Sun Devils prep for surging West Virginia team, looking to stack success
Kenny Dillingham did something out of the ordinary on Monday, when the Arizona State head coach sat down for his weekly press conference at Mountain America Stadium. He opened with a comment about his desire to speak only about the upcoming opponent, West Virginia.
Dillingham, draped in his black sleeveless hoodie, waits for questions from the media, but before he even sat down, his voice was echoing off the microphone. This comes after weeks of national speculation surrounding college football coaching positions opening up. Dillingham has been a marquee name for other programs to consider; however, he put those conversations to bed before they started.
“For guys who don’t know, we practiced today,” Dillingham said as he fixed his seat, inching closer to the podium. “Today was like our ‘get back practice’. Let’s focus on West Virginia and answer questions that are relevant to our football team.”
Keeping the week’s focus on the visiting Mountaineers is warranted, as they come into Tempe after winning consecutive Big 12 games for the first time in 2025. Their uptick in form started in a 45-35 victory over Houston, a program that’d beaten ASU a week prior, 24-16.
West Virginia’s recent success is in large part due to its fantastic run defense; it is tied with ASU, allowing just 3.7 yards per carry —the third-best mark in the conference —and, for Dillingham, that creates a heap of potential issues.
“Coach Rodriguez is a coach I’ve studied for a long time,” Dillingham said of West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez, who’s been the head coach at four different programs since 2001, including Arizona. “ For us and for me, this is a really big challenge; his teams play really hard, and they’re on a two-game win streak.”
Establishing for many in college football, but only so many teams utilize the quarterback in the run game the way these two teams have lately, for the Sun Devils’ senior Jeff Sims ran for a program record 228 yards against Iowa State, earning a spot for his jersey in the Sun Devil Hall of Fame.
For the Mountaineers, freshman signal caller Scotty Fox Jr has grown into his own over recent weeks, rushing for 65 yards and two touchdowns against the Cougars, followed by a 58-yard performance on the ground against Colorado.
“You look at their run game and they utilize their quarterback in the run game, similar to how we use Jeff,” Dillingham said. “That’s why coach Rodriguez has always won games, because he’s dedicated to the plus-one run.
“For us, we’re trying to take a little bit of that element here toward the end of the year, but this is the number one rush defense the last three weeks in our league.”
Dillingham elaborated on the art of running the ball with a quarterback, noting that it comes down to one key factor: additional numbers. Typically, when a team hands the ball to a running back, the signal caller is out of the play, which means that when a quarterback doubles up as a ball carrier, you have a numerical advantage.
“They’re a big zone read/ counter read/ flash mesh read team, while we were more last week direct run,” Dillingham said. “It wasn’t a read, it was catch and run, and when you catch and run, it’s more of a math problem.
“They’re a little bit different philosophically, but the premise is the same, it’s one extra person.”
Fortunately for ASU, the team had a bye week to recover ahead of the Mountaineers contest. Dillingham joked about the false correlation between a bye week and a “week off,” making it clear his docket was full and that ASU did a lot of work off the field.
“Sometimes when people use the word week off, they think I went over to Disneyland or something,” Dillingham laughed.
While ASU wasn’t riding the largest rides in Anaheim last week, players did have a chance to rest and get healthy. Senior defensive lineman Prince Dorbah is back and active for Saturday’s contest, and junior wide receiver Jordyn Tyson is inching closer to a return, although Dillingham said he’s likely to be back for Colorado.
Monday’s injury update brought a somber tone; however, senior safety Xavion Alford will be out for the remainder of the season. He hasn’t played since Week 2 against Mississippi State, and the 2024 All-Big 12 First-team defensive back spent the majority of the season trying to overcome an injury he suffered in the preseason and played through the first two games of the year.
“That’s a kid who’s been a staple of this program,” Dillingham said on Alford’s impact. “He’s one of the heartbeats of the program. So, it just pains me that he’s not going to be able to make it back.”
Dillingham did not rule out a return for Alford, who, upon a waiver approval, could be eligible to play in 2026. He’s been an NCAA athlete at Texas since 2020, and a plan for his future with ASU will be announced at a later date.
Unfortunately, Alford isn’t the only key Sun Devil to deal with injury woes; sophomore quarterback Sam Leavitt recently had season-ending surgery on his ankle after multiple injury setbacks since the early stage of the year.
Despite numerous players missing time, ASU still sits in a position to battle for the Big 12 Championship title, and just two conference losses with three games to play, which, with added perspective, is an impressive feat for a banged-up maroon and gold.
“We didn’t have it last year, and now four of our six guys who went to media day are out,” Dillingham said. “You’ve got to find a way. And it’s something we’ll assess after the year, and maybe we got to be more physical in spring and fall. That way, games aren’t drastically more physical than our practices, because we kind of tailbacked this year. Those are all things I’m looking at in terms of how to prevent those things from happening, but I’m kind of just throwing things at the wall.
“We’ve had a really, really tough conference schedule … So with all the injuries, I’m very, very impressed by our guys’ ability to just keep fighting and not just, you know, cashing it in.”
As for Monday’s session, Dillingham was pleased with the players’ intensity during a short burst. The team practiced for just 10 periods, which ranged from approximately 1 hour to 90 minutes, much shorter than a typical 2.5-hour session.
“I think we worked some of the kinks out today,” Dillingham noted. “We got to play catch. So I thought the guy’s energy was good. This is a great opportunity for us to do something a little bit different. Thought it was necessary. Like, ‘let’s go put in the work now.’ Hopefully it was a good decision.”
As the Sun Devils prepare for the week, Dillingham is aiming to build off senior Jeff Sims’ incredible 405 yards of total offense against Iowa State. The signal caller made headlines for his rushing, but he also threw for 177 yards and a touchdown, leading the offense through fluid passing.
“I thought he threw the ball well, too,” Dillingham rebutted to a question about freeing up Sims to run the ball. “He had a huge third-down conversion to Chamon on a man deep over route, which extended a drive on the flea-flicker. He threw the ball into the window for a great catch by Malik (McClain). We didn’t ask him to do that a lot in the second half just because there were some elements in the rain.”
The conundrum between Sims’ passing and running abilities creates interesting game-plan scenarios for ASU. Running the ball 29 times on the road in Ames for a school record (by a quarterback) 228 yards, is a feat that the Sun Devil signal caller will be hard pressed to repeat on Saturday against a Mountaineer defense that yielded a combined 133 rushing yards in the last two weeks.
Hopefully, we can run the ball without him,” Dillingham elaborated. “If you can’t run the ball without him, is it because of a numbers problem or is it because you know they’re winning with less? If they’re winning with less, it means the windows aren’t going to be open either.
“So now you’re going to have to utilize them. If they’re winning with more, well, we don’t need to force him to run kind of like we did last week at times. We got to throw the football. So I think it just football is just a numbers game.”
