Kenny Dillingham was one of the best coordinators in college football last season. Partnering with Dan Lanning at Oregon, Dillingham ran the offense for a defensive-minded head coach, and he was part of the reason Bo Nix decided to transfer from Auburn to Oregon.

Nix enjoyed a wonderful season. The Ducks were exciting, explosive, and at one point a threat to make the College Football Playoff. And as soon as the Arizona State job came open, Dillingham looked like the obvious candidate.

Dillingham was raised in Scottsdale. He graduated from ASU in 2013. He coached high school ball at Chaparral. And his hire marks the first time in ASU football’s modern era that a graduate has been named the head coach.

It made sense. And there are no hard feelings.

“When you play him it’s gonna be like playing your brother,” Lanning said at Pac-12 Media Day. “Like if I was playing my brother in basketball right now, I’d want to whoop his ass. That’s the goal. But Kenny’s a competitor, too. And he’s a great coach. And obviously, he’s familiar with that area. That’s home for him. I think he’ll do great things with Sun Devils.”

The relationship — which goes back far before Oregon — between the two remains strong.

“He was my guy that I would throw all the crazy ideas off of. I’d go, ‘If we put the tackle over and then get an unbalance and then shift, what’s the defense going to do?’ He would tell me his opinion. He would ask me the same thing on defense. He was like my whiteboard enemy at Memphis,” Dillingham said. “We go back and forth on the whiteboard. Whoever had the pen last before our meeting won. It grew me as a coach to learn the defensive side of the ball.”

Dillingham says he plans to try and take the weekly “get real” meetings that Lanning has his team hold and build upon that at ASU. The Ducks are encouraged to open up about topics beyond football and be vulnerable with their teammates.

“I think taking that mantra and putting my own spin on it, making sure that you as a team are building relationships year-round. You don’t just flip a switch and say, It’s fall camp, get to know each other,” Dillingham said. “It’s a year-round process to get to know each other and build that ‘family’.”

He also thinks he can take what he learned in the NIL space at Oregon and apply it to what he’s building at Arizona State.

“In terms of what I learned at Oregon, how to play the NIL space. That’s a cutting-edge thing in today’s day and age,” Dillingham said. “I think Phil Knight almost created the space. That’s how he built an entire company. To be there and to learn how they navigate, what they did to navigate it, be cutting edge with one of the biggest things in college football that’s changing, I think I learned a lot.”