What Kenny Dillingham said about Arizona State's road game at Cincinnati
Former Pac-12 football teams have not fared well traveling through three time zones this season.
Entering Week 8 of the 2024 season, Washington, USC, UCLA, Stanford and Cal have all traveled cross-country to play in the Eastern Time Zone.
Their combined record in those games is 1-8.
Arizona State faces that challenge for the first time this season as the Sun Devils travel to Cincinnati, Ohio, to take on the Bearcats in a Big 12 matchup Saturday. Kickoff time is scheduled for 9 a.m. MST.
Sun Devils coach Kenny Dillingham is well aware of the challenge and is doing everything he can to prepare his team for the road trip and the early kickoff time.
"If you look at right now in college football, traveling three time zones and the win percentage, like I told our guys, is very, very, very low," Dillingham said in his weekly press conference. "If you just looked at that, and you didn't even look at the football teams, you just said 'who's traveling three time zones?' and you bet on the other team, you're gonna win the majority because it's such a challenge. Especially for college athletes who maybe don't go to be when they should like a pro athlete does when he's preparing to do that.
"So for us, we're bumping everything up an hour all week," Dillingham said. "We're getting out there on Thursday, and when we get there on Thursday everything's an hour-and-a-half, an hour-and-45-minutes earlier. So we're trying to get their clock changed starting [Tuesday]. Which means instead of waking up at 5, I get to wake up at 4, so that's exciting. We're really trying to negate that early time frame ... by getting their body clock started on Tuesday, not just when we get there on Thursday."
Here are more highlights from Dillingham's weekly press conference.
Cincinnati's strengths
"Really good opponent," Dillingham said. "This team has two losses by four points total. Otherwise they'd be undefeated and a top 15 team in the country if you flip four points in their season.
"Coach [Scott] Satterfield does a really good offensively. He's always done a really god job offensively. Wide zone team, play-action shots, move the pocket, move the quarterback, throw to their tight ends, solo their best wideout up and try to win one-on-ones, create angles in the running game ... he does a phenoomenal job offensively."
Cincinnati QB Brendan Sorsby
"The quarterback is playing arguably as good as any quarterback in our league right now," Dillingham said. "His efficiency is through the roof. He's locating the ball. He's big so they can run him in the red zone, they can run him on third downs.
Cam Skattebo's improvement
"He's a different player than last year," Dillingham said. "He's not the same player. He's dropped 10-15 pounds. He's in such better shape. He clocked 21.8 [mph] in the game last week, which is really good. Last year if he hit, ever, a 20 it was awesome. More than likely he was in the 19s."
On not being ranked in the AP Top 25
"I really don't care. I mean, I truly don't care," Dillingham said. "I mean the only thing that could possibly make me care is recruits may care. Other than that, I really don't care at all. I don't even talk about winning with our guys, ever. Or record, ever. Never have, never will.
"We'll never talk about results. We always talk about the process of how to be successful. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat."
More Arizona State & Big 12 Analysis
Ben Sherman has been covering the sports world for most of his journalism career, including 17 years with The Oregonian/OregonLive. One of his favorite memories was covering the 1999 Fiesta Bowl - the first BCS National Championship Game - at Sun Devil Stadium.