On overall thoughts on the personnel of players who replaced transfers and how it’s worked out:
“I think (OL) Champ Westbrooks has been playing really well the last two weeks. Obviously he was out a lot of spring ball and then even fall camp he was working back in. I think he’s been a huge bright spot for us the last few weeks. Obviously at corner, I think you know Javen was a really good player, (CB) Keith (Abney) was a really good player. I think the guys that have come in and done a pretty nice job. We’re not giving up. We’ve had a few penalties there but now that we are giving up one-on-one fade balls consistently against Baylor. I think we had one of those on a corner that was truly just giving up. But I think those guys, from that perspective of playing pretty solid. I would say the biggest thing for me right now is that we just have to play harder. Like we got to be felt when we are on the field and that’s not what we are right now. We have got to find that everybody’s got to look into themselves and find how to play this game with a relentless passion and that’s the message and that’s the challenge.”

On relying on players who are new to the program and how challenging it is to replace starters:
“I definitely think there's part of that confidence. When you're trying to figure it out and try to get reps, Some guys just aren't naturally, I would say, as passionate, right? So when you do change a lot of guys, maybe the guys that are passionate don't feel like maybe if they're not hitting the level of expectation they have for themselves, maybe they do pull back some. What I love was, you saw (ASU RB) Cardae (Mack) out there and you saw juice and passion when you saw (ASU DL) Julian (Hugo) out there, juice and passion. There was some juice and passion out there from our young guys that I really enjoyed. But we as a football team have to have to figure that piece out, like I've said all along, I have so much belief in this football team that we are better than what we're playing. I want to continue to say that regardless of what happens until I think we're playing to the level I think we can play at. Our talent shows us and I think we're figuring it out. I think we play better - we didn't play good,- but we played better than we did the game prior, which wasn't very difficult. So that's progress, and hopefully we come up this week, and we're going to make some some changes, some pretty drastic changes to how we practice. I'm not going to get into it to try to get our guys to like let's go. It's football. It's fun. Let's play it. Like I want to feel the enjoyment that we have playing this game.”

On the line of scrimmage play and his view of how run blocking has been:
“I think part of that is you know everything works together. So the scheme works together with the pass rush. Who you are playing on the pass rush and the coverages and then obviously on third downs, creating pass rushes, that’s the goal. I think there’s a lot to be said about that. I’m not going to get specifically into the thoughts on that because I think there’s some more layers that I don’t want to really get into leading up to this week. But yeah, we have to have an increased pass rush. We got to find ways to have an increased pass rush on early downs. We’ve also faced a lot of teams that were really good at catching and throwing. So that was their MO. So we’ll kind of hopefully profess in that category.”

On how difficult it is playing at Texas Tech after playing there in 2024:
"An unbelievable environment, they got a great tradition there. I know they sold out a game on a Friday night which is impressive. That just tells you that this place is going to be rocking here on Saturday. They’re 5-0, They are one of the best teams in the country, a top-10 team in the country. They have everything positive there. So it is a great challenge for our guys, a great challenge for our staff and it’s going to be an unbelievable environment to go play in.”

On Texas Tech Head Coach Joey McGuire and the style of his team from the past two years:
“I think they are always going to be built from the front out. That is what something that they take a lot of pride in is building the defensive front, linebackers, and their corners. The length they have this year. They just have a very very good football team. In all aspects, to be honest, not many weaknesses and what they have. Their quarterback last year in his first game went out and scored one of the best performances in Utah that I've seen from a quarterback. He was a guy that said this is our future here, and the future is now. And he's led him to being 5-0. They've signed the number one wide receiver in the country a couple years ago, who's playing for them. So they've got some of the best guys in the country on that field and that's what you should want as a competitor is you want to play the best and play a top 10 team in the country on the road.”

On coming into this weekend’s matchup as an double-digit underdog:
“I expect to win every game. I expect to win games when we run the swing game. I expect to win every freaking game. I expect to win. There has not been one game since I've been the head coach here that I have not taken the field expecting to win the football game, and with a plan that I had the utmost belief in was the best thing to win the football game. So I don't really care. I don't really get into all of that, like it doesn't motivate me. What motivates me is, we are going to play the best football game we can play, and what motivates me is being around people who play the game with a passion and their respect for the game. They play the game with an utmost level of want to. There is no quit. I will do whatever is necessary for my brother next to me with a passion, and that's how I look at every single opponent. I don't care who it is. It doesn't matter to me. I just want to play our best game possible with as much passion as possible to put our players in the best position to be as successful as they possibly can be, over and over and over again.”

