Kenny Dillingham is making Arizona State impossible to ignore — 'You've always got to push'
NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos...
CAMP TONTOZONA, Ariz. — Kenny Dillingham was not gifted one of those big, reverberating football coach voices. So when he needs to get a point across, it is a full-body effort from his toes all the way to his vocal chords, making him look like an overzealous terrier as he bounces from one end of Arizona State's practice field to the other alternating between enthusiasm and rage.
"I gotta yell," he told Yahoo Sports. "I gotta go after it. I lose my voice early. Once I get raspy, I start from the chest."
But for the 36-year-old Dillingham, having a voice that needs some amplification has trained him to be loud in the ways that matter most as a college football coach in the current era.
You have to speak up to get what you want.
As the Sun Devils completed Dillingham's third season last November and into early December, he was presented with what many coaches would consider a generational opportunity. Not only were there an unusual number of top-shelf or even blue-blood jobs open, but there weren't many accomplished coaches to fill them.
From Auburn, where Dillingham was an assistant in 2019, to Michigan, his name seemed to be popping up everywhere. Even though he has always considered Arizona State his dream job, coaching just a few miles from where he grew up, it has traditionally been a program with short peaks and a hard ceiling.
After getting Arizona State to the playoff as the surprise Big 12 champions in 2024, Dillingham's 8-5 record last season was defined by too many injuries to star players. After most of them left — some to the NFL Draft and quarterback Sam Leavitt to LSU with a massive NIL offer — the conventional wisdom in the coaching industry would have been for Dillingham to strike while the iron's hot and go to Michigan rather than start over at ASU with a new-look roster.
When I asked Dillingham if he thought he might be passing up his best chance to get one of the truly elite jobs as he was going through that process, he acknowledged that "of course" it crossed his mind.
"But I don't care about being at a blue blood," he 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.
"I think sometimes people can't see the forest through the trees, and I've got a great thing. Why would I mess it up?"
While all that is true — Dillingham really does love Arizona State, is neighbors with his sister and has his parents right around the corner — he was also very public during the heat of those negotiations about using his unique moment of leverage to elevate the program into a new category.
Though Dillingham negotiated a small raise and more job security through rollover clauses in his contract, the big win for him was negotiating a 25 percent increase in his staff salary pool and more fundraising involvement from the university.
And on the second part, Dillingham is not shy about asking for money. Last December, he went viral when he stood in front of reporters and went on an extended rant about the need for a rich Phoenix-area resident to step up and fund their roster.
"That's really what we need," he said. "We need one person. We live in Phoenix, Arizona. You're telling me there's not one person who can stroke a $20 million check right now? There's somebody out there who can. There's somebody."
In a way, it was the unseemly embodiment of everything wrong with college athletics at the moment. It was also very much in line with the way Dillingham has risen quickly to national prominence amidst incredible changes in how successful programs are built. Sometimes, you have to just speak it into existence.
"It's uncomfortable," Dillingham said, "but it's just like I tell my players. What's wrong with saying the truth? I made myself a target, obviously, but I don't care. I don't live my life through people I don't meet and their perception of me. I live my life through these people, so what do I have to do to help my team? If that's doing The Worm on the 50-yard line for a fundraiser, then let me Worm it up.
"I don't care what the perception is. How do you get something that you need? You ask for it."
That answer reminded me of the first time I encountered Dillingham roughly a decade ago when he was on Mike Norvell's staff at Memphis and told me — a reporter he had just met — that his goal was to be an FBS head coach before the age of 30.
In the moment, it seemed a little crazy. But it also revealed a level of chutzpah that you probably need as a coach to make it work at a place like Arizona State, which has had some moments of success but is largely been viewed as one of the biggest underachievers in college sports.
Now, as I watch him run a practice at Camp Tontozona — a university-owned facility in the mountains a couple hours northeast of Tempe where the football team spends a week of fall camp — Dillingham's relentless energy and synergy with his staff is a reminiscent of being around Clemson under Dabo Swinney right before they really took off as a national championship contender.
Will Dillingham win a title at non-traditional place like Swinney did? Who knows. But you can just feel there's something a little different about what he's got going on there, as if he's a half-step ahead of the game in a changing landscape that befuddles many of his colleagues.
"I'm a firm believer in anything for the player," Dillingham said. "Coaches make a lot of money coaching football. Whatever's for the player, coaches have to figure out. We can complain all we want, but whatever the best situation for the player is, that's what I'm about. Just tell me what that is and let me go play by the rules.
"I like to say we're in the technology space. If you're in tech the last 20 years, I read something where it doubles every six months. So you've got to be able to pivot."
And Arizona State is pivoting from a program that cycled through four coaches over a 22-year span without much success to a place that sold out every home game last year and can produce one of the best atmospheres in the country when things are going well.
Excitement is high once again, but the Sun Devils enter this season with more unknowns. A year ago, Dillingham had a bunch of star players returning like Leavitt, receiver Jordyn Tyson and linebacker Keyshawn Elliott.
This year, the media picked Arizona State to finish in the middle of the pack in the Big 12, but as Dillingham acknowledged, this team could turn out to be anything. More important is the trajectory of the program, backed by the investments that he secured through his dalliance with Michigan.
"You've always got to push," Dillingham said. "Just like coaching, you can never make it comfortable because everybody wants to be comfortable. So how do you create discomfort without being an asshole? For me, it was like, this is an opportunity to push the envelope and get my coaches more, get the players more, try to get an indoor facility — whatever we think we can do to elevate our program.
"I just want to see growth, and we can't grow at the rate of the average because if that's what we're doing, we're staying the same with everybody else. I just want to make sure our growth pattern is higher ever year and eventually we will get caught up. I guess the best way to say it is, I'm not in a hurry."
But he is loud, summoning a voice that he's created almost out of nothing, determined to eventually make all of college football hear it.
More at NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos