Arizona State Head Coach Kenny Dillingham:
Monday Press Conference Previewing Texas A&M | Week 2
On how much he can know about the team after win with a step up going to Texas A&M:
“There’s a lot of things we’ve got to get better at. Still too many MAs (mistakes) across the ball, not the perfect plays. Obviously, critical penalties at times. Didn’t take the ball away. Put the ball in jeopardy too much. Not going to be a good team doing that. So you can learn a lot about what people can do in the game. Like, do they panic? Do they not? Can they remember what they were taught in the game? Can they not? How many plays can they go in a row before getting tired? So I think there are some things you can learn there. Our opponent this week is one of the best teams in the country, so this is about as big of a step up as you can get, to play them on the road at their place. I don’t think it’s going to get more challenging than this.”
On where mistakes could have been better how does that compare to a typical opener:
“Way better than a typical opener, but one M-A (mistake) is too many M-As. We should be perfect on game day. Three calls that were just bad calls, right? And on defense, there were a couple of things that just weren’t good. On special teams, we had a delay of game on kickoff. Like, how is that possible? So, there are areas that the coaching staff and the players can take from that game, and we’re going to have to play a really good football game this week to give ourselves a chance.”
On reviewing last year's film to prepare for Texas A&M:
“You’ve got to look at last year’s film, a lot of last year’s film. You’ve got to look at this year’s film. (Texas A&M head coach) Mike Elko is a phenomenal football coach. He’s built off of toughness and physicality, old school, but he’s been willing to adapt. That’s one thing I’ve got a lot of respect for him for. We actually talked ball in 2020. I was at Auburn the year before we played each other, and then we got on the phone and talked football. It was funny because the indicators we had before are no longer there. I go back to my notes and I’m like, ‘All right, what are the things that we had?’ And nothing there. That’s a sign of a good coach, a coach who every year evaluates himself and changes and adapts. It’s a great challenge for everybody to go to A&M with a really good coaching staff. Holmon Wiggins (Texas A&M Offensive Coordinator) has been a part of some of the best offenses in college football as a play caller. We’ve been going back and watching film from Alabama when he was there. We’ve been watching film from Duke when Elko was there. We went back and watched film from James Madison because there’s been a coordinator change. We kind of chased probably too many ghosts, but we try to do as good of a job understanding. You never know in a new year what the wrinkle is. We’re still in wrinkle mode, so you can create these great plans, but you don’t know what their new wrinkle is. You’re always on these hunts, even if you don’t present them to the players, what’s going to be their wrinkle? You almost have to chase these ghosts and have them in the back of your mind. What do you have to respond with if this is the wrinkle that they provide this year? So, it’s really fun.”
On playing at Kyle Field and the challenge ahead:
“About as challenging as it gets. They're well coached. They're physical, they're explosive on offense. They're gigantic upfront on offense. They've got good backs. They've got good corners, they've got good D linemen, they've got good linebackers. They've got good safeties, they've got good tight ends. They've got good quarterbacks, running backs. specialists and coaches and a great crowd. But, that's why you play football, right? You play football because you wanna compete versus the best and you want that. Anybody who doesn't wanna compete and go out there and play the best, who doesn't want that?”
On preparing for loud noise environment in practices:
“We're going to prepare just like every team in the country does, you go on the road, we're gonna play loud noise, and do some noise periods, from that perspective. There will not be a lack of energy in the building. I can tell you that much, we're not gonna have to worry about that. If you didn't bring your own juice on Saturday, it's gonna be brought for you. By their team and by their crowd. So we just gotta worry about us, I told our guys in this morning meeting, you go on the road to play, you just got to stay composed and you gotta say, it's gonna be loud and cool. That's what college sports is about in these environments.”