On Texas Tech bringing in NFL coaching:
“They're playing at a high level. You're not going to be five and zero not playing at a high level. They lost a really good coach, and then they replaced them with really good coaches, and they lost really good players, and they replaced them with really the pick of who they wanted out of the portal. You can see that. You can see the success that those guys have had up front. The havoc rate they're causing is high. The amount of turnovers they're creating is high on the defense side of the ball, and that's something they've always done on defense. They create takeaways, and that's something. They had a pick in a one-score game in the end zone for a touchdown that just kind of sealed the deal the last game they played. So I think their defensive line's doing really well. They played really well last year, and it's a great challenge for the offense.”

On defensive lineman Zac Swanson:
“His first year here, he played awesome, played great. I mean, he was battling some injuries, and he battled through them and he played phenomenal. He was a big piece of that year one. Last year, he was injured, and he just kept working, kept working and kept battling. This year, he's in there and he's making plays in certain looks. I feel like he's one of the impact players on the inside. I think he's being disruptive, so it's really cool to watch a guy, a local guy, have the success he's having in his hometown, even after the setback he had last year. So for him to be able to bounce back and be an impact player for us is fun to watch.”

On young players being an example to the team:
“I think there's older guys that do it too. I just use those two guys as an example. (ASU Running Back) Kyson (Brown) plays with a lot of passion. (OL) (Filiva’a Lokotui) Suka is newer. (ASU Offensive Lineman) Makua (Pule) plays with a lot of passion. (ASU Defensive lineman) CJ (Fite) does. He plays with it with a ton of passion. There's (ASU LInebacker) Martell Hughes. There's guys. It's not just two guys. I was just using two freshmen as an example. But when I watch the tape, I expect a football team,at the level. I don't expect to play with the same level of passion and physicality as the average team. That's not what I want our football team to be. I want our football team when people turn on the tape, the opposing coach describes the passion and energy, and Coach (Joey) McGuire could go in there and show clips of us and say, listen, this team plays physical, and this team plays hard, and he's lying to himself. That's not what the tape shows. He may do that to motivate his guys. It's not what the tape shows, and he probably will do that to motivate his guys. We are tape, and right now our identity is not that, and we can be that, but that's not who we are right now, and that's what excites me the most. That's the part that excites me and the same thing I tell our team. The thing that we're not, is something that we can make a change at any waking moment that we choose. All we got to do is say yes. That's it. As a whole football team, say yes. This is who we're going to be, but right now we're not, and that's the thing that excites me about this team. That's why I have so much freaking passion, frustration and excitement. It's like, man, we can do it. I got to figure out a way to get them to flip that switch on. But right now it's not. It's flickering. Why isn't it working all the way, right? Why is it flickering? We got to get it to stop flickering, and that's the challenge that I have. That's my challenge as the head football coach.” 

On (OL) Filiva’a “Suka” Lokotui’s energy and it’s impact on the team:
“You can tell really early, what somebody's about. Early in camp, he tweaked his elbow, they put him in an elbow brace, they told me he sprained his elbow. I came out to practice and I'm like, ‘how's the brace feel?’ He goes, ‘it's an upgrade right now’, basically saying this brace made me better. Like now I'm half man, half brace; I'm unbreakable. I shared that story with the team. I'm like, this is a guy who took a circumstance and flipped it in his mind, and he has done that every single day since he's been here, and now he's playing. We have to put you in a tight end, perfect. Hey, we have to put you in a tackle, perfect. He's running down the field full speed, which is the expectation, chasing the play with a passion and energy, and he's a great example of what we're looking for. That belief, that happiness to play the game. Like this is a game, you should be so fired up to play this game, to coach this game. There should be so much energy and passion. You should be able to feel it, and that's what I want. I want to be able to touch the passion and energy of our football teams. We can't touch it right now. We have to get that. We have to find it, and if we find it, we're gonna be a dang good. People won't want to play us, but if we don't find it, people are gonna have to go back to old film to try to motivate their team to play us. And right now, I can guarantee you, teams are going back to old film to try to motivate their guys to say this is what they're about, and we need to be where they're watching our current film. They're watching right now, and we have to get teams to watch our current stuff, not what we were, not the ghost of the past, but right now. And that's been my message to our team, and that starts with me. Like I said, I'm going to make some changes to how I do things and how we operate because we played better, but I'm still not getting the response that I believe is necessary to play to our potential, and it's my job to get our guys to play to our potential.” 

