Arizona State football coach Kenny Dillingham is passionate about his job and he loves what he does.
Want proof?
Check out the comments he gave with Arizona Sports 98.7 FM’s Bickley & Marotta on Wednesday, where he addressed the “negative” aspects of the job in the NIL era and college football coaches who “complain” amid the hardships of the coaching profession right now, a profession that has recently seen some big name coaches retire or depart for the NFL.
“At the end of the day, I joke around, but you know how many people want my job?” Dillingham told Arizona Sports 98.7 FM. “You know how many people want my assistant coaches’ jobs, and my analysts’ jobs, and the (quality control) and the (graduate assistant) jobs? So don’t complain about what we do. We’re blessed!”
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Dillingham wasn’t done, telling unhappy coaches to go ahead and “quit” in his interview during the show’s “Newsmakers Week.”
“There’s a lot of negative of it, yes, but do you know how many people want to be a college football coach?” Dillingham said on the Bickley & Marotta Show. “I literally spent nine years of my life doing anything to become a coffee boy. So don’t give me the, ‘Oh, it’s hard to be a college coach right now.’ Then quit. That’s how I look at it.”
Dillingham, 33, was hired at ASU before last season and went 3-9 overall and 2-7 in Pac-12 play in his first season as the coach of the Sun Devils.
He may be a young coach, but he has paid his dues in the coaching community, having spent time in various roles at Oregon, Florida State, Auburn, Memphis and at ASU, his alma mater, where he started out as an offensive assistant in 2014-15.
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The Sun Devils are moving to the Big 12 Conference next season, another adjustment Dillingham and his staff have to make.
“You adapt. You adjust. And is it hard? Yes. But if you love it, you’re going to do it,” Dillingham said Wednesday. “Does it pull away from other things? Yes. Find a way to have life balance. Recruit the kids who understand that I’m not going to call you every single day because I’m going to go home to my kids and my wife. Find the balance that works for you. It’s very, very difficult because you never have to turn the switch off.”
He added: “Every single day of the year, every minute, you can be working. And if you’re not, you feel like you’re being outworked.”
ASU may have only won three games last season, but you cannot accuse Dillingham of not being passionate about the game and passionate about coaching.
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Reach Jeremy Cluff at jeremy.cluff@arizonarepublic.com. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter @Jeremy_Cluff.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: ASU football’s Kenny Dillingham sounds off on ‘complaining’ coaches