On how long a leash is for younger players to in game starters:
“A long one, you got to have a long leash with guys. There's a huge chunk from high school football to college football. There's every player whose jump is different, some schools that you play at, it may have been really high level of football where you're competing with 8 other Division 1 players, and there may be other levels of football where you maybe aren't playing those guys, and now the jump is like 10-X what somebody else's jump is. So I think you've got to understand where the guy came from, and you have to be able to have a long leash, and then you have to be able to say, okay, this guy made these mistakes, but is he learning from those mistakes or does he make those mistakes again? Because there's one thing to get out there and make mistakes, and then correct them, and make a whole brand new mistake. Cool. That's great. We don't want it, but I understand it. It's another thing to make a mistake and then come back out and make the same mistake again and then make the same mistake again. That's when the leash obviously gets cut shorter is when it's the same mistake multiple times, not just, I haven't seen that before, that's new. I'm a right guard and I've never seen somebody spike across my face or bring this game in a real setting before. I need to slow down. That's okay. And then you see somebody spike the other way, well, they got you there too. That's okay. Just don't let the guy spike across your face without noticing it 3 times in 3 consecutive games.”
On the unusual roadtrip going to Texas and then London:
“We had to meet about it today. Our morning meeting was spent talking about logistics to get to London and how we're flying straight from A&M and straight to London and how we're going to get there when you have to pack, bring your bags on Thursday, there are some natural distractions. We're not hiding away from that. There's nothing we can do about it, so we're going to embrace it and we got to get ready and play a football game”
On how RB Cardae Mack earned the coaches’ trust to be on offense and be in the wildcat:
“Consistency. He’s just consistent. When we've gone live, he's been hard to tackle. He has some history playing quarterback, so we felt comfortable with him being back there in those settings and we told ourselves we want to get him some reps of playing wildcat quarterback. Wildcat quarterback and gets some direct runs rocking. So, I thought he did a good job with that.”
On QB Jake Fette getting some action Saturday night and the difference of high school football compared to college:
“It was awesome to get him in the game. I joked around when he pulled one run. He had a six yard run. He got loose, and said, ‘Oh man, this is a little bit different.’ It's college football. So I joked around in the headset. I said, ‘You're in college now.’ But it was good to get him out there and just get a feel for the game. It’s a different world, so he was fired up to be on and I was happy to see him out there.”
On how Texas A&M Coach Lyle Hemphill and (Mike) Elko’s philosophies complement each other:
“They’re similar trees, so they complement each other perfectly. They know what they want to be. The teams that are the scariest teams to play, in my opinion, play the best defense. They don't try to trick you. 80% of the game they know what we know. What they do such a good job of as a staff is make really small changes to how they play the front, how they play the linebackers, or small changes to leverages. When I watch defense and I see small, small changes week in and week out, that's a team that understands who they are and that's a team that studies and say, ‘these small changes are going to make the difference this week.’ They're very good on defense and Coach Elko has been very good on defense and as a head coach for a long time because he understands the subtleties of what makes a really good defense, and they make those changes and they make it a nightmare to go against. I've got a lot of respect for him. I think he's one of the best head coaches in the country.
On his assessment on the team’s defense line play and what they have to build off of going into Texas A&M:
“I thought it was solid at times, for the most part, pretty good. I thought there were times that we didn't contain the quarterback. If we don't do that this week, he's going to throw for 400 and run for 400. It'll set the record if we don't contain the quarterback this week.So we have to be a little bit better in our rush lanes at times, but I thought some guys flashed, for a positive, rushing the passer. So, I was pleased with it. We didn't hit our rush goal. We allowed too many yards per carry to hit our rushing goal. Part of that was due to an MA, which was a misfit, which eventually led to a touchdown. But other than that, I was pretty pleased with how D-line played. We just have to be able to contain the quarterback a little bit more.”
On how he prepares for players like Texas A&M QB Marcel Reed in a week:
“He's a really good player. He's athletic, but what people don't give him credit for is how he has unbelievable touch on his deep ball and on his intermediate passing game. He can throw a field out route that's caught on the sideline and it just looks like it's supposed to look. He throws the ball vertically down the field really well, and then you can't sack him. It's very challenging to sack him. You can tell he's gotten way more comfortable in true dropback passing. That could be due to a guy who's a former wideout guy, Coach Wiggins, coordinating the quarterback. You could tell that there's a lot of comfort in the wide receivers and a lot of trust that those guys are going to be where they're supposed to be, so that showed up on Saturday."
