Arizona State was picked to finish near the bottom of the Big 12 in Kenny Dillingham's second year. The Sun Devils won the league instead, earned a College Football Playoff bye as a top-four seed, and took Texas to double overtime in the Peach Bowl before falling. Dillingham finished runner-up for AP Coach of the Year.
Then last season, after Michigan parted ways with Sherrone Moore and was looking to build some stability to the program, Dillingham's name was near the top of their list and they made a push for the young head coach.
Dillingham, who has shared the same senitment in the months dating back to that pursuit from the Wolverines, reiterated in a recent Yahoo Sports piece he is not chasing a nameplate.
"I don't care about being at a blue blood," Dillingham said. "I want to coach football and be happy. At the end of the day, some of the best coaches aren't the guys that everybody talks about. The media talks about the people who win championships. But sometimes the best coaches aren't those people."
Nearly everyone who has spent a fair amount of time in the profession know exactly what he means.
The names that get the airtime are usually the ones sitting on top of the sport's biggest budgets and best rosters. Plenty of the best teachers, developers, and program-builders are working at places that never sniff a primetime game time window. Dillingham has coordinated offenses at Memphis, Auburn, Florida State, and Oregon, so he has been inside rooms at every level of the food chain.
He also is not interested in leaving. "I've got a great thing," Dillingham said. "Why would I mess it up?"
Arizona State is home for him. The Scottsdale native grew up in the area, his sister and rest of him family live up the road, and he took over the program in November of 2022 after his run as Dan Lanning's offensive coordinator at Oregon. The 2023 season was a gut-it-out rebuild. Then came the Big 12 title in year two.
The 2025 season did not match that peak after losing a number of big names to the NFL Draft. Arizona State went 8-5, dealt with injuries to several starters and lost the Sun Bowl to Duke, and portal movement at quarterback reset the roster again. Dillingham still pushed for more, both on the field and inside the building.
"You've always got to push," he said. "I just want to see growth, and we can't grow at the rate of the average." Dillingham previously shared that if other programs are growing at a rate of 10% per year, the Sun Devils need to make a push for 11% or 12% per year, as he is not interested in "babysitting an average program."
He has backed that up at the negotiating table, landing a reported 25 percent bump to his assistant salary pool this past off season, all because he was willing to push for it in ways a lot of other coaches are not.
You do not have to be at a blue blood to build something real, and you do not have to apologize for asking for what your program needs to grow. Dillingham has done both, and he has Arizona State winning at a level almost nobody outside the building saw coming and they're now on an upward trajectory only those that really knew Dillingham could possibly have seen coming.
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