Kenny Dillingham calls out Arizona State's complacency: "An average practice for an average team"

Kenny Dillingham wasn't mad, he was disappointed.

Speaking with the tone of a father whose teenager brought home a 75 on a vocabulary test and then forgot to lock the back door, thereby letting the dog get out and a raccoon get in, Arizona State's head coach lamented his team's effort to reporters on Thursday. 

"It was a bad day. It was a really, really, really bad day on offense," Dillingham said. "It all stems from the passion we play with. Is it okay to not make a play? And if you accept it, then you accept it and that's who you're going to be. Don't be mad going 5-7. It's okay. Don't be mad going 6-6, don't be mad going 3-9. Somebody has to go those records. There's going to be tons of teams who do it. Why not us?"

The comments were potentially a warning sign for the 2025 Sun Devils, and an indication of the different type of challenge Dillingham and his staff have on hand. Taking over a bottomed-out program following the Herm Edwards disaster and enduring a self-induced NCAA bowl ban handed down during training camp, Arizona State went a predictable 3-9 in his 2023 debut. The Sun Devils then shocked the world in 2024, winning the Big 12 -- after they were picked to finished last, inadvertently killing the Big 12's preseason media poll -- and nearly taking out Texas in the CFP quarterfinals. Finding the motivation to win when it's not expected of you is easy. Anyone who's gotten to the top will tell you it's much easier to stay there -- not only is the entire conference gunning for you, but your most difficult opponent might be inside your own mind. And on Thursday, complacency beat the defending Big 12 champions. 

"We didn't practice bad. We didn't bust. We didn't (miss assignments). We threw one pick. We didn't practice with passion. We didn't care if we scored a touchdown. We didn't care if there was an interception. We didn't care if somebody made a great play, for most of practice. We were just out here practicing. And to me, the best teams, it matters all the time. You want to win everything. And today we didn't have that mindset. We didn't want to win, we wanted to practice. And those are two different mindsets to me," Dillingham said.

The 35-year-old Dillingham, a major college offensive coordinator before the age of 30, has always burned with a passion hotter than the Tempe asphalt at 4 p.m. on a summer day. For him to witness a team accept less than their best was undoubtedly painful. Every team has to fight through the doldrums of training camp at some point, but that point typically arrives in the middle of August, when the monotony of camp has set in but game week and the freshness of hitting a new opponent is still too far in the distance to touch. But to be going through the motions on Day 2? That is potentially a major red flag, especially for a team that played with so much passion last season.

Dillingham, who has always told it how it is, was doing his best to fight the lethal virus of complacency before it infected his entire team. 

It was a good practice for a bad team. It was an average practice for an average team. That's what today was."