On the importance of the balance in the touchdowns and what he wants to do offensively
“I always want to take what the defense gives us. Last week they gave us a lot of perimeter screens. I think that was the most screens I may have ever had thrown a game in my career, but that's what was there and every week that's going to change.The key is ‘how hard do our guys play?’ Are guys running down the field? Are they playing with a passion? Are we disciplined? Are we doing those things that actually win football games? I think we did that for the most part of the game, so we just got to continue to do that. Whoever scores, whoever catches it, great. Hopefully our schemes get our best players the ball.”
On how important it is to maintain multiplicity to open up Cardae Mack’s wildcat packages
“I just want people to know that we can toss back the quarterback and throw it. The quarterback is still back there. It's funny because in camp, you face all these teams and the quarterback's back there and the new trend is you move the quarterback over and run the running back. But the quarterback is still here, you can still give it to him. It's not actually wildcat. You can count your hats, but it's not wildcat because the quarterback is still back here. And if you choose to play it like wildcat, we have the ability to run normal plays. So I think it's more just us putting on tape that we have the ability to be balanced in that set and it's just because we direct snap it to a different person doesn't change what we can do from different sets. We're always gonna have different ways that we can protect our calls and if we want to be a team that lines up in some wildcat, then we'd have to be able to be a team that can do some fun tricky things out of it every once in a while that are actually pretty basic. We had that call on the game plan, we could run it from a regular set and we could have run it from a wildcat set. Same play for everybody else, we just tagged one word, wildcat.”
On If he saw anything different from Cutter during a live game in contrast to during practice:
“Confidence. I could see confidence pregame. Him throwing the football pregame was the best he's probably thrown the ball since he's been here.Every throw was on the money, and I think that translated to the game. He was very accurate in the football game and I think that stemmed from the confidence he had in the plan, what we were doing, and how well he hit the ball pregame.
On what he saw from Cutter when he fumbled the ball and bounced back:
“The first play after the fumble was not a good play, and then he bounced back. It was a bad call by me, one of the times I put him in a bad situation with the pressure from the boundary safety there and I didn't have a good plan for it, I didn't prepare him well enough for it. And after that, I don't know the stats, but they're really good. I thought what he did awesome was just his composure. The one thing about him is he stays pretty calm, cool, and collected.”
On the value of playing a team like Texas A&M during the season:
“It’s a good challenge for our guys. There’s so many different recipes for success. What’s the goal of the organization? Every organization has different goals. Is your goal to create a plan to make the college football playoff? If your goal is to have the best record, is your goal to have the most competitive schedule? Everybody has different kinds of visions and goals for how they put things together, and I don't know what the right answer is. I don't worry as much about that as I do that this team's on our schedule. They're a really good team. They're a top 10 team in the country. We're on the road. Let's go play our best football game. That's the limit of my thoughts there, whoever's on the schedule. Future schedules, hopefully I'm involved in and I have been a little bit more involved as of late, which is positive. As those things navigate, they navigate, but right now, this game has been scheduled for a long time.”
On Texas A&M’s defensive style:
“They are aggressive, they don't give up explosive plays and they attack. Their defensive line gets off of the ball and they are very good. Their corners, they play man coverage and they cover you. Their safeties hit you, their linebackers, they're an aggressive football team. They coach aggressively, they play aggressively. It's a team that once again you've got to be able to try to not let their aggressiveness create negatives. You have to try to stay out of those situations as much as possible. There's the fine balance of, well they're really good, you have to create explosives. How do you create explosives without taking risks? Well you have to figure out how to create explosives without taking risks, which is the great challenge. Their team, I would just say one word that describes them is aggressive, how they coach it, how they play it.”