On percentage of technique versus percentage of passion:
“70 passion, 30 technique. This last week, maybe 80/20. I think two weeks ago it was 50/50, 40/60. We got a lot of things cleaned up in the last week, and I think that showed on tape. I still think there's 20 to 30 percent of things that we can clean up and keep getting better at. There was a lot of growth from last week to this week, but the one thing that didn't grow was just that piece that I think is the secret sauce to any team, and that's when you turn on the tape. How does a team define you? And if a team defines you as this guy's really talented and he's fast, or this guy's really hard to double team, they're not describing a football team. They're describing individual talent. Bad teams are described by individual talent. Great teams are described by the culture and the mindset of the organization and the mindset of the collective whole. And when you watch the best teams in the country, there's going to be a way you describe them, and it's not going to be one specific player. You may talk about that one player, but you're going to describe them in a group manner, and that's what we're on the hunt for. We want to be described as a group, and can't be described as what we were in the past. It's got to be described as what we are now, and I think that's what I'm continuing to challenge, and I'm continuing to change what I do and how I do things to try to get what I think is necessary to win games at a high level.”

On getting playtime for freshman and younger players:
“We're going to try to put the best players in the field trying to win. There's not much gamesmanship for me there. It's best players play. I alluded to this a couple weeks ago, maybe last week, I think we've been able to sign some really, really good freshmen in the last class and I think we got some really, really good ones committed that are going to be able to play early. There's going to be a transition for us, the cycle of the program, in terms of we have to flip this thing and create momentum to create stability and I think that stability is going to come through the high school ranks, but we're not quite there yet with that stability and backbone, just because of how originally we flipped it. I think now we're in a different stage of where we were. I think you're going to see freshmen play more and more and more in the next year to two years to three years. I think you're going to see that show up significantly more than what you maybe saw earlier.”

On external pressures as motivators:
“They're going to be motivated by outside factors, right? That's nothing that we can control, and that's real. That's natural. We should be motivated by outside factors, but we have to be motivated to play our best football game. We have to be pissed off to play our best football game. You're always gonna have outside motivating factors. I'm not dumb. I'm fully aware that that's gonna happen. I don't talk about them a lot because you guys talk about them enough. These kids are on social media. Most of the stuff that coaches used to have to bring up to players when regards to this, they see it doing this (press) all day long. They see the good, they see the bad, they see the ugly, they see all the stats, they see all the comparison charts, they see how much you're gonna win by, how much you're gonna lose by, why you're gonna win, why you're gonna lose, how this person's gonna beat you, how that person's gonna lose to you. They see it all so naturally that I think in the last three years we've just been so focused on ourselves and the natural external motivation is going to show up from people and maybe that's wrong. That's just what I believe in. I never really get caught up in the opponent as much as I get caught up in playing our best football game and I've said that for three years. I'm going to continue to say that because it's what I believe in, and the external motivation is going to be there. It's going to be real. There's nothing you can do to stop that, but at the same token, like if you want to have success, we have to play our best game.”

On balancing personal health and social media:
“That's just the world, though. That's everybody, that's not just us. It's not like Arizona State's the only school that kids are on social media. It's not different from that perspective, it's just more that it is what it is. That's the world now. The world now is reality, and it's not reality. You have the real world, right? The one we're in right now, and then you have the social world, and sometimes they get intertwined, and it's real. That social world becomes real to people, and it can be distracting. You have to say you can't worry about it. Nobody knows what is better for you individually than the people closest to you, the people you can pick up the phone and call. If you're seeking advice from somebody else or you're tweaking what you're doing based on somebody else, you're probably going in the wrong direction. Are there times to look up different ways to maybe control something? Yeah, research and studying, getting really intelligent information. That's great. That makes you better. It is challenging keeping guys focused, but I think that's what the best teams do. That's what the best coaches do. The best coaches can teach your guys to block out the noise and to focus on the things that matter. I think that's our job as coaches, is to block that out and make sure our guys stay completely focused and confident in what I believe we can do.”

