw. He got into college and rose really, really quickly. So the guy gets his defense to play at such a high level of energy, and then he's aggressive. When you play at that energy level, that's what makes them dangerous. When the aggressiveness is combined with the energy level, it’s hard to create big plays when people are running the ball. They run the ball and they create negative plays. So it's gonna be a great challenge for us.”
On Texas State Quarterback Jordan McCloud:
“Obviously he played really, really well last year before he transferred over. In his first few games (this season), he’s been efficient with the football. He can extend plays and he keeps his eyes downfield when he extends plays. He's got a super quick release, and he doesn't get hit very much because his release is fast and he knows where to go to the ball. He's a seasoned vet in the game. I think we have to be able to disrupt his rhythm which is what you try to do to every quarterback, and how you disrupt him is a little bit different week in and week out. We can't get him in a rhythm like he has been and just let him play catch, because he's really good at understanding where to get the ball to and you pressure him on early downs. So we gotta be able to cover these guys, and get home.”
On playing against a veteran quarterback:
“They have seen it all, so you're probably not gonna spook him. You're not gonna go out there and run something new and think they're not gonna figure this out or he's gonna get rattled here. You're not gonna spook them, so there's really not as many tricks. We can't give him any tips because he's seen too much. It's about the pictures being the same and if we can give identical pictures, then it doesn't matter how long he's played college football. The pre-snap picture he's getting is the same over and over and over again. And I think for some guys you can give so many pictures that it overwhelms them. You gotta give them the same one and give them different looks. So I think that the challenge this week is how can we not let him know what's happening, and we can't give things away.”
On what makes Texas State’s running game so good:
“They're very, very physical. GJ Kinne is the head coach of the football team and he's worked for Gus Malzahn. They run almost every run scheme available. They run everything and you can tell the identity of how it all begins is the running game. That goes back to what I believe is his philosophy as a head coach is he wants to run the football. Running the football is kind of his upbringing, and I think that's what opens everything up. He's one of the youngest head coaches in college football, and I think he's put together an incredible football team. I think people should talk more about the job he's done. He's gonna be on most of the head coaching watch lists to go be a head coach in the Power Four level here in the next four months. because of the job he's done here. This is a football team that is a Power Four football team in my opinion. This team could go win a lot of games and compete in the Big 12 Conference. Kudos to him because he has really good players. He's recruited, they've bought advanced culture. They're playing really, really hard and you can see that in the run game.”
On what challenges a young team faces going on the road in a short week:
“Fatigue. You have to put in the work. The work has to get done, whether you're on a short week or a long week.. And I'm not saying the physical work, I'm saying the middle work, like you're still going to play a game. So you have to put in the same amount of middle work you put in on a full week, in a short week. And if that means you have to cut it by 10% because we cut calls a little bit, that's a coaching balance that we've got to balance for the guys. But its how do you find time? Do you sacrifice? What do you sacrifice to make sure you're putting in the same amount of time that you get in the prior weeks to start fast and play how you played early? I think that's the biggest challenge. When you're on the road, we can't create pre snap penalties. Can't kill ourselves. We got to stay focused. No pre-snap penalties, no bad penalties. If you look at the second half, that's really the tale of the second half, is penalties. It’s absolutely right, wrong or indifferent, whether I agree or disagree with them, we just got killed with critical 15 yard penalty, 15 yard penalty, 15 yard penalty, 15 yard penalty, oh my gosh, every time you look there's some 15 yard penalty, and none of them are actually responding to personal foul penalties. We did a great job there. They're all interesting penalties, and it's unfortunate.”
On how responding to second-half adversity can carry over:
“I hope we have to respond like that every single week from here on out. That's what my hope is. It's not going to happen. There's more than likely before we face that again, we're going to face a game where we're losing, not kind of what we haven't been trailing yet. So where we will be trailing in a football game like that's going to happen this season, and hopefully not for a long time, but if it happens on Saturday, we're going to be able to respond to that. And that's the part that I didn't really like, is that four, five play series we let that momentum of them scoring, and the momentum flip when there's no reason it should have flipped. And that's what we got to get better at, is I think we'll respond to success better, because I think our guys just felt it. I think we still have to learn how to respond to that, to that failure. We did it good at the end, but there was just too many plays there in the middle that if we didn't have that big of a lead, it would have been gone.”
On Ian Hershey, and the special team's performance:
“To be honest, he had a horrible week. He missed like every kick, and then he goes out there and absolutely nails them. I mean, over and over again. And today he killed it again. So he's in a rhythm. I mean, he is absolutely, absolutely killing it right now. An unbelievable game by him, an unbelievable game by our specialists. Every single kickoff was booted, absolutely gone. Another personal foul penalty on an opposing team's kickoff return because of how physical we're running on the field. That's two for two. Just being violent and playing with effort, getting people frustrated and not responding. It's probably the first time in my career I've seen that on that kickoff unit, and we just got to continue to grow there. But yeah, Ian did a phenomenal job in the game. I was super, super proud of his kick at the end of the third quarter, eight minutes left, going to the third quarter, 7:30 left in the third quarter, a critical kick to take a four possession lead.”
On why he stuck with Ian Hershey after a rough practice week:
“There was never really a waiver there, I felt good. When he was in the game.. knowing he missed the one kick in the football game, but I got a lot of confidence in him, I never really wavered. Tuesday practice last week, he didn't make kicks and that’s part of it. Sometimes when you go golfing, you can't make a putt. And then sometimes when you go golfing, you never can make a putt. We want to take those guys out. But he's not like that. Normally, he makes putts, and he just had a bad day, and then he comes out there and sunk them all again. And today, sunk them all again. So he's in a really good groove, and he's got a big leg, I mean, in pregame warm ups, he made a 55 yarder that had seven yards, eight yards to spare, going north into the wind at the time. And I was like, holy cow. I felt really good at that point. When I saw one pregame field goal, there was a 55 yarder north into the wind, and he made it by seven, eight yards. So alright, we're good. We're gonna kick these things.”