Sun Devils' Kenny Dillingham Rips Into Practice Performance

Arizona State Sun Devils coach Kenny Dillingham was not happy after practice on Thursday.

He said the team lacked emotion, passion and had a "bad day." In fact, he said if they play the way they practiced, they will have a losing season.

“We’ve got to be better,” Dillingham said. “Our offense, in general, too many drops on offense as a group. It was a bad day. It was a really, really bad day on offense. 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. 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 because somebody has to go those records. There’s going to be tons of teams who do it. Why not us?”

Dillingham made it clear that the Sun Devils looked good fundamentally in practice as there was only one misfire on offense which resulted in an interception. He commented on the lack of emotion when someone made a big play. He said the team was not fired up. They were dull.

“We didn’t practice bad,” Dillingham said. “What I mean by that is we didn’t bust, we didn’t [miss assignments]. We threw one pick. We didn’t practice bad. 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. 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. Good practice of complacency. It was a good practice for a bad team. It was an average practice for an average team. That’s what today was.”

This was different from the way Dillingham commented after Wednesday's practice, where he was very happy with with the team overall.

“That was our best first day,” Dillingham said on Wednesday after practice. “I don’t like to sing as many praises as I like to say more negative, especially when our guys are getting a lot of (external) praise, but today was a good day.”

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