On potentially missing an outgoing leader:
“I definitely think about leadership in so many different ways, and teams can be successful in so many different ways. I don't mean I want to watch somebody dance after the play, right? It means I want people to be genuinely excited for the guy next to him to make the play. I told them at the team meeting today, I said, ‘when you make a play, you're going to celebrate because you should, right?’ I said, ‘but true teams, if you want somebody else to have success more than yourself, it means you're going to celebrate when they have success too.’ You may celebrate by doing nothing, by ‘rahhh’, like that's (DL) C.J.'s (Fite) celebration. When you see C.J. flex low, that means C.J. did something that he's fired up about. You can see how he flexes, he gets low, hunches his shoulders, and that is C.J. fired up. I love it. (DL) Julian Hugo did something with his hands and then scraped his arm and did all this other stuff. Great. I don't care what that was, but I don't see it. I want to see our guys love the game and play with the game. I don't think it needs to be like oh everybody should see us. That's not even close to what I want. I want to see nine guys sprinting to the football so fast and violently, not with a purpose of checking the box that I don't get a loaf, but with the purpose of, I hope somebody runs in my way, because I'm going to impact this play one out of 10 times, and I hope this is the play. It's not the rah rah piece, right? Sometimes people confuse passion and energy with the rah rah. No, it's the want to succeed so badly that when success happens to anybody from the team you can feel it. We're all around the ball together and I'm so juiced that my teammate just made that play that I'm juiced, that's what we're trying to find and it's better. We're getting there. Like I keep saying, we have a football team that is capable. That is the most exciting part. That's why I come in here like, ‘man, I'm excited’, because I have to fix it. I have to find the formula. Maybe some Tabasco sauce has to get thrown in there. Sometimes Tabasco isn't the answer. You're eating eggs and it’s gotta be Cholula, right? You have to figure out what it is that's different. But I have to figure it out, and I have to be different to get these guys to have the right formula to go play to a maximum level, because they want to. I know that. There's a want level. There's a care level. I have to figure out the formula, so I'm gonna keep changing things because I am not one to play for second place. What I mean by that is to play to not be as good, to play it safe. That's not my world. I can't play it safe, right? Year one, I ran the swinging gate, guys. There is no safe in my blood, there is zero safe. There is, ‘what is the best way to become the best team we can possibly be, regardless of external perception.’ Has anybody ever thought about how the swinging gate would’ve been perceived if it didn't work in year one with a 31 year old? How would that have gone? About as bad as you could get, but I don't care, it's irrelevant to me. I want to do everything in my power to get these guys to where I think we can play at the best level, and that's the challenge. That's why it's fun, it's painfully fun. It's painfully fun, right? That we are on a hunt, and like I told them, we find ways to win while we get better. That's the challenge. You don't play great, find a way to win. You play better, find a way to win. We just have to find ways to win as we get better and better and better and better.” 

On players making their return:
“He'll (OL, Wade Helton) be back this week. Everything's good, trending there. (OL) Santana (Alo-Tupuola) is back this week as well. I know he had some personal things, but he's back with the team now, which is great. Those guys should be back.”

On what makes Texas Tech’s offense so special:
“They're versatile. He does a really good job skimming up the run. They want to tell you that they're a pass first spread team. No, I mean if you know about Coach Leftwich, his dad's nickname is Lefty. His dad was an offensive line coach slash tight end coach in college football for a long time. His brother is an O-line coach in college football. If you know about his history, I think his family would be calling him weekly if he's not scheming up runs and not trying to run the football. I think that's the identity that he wants to create, even through all the space, he wants the space to create the ability to run. Coach McGuire has alluded to that. All the times he speaks, the game starts up front. How they sign players, the game starts up front. I think everything that they've done as a program and what he's done is they want to be able to run the football, and that sets up the pass. When they do throw the ball, they're effective, especially downfield, because they're running the ball so effectively. So many of their explosives are coming off of the run game right now, that you have to be able to limit their explosives while stopping the run. That's what makes the offense good, is he throws the ball downfield and he runs the ball right at you, and that spacing creates explosives.“

On facing Texas Tech's Will Hammond at quarterback this week:
“He’s 5-0. The goal of the quarterback is to win. Find ways to win and make the play when your number is called. The best quarterbacks, they find ways to win and they make the play when the play needs to be made. His record as a starter is 8-1, that’s great. He’s a guy that they watched play Utah on the road and then said this is our future, and doubled down on that. He’s a kid from Texas, starting for Texas Tech, one of the most trending programs in the country. He’s a phenomenal player, hopefully we can play a football game.”