On their athletes compared to Big 12 opponents:
“Athletically, obviously, everybody's different, but not schematically. Some of those teams like Utah are more just man. They have their auxiliary coverages that they play with, some pressures. I would like to say coach Elko has a tree. Coach Elko is one of the defensive coaches in this profession that really has a good tree of people underneath him. I worked with somebody who worked with Elko at Florida State who was our defense coordinator, and they have a tree. He has his own system of how he does things and a lot of people have been very, very successful taking that blueprint and running it. That's a unique thing, this is not somebody else's system. We're facing the guy who kind of put this thing together in my opinion. That's why he's constantly adapting it because he has such comfort in this scheme that he knows where the weaknesses are, where the strengths are, and he knows where to lean guys game by game to cover those things up. That's why he's had so much success.”
On why he chose to run the onside kick and certain plays:
“The onside kick was there. Last year, we're in a seven-point game at the half. I don't take opponents lightly. When we prepare a plan, we prepare the best plan possible to win the football game. we said if the look is there after the first one, we're going to kick it. It was there, so we kicked it. I'm not going to ever go into a game and disrespect the opponent. disrespecting is when you don't run the best things possible to win the game, early in the game. It was there, so we took it. It's that simple. I thought that was the fundamentals of coaching. If something is there and it's seven to zero, you run it and you get it. I'm not really worried about saving things. At the end of the day, you can save things. Great, it's awesome, but every time you run something, you open up something else and you open up more options or you maybe limit what somebody can do versus you. There's some certain things that you're always going to save. Very few things, but by the same token, we showed this, now they have to defend this. If they have to defend this, then maybe we're not going to see this. Maybe we're not going to see that. I'm not as concerned about all that stuff. We just have to self scout what we've done and then say, ‘Okay, how are our teams going to adapt to that’ or ‘how does that change what they do?’ Rock and roll from there. I'm not smart enough to not just try to be the best we can be. If we want our players to be the best they can be, then we have to coach like we're trying to be the best we can be all the time. If we don't want that, then, probably not the program.”
On finding when plays aren’t working compared to the game plan not working:
“There's a balance, right? If you have the right hat count, if you have the right leverages and their defensive end is really good and he's beating you, well, your game plan is great. Other than that, human beings are beating you. Now you hopefully had a plan that was, one, the best plays versus this team and, two, the best ways to not run at their best players. You have to get a feel for whether you can survive their best players, and if you can, then let's run the plays that create the best numbers, leverage, and grass. If you can't, then these next row of plays may not create the best numbers, leverage, and grass, but they give your players the best matchups physically possible. Your goal is to create both. You want the best matchups and the best numbers, leverage, and grass. But the reality is a good defense is going to try to prevent that, too. I would say when do you know when you're not scoring and the play's supposed to work and that guy's just covering the dude or the guy you were saying, ‘Hey, if they give us a one-on-one, we're going to throw it and we're 0 for three.’ Oh, crap. Well, let's have a new plan versus a one-on-one. Can we keep doing this? I just think it's when what you wanted to happen is happening and it's not working, but that was your plan. Everything is perfect except the success. That's when you've got to change, when everything worked out exactly like you wanted it and it's still not working.”
On his reaction to the Michigan game and having one extra second added:
“Literally my reaction was I've been there, done that, been on the other side of it. It's a crazy feeling to be on the flip side of it. It's something you can't process. I will say their staff handled it way better than I did to say the least. If you have any concerns over that, ask any BYU fan. They will make sure to make it perfectly clear how they feel about that situation. But they handled it way better than me and I handled it in my setting. It is a crazy thing to be a part of. I can tell you that it is wild for the game to be over and then it not to be over.”
On the performance of the running back group:
“I thought they played well. My favorite play of the game was Marquis Gillis. He faked a handoff then became the lead blocker 50 yards down the field for Grayson Rigdon. That was my favorite play in the entire game from a running back perspective. That same play, Reed Harris (WR) pancaked somebody running up the court up the field. You had O (Omarion Miller, WR) have an unbelievable block on the edge. You have Santana (Alo-Tupuola) 25 yards down the field in the opposite hash blocking the guy. My favorite play of the game was when those guys were on the field and I saw the effort that that group's playing with.”