With it recently suffering the first defeat of the season but starting the year with a 3-1 record, ASU football is on its first of two bye weeks and will look to regain some of what was working during the early success and keep their standards at a high level.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!ASU fell to Texas Tech 30-22 in its first game in Big 12 Conference play as a program due to unnecessary penalties and special teams blunders putting pressure on the offense to rescue them from the hole that they dug themselves in, but couldn’t get out of it.
It has been an interesting schedule, to say the least, for Arizona State. The Sun Devils had an abnormal Thursday game on Sept. 8 against Texas State followed by a long break before the Texas Tech loss and are now on a bye. ASU’s next bye is on Oct. 26 between the road games at Cincinnati and Oklahoma State.
Having the chance for players to reenergize and nurse any injuries with the extra time off of a game, Arizona State head coach Kenny Dillingham wants his team to practice at a relatively high level to keep the conditioning in check so they will be in shape for the Kansas game on Oct. 5.
“Your body is rested but is your conditioning level lowered? When you don’t push like you normally push on a game week, does that bring your conditioning level lower and then, how hard is that to get back up to the level before the bye? We’re trying to get a couple of these practices during the bye week at 85% of a normal practice because some really smart people tell us that if you are at 85%, the science says you won’t lose conditioning levels, that was what I was told,” Dillingham said after practice Wednesday. “One of these days, we are going to try to hit one of these days out here trying hit that level. We are monitoring that and making sure everyone on the team hits a top speed because we won’t have those top speeds on a game day this Saturday. That way we won’t lose our top speed.”
Between school, practices and gearing up for game weeks, the Sun Devils have a little bit of time to decompress before they get right back at it and return to a regularly scheduled program.
During this off time, Dillingham shared what he will be doing during the bye week and mentioned that he will continue to be invested heavily into football but from another perspective.
“Hopefully on the couch watching games with the wife and the little guy [son], doing not much of anything,” Dillingham said. “Then when I get bored of watching games, I’ll go watch back and forth of film on the future opponent. Football, then more football, then more football. I love college football, football in general. I’ll watch it on an off-week as a fan as much as you can.”
Kenny Dillingham proud of ASU’s mindset in not dwelling on mistakes despite defeat to Texas Tech
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Reporter Alec Cipollini covers ASU Athletics, the Phoenix Mercury and more for Burn City Sports. You can follow him on his X account, @AlecCipollini
