This week, Arizona State Sports Illustrated affiliate reporter Kevin Hicks asked Sun Devil Head Football Coach Kenny Dillingham what his plans were going to be for the Friday 10/24 matchup between #1 Basha, and #3 Hamilton. Dillingham’s response was… interesting.
“I don’t know yet, it just depends,” Kenny Dillingham said. “I usually don’t attend (high school) games for (ASU) home games. I’m different than a lot of people, I’m about our football team, and it’s a game week…”
Nailed it.
Great answer. Focus on the task at hand. A 6-1 Houston Cougars team is in town, and if Arizona State hopes to make a repeat trip to the Big-12 Championship, the margin for error is super low. With so much on the line, people will totally understand ASU’s head coach taking this stance… unless… Kenny Dillingham has more to say?
“…it’s Friday, and if people that are from this state choose to come to this school then I’ll care about them. That simple. Just like I care about our football team. There’s a lot of guys who want to be here- nationally, across the country, that want to be a part of this football program. So I’m gonna focus my energy on the people that are here in this program, and pour it all into them, and once the game ends, I can move on to the next part of my job, which is trying to get the next generation of Sun Devils. I’m always focused, A) on the player that chose to be here, over B) the player that I want to be here. I’ll always choose “A,” because that person chose to be here.”
Oh boy.
There’s a lot to digest in these comments, and I have five very distinct thoughts about what Kenny Dillingham had to say here.
1) Kenny Dillingham has the right sentiments, he just delivered them to the wrong audience
I’m an Arizona State fan. I make ASU related content all the time. I’m also a huge fan of Kenny Dillingham and the philosophical approach he’s brought to making Arizona State relevant on and off the field. My job for the last 13 years has also been to cover Arizona high school football- and over that time I developed a reputation as a critic of Arizona State’s lack of locally grown talent on the roster. I feel like that reputation is wildly unfair, but that goes to my point- you don’t get to control what people think about you… especially if they’re invested in a completely different narrative.
The truth is, and has always been, that I don’t care at all where Arizona State procures talent from. All I have ever cared about is that Arizona State is meeting the base level requirements for the potential for local recruiting to bare fruit. If the harvest never comes, so be it- but if you aren’t checking off the basic, fundamental, minimum requirement boxes, you’re going to open the door for a flood of criticism from people who have an investment in believing that Arizona State isn’t just misguided when it comes to in-state recruiting, but that ASU is actually adversarial toward Arizona prospects.
Another truth is that this Arizona State coaching staff is extremely fundamentally sound when it comes to local recruiting, and the staff is the most qualified and plugged in to the local recruiting scene of any staff in ASU football history.
HOWEVER, people want to believe a narrative, and they’re not above pointing back to these comments any and every time Arizona State “misses” on a local recruit, even though every situation is completely different.
I think the audience for these comments was likely very small, but since it was said during media availability and broadcast out to everyone, “everyone” becomes the audience. Kenny Dillingham likely wanted his team to know that they are his priority, and a select few recruits to know that he’s interested in making them that level of priority as well (more than he has an interest in just being another college head coach on the sideline on a Friday night).
Instead of just the intended audience getting the message, we have former Sun Devils greats like local OL trainer Mike Pollak saying that Kenny Dillingham has the wrong priorities. Things like that become the genesis of a narrative that becomes hard to shake, even if it ultimately has no impact on the actual relationships formed between ASU’s staff and the players they’re trying to bring into the fold.
2) You can’t let these AZ kids get you down
Local recruits have worn down every single coach to come through Tempe, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. There’s both a romantic and practical appeal to going away to college. Moreover, lots of these kids, like former Pinnacle WR Duce Robinson, who ASU prioritized as both a prep recruit and transfer portal prospect, have parents whose loyalties lie elsewhere (Robinson’s father is a Florida State alum).
The pressure from the outside to procure local talent mixed with the resistance from local talent toward playing for Arizona State creates a resentment for the process, and that’s when you start to hear comments like what we heard from former ASU Defensive Coordinator Antonio Pierce
To sum up these comments, Pierce said “we’re going to do all we can, and if you choose to leave, we’ll see you on the field, but when we’re good and everyone wants to be here, good luck finding a spot.”
