Here is what the Sun Devils had to say after their week 2 heartbreaking loss to Mississippi State.
Arizona State head coach Kenny Dillingham on the game: “I thought our guys responded great in this football game. We’re one play away from this press conference from being an unbelievable comeback; that’s football, though. It’s about the moments in the game, it’s about winning the close games. It's not letting the result create an emotional response to how we’re gonna move forward. We have to take what we did good and how we played and how we responded, a 21-point run, and we have to build off that and not the one play at the end of the game. It’s gonna affect our win-loss column, but it can’t affect our future games. Sometimes you have emotional losses like this roller coaster.”
Dillingham on playing good football now versus the end of the season: “We’re down 17- 0 now on the road, and we battled back, took the lead, and we’re that close to winning the game. The real reality is we’re not in conference play yet. We got one more game that we gotta go play really well at home, and then our conference play, and hopefully we learn from this and get better and better and better. The goal is to be playing your best football towards the end of the season, not at the beginning of the season, so hopefully you know we learned from this first half, where we started a little slow on offense, and we can get a rhythm moving forward.”
Senior linebacker Keyshaun Elliott on the environment: “When they're rocking, they're rocking. When they're quiet, they're quiet. They had momentum a lot of the night till that second half. Defensively, I don't think it affected us. They played with a fast tempo, so our communication was kind of slow at the start. That's why the defense started slow. But, as we got comfortable, things started rolling.”
Dillingham on the first half: “Second downs were killing us in the first half. We weren’t converting second downs and getting us into third and long, so we gotta be better on second down early in the game. We gave up a few big plays on defense, but we had our defense on the field too much in the first half, but the big plays was kind of the nature of the game.”
Dillingham on the locker room vibe being down at half: “We’re ready to go, our guys weren’t nervous. They were very calm. They were like we’ve been here before, we’re ready for this.”
Dillingham on the first drive coming out of the half: “We talk about the middle eight all the time, and that's a hidden piece of the game. We were plus 10 in the middle eight, and that kind of got us back in it. Our guys were ready for that, and we coached a lot, so they were ready, and it kind of set the tone. Everybody felt a big jolt of confidence from it.”
Junior running back Kanye Udoh on the second half: “I really love how we all banded together and fought back. Like a lot of teams down 17-0 on the road. That's it. So, I love how we were able to battle back. We just weren't able to pull it out.”
Dillingham on kicking the field goal near the end of the fourth quarter: “You’ve got to take the lead, you can’t not take the lead there.”
Dillingham on quarterback Sam Leavitt: “The first half, we couldn’t get him in a rhythm. They did a good job coverage-wise, showing like they were gonna double a few times, but you gotta give that team credit, they played good football, we couldn’t get Sam in a rhythm. I gotta do a better job getting him in a rhythm because you can’t play quarterback if you’re not in rhythm.”
Dillingham on Udoh: “Yeah, he was huge. He did an unbelievable job; he ran behind his pad level. He ran behind his pads or offensive line. Did a good job on the football.”
Dillingham on adversity: “We talk about facing adversity and responding to failure all season, all camp, because I know that when you have success, it’s not about how good you are, it’s what happens in the moment that you fail and you’re not supposed to fail. (It’s about) how you respond, and I thought our guys responded well to that adversity. Now we got a new version of adversity, it’s the loss. In-game adversity is different. Now the adversity of the loss, we gotta be able to respond to that in a close game, and we lose close games very much last year, other than you know the Texas game at the end, we won most of those last year, so we just get back to it and rock and roll.”
Udoh on what the team learned from this game, “I’ve been on a lot of good teams, and what we did today, how we responded in that second half, that's what great teams do. So, I'm excited for what we do moving forward.
Elliott on the Mississippi State offense pace: “Yeah, that’s what they’re whole tempo offense is for. They’re looking for one guy to make an MA, and that you know you’re gonna get discipline for it, so obviously, there’s a few too many explosives that we gave up. We gotta get back together and get to work, but overall, I thought when we stopped them on first down we were getting off that field, we just gotta continue to get better.”
Dillingham on Starkville: “(It’s an) awesome environment, as good as I’ve been in, fans were great, stadium’s great, I mean everything about it was awesome. It’s what college football is supposed to be about.”
Redshirt junior running back Raleek Brown on his emotions "I don't like losing."