While it might have felt like that was a logical line of thought from Pierce, it was actually him creating an imaginary scenario in which Arizona recruits get passed over in the future regardless of whether they commit in the present. And by all accounts, Arizona State carried this level of adversarial delusion into all of its dealings in local recruiting, and created a level of damage in the community that Dilligham’s staff is still working to overcome to this day.
I bring this up, because it’s not hard to detect a level of frustration in Dillingham’s comments that mirror some of the frustration that Antonio Pierce was attempting to mask in the clip above.
Local recruiting is a difficult, thankless, uphill climb that takes a certain level of amnesia from day to day to attempt to endure.
3) The recruiting landscape for Arizona kids has changed
One thing Kenny Dillingham didn’t say, and probably shouldn’t say (even though I’d like him to), is that it’s not currently wise to prioritize in-state high school recruiting in the way that the old guard believes he should.
He didn’t say it, so I’ll say it for him.
Arizona State can’t win with Arizona high school prospects.
That’s not an insult to Arizona high school football players. USC can’t win with Los Angeles high school prospects. Texas can’t win with Dallas and Houston metro high school prospects.
Nobody is winning with team primarily made of home grown talent anymore.
It doesn’t mean efforts to forge relationships with local recruits, their families, and their high school coaching staffs should drop off. In fact, I still firmly believe Kenny Dillingham should be on the sideline for Basha/Hamilton, if for no other reason than to remove the perception of an unforced error.
The truth is, teams that win and compete at the highest level need to strongly invest in bringing in players that spent time as either productive FCS or Group of 6 talents, or at least two years on a Power 4 bench having used that team’s strength and conditioning program to physically mature.
As an Arizona State fan, I’m not bothered when they miss on a guy like Alex McLaughlin out of high school- I’m frustrated when he ends up at Washington as their leading tackler after developing and producing at NAU.
Beyond that, Arizona State wisely dedicates monetary resources to players that have already been productive in Maroon and Gold- and if someone wants to pay a 17-18 year old to come to their school, Arizona State would be insane to not let them go, but still form a relationship that can pay dividends for both parties if they decide to enter the portal after a year or two.
But in Arizona, once you get past the level of prep prospect that would demand a salary as a freshman (Your top 12-15 ranked prospects), you’re not necessarily left with prospects that a program attempting to compete for Big 12 Championships is going to be prioritizing. It’s a harsh truth, but it’s THE TRUTH.
4) It’s still probably a mistake to not go to this game
I’m speaking as a rabid fan of Arizona high school football, but also as someone who knows that it’s in Arizona State’s best interest to pull out every possible stop for some of these younger prospects, like the 2028 and 2029 Oliver brothers at Hamilton (sons of former Sun Devil R.J. Oliver), 2028 Hamilton QB Jax Sculley, and 2028 Basha DL Landen Wade. Not every prep prospect is worth monetary investment coming out of high school, and one has to hope that by 2028 the salary cap for players is fully functional, but these guys are worth whatever you want to throw at them.
Right now, all you can do is take advantage of your proximity and show up wherever and whenever its allowed.
5) If you don’t show up, you better win
Sometimes I think about a thing that local longtime high school media personality Kevin McCabe said about NAU basketball when they were losing games in bunches after also neglecting to prioritize in-state recruiting-
“We could have been just as bad as this with local kids.”
Winning solves everything, and it would certainly muffle the complaints of anyone who felt sore about Kenny Dillingham not only skipping Hamilton at Basha, but using his absence to make a statement to whomever his intended audience was.
Beat Houston, and a Friday night with the team is a night well spent. Lose at home, and you’ll have people saying you could have at least gotten a public relations win this weekend.
At the end of the day, all I care about is that the Arizona kids whom are both good and determined enough to play at the collegiate level get a chance to do so. And I’m going to root for Arizona State regardless of the origin of the talent that dons the Maroon and Gold.
But one thing that is undeniable, is that the fan allegiance to guys like Danny White, Randall McDaniel, D.J. Foster, N’Keal Harry, Chase Lucas and others that have elected to forge a path as Hometown Heroes is unmatched- and their time as Sun Devils has been worth every headache any coach has had to endure to make it happen.
Leave a Reply