Amid season-long kicking struggles, including in the team’s 24–14 loss to the Cincinnati Bearcats on Saturday, Arizona State Sun Devils head coach Kenny Dillingham is looking beyond his locker room for help. The Sun Devils missed two field goals in the defeat, both by sophomore Ian Hershey, which prompted Dillingham in his post-game press conference to make a plea to the Arizona State student body.
A reporter followed up by asking if the second-year coach was serious, and he doubled down.
“I’m dead serious,” replied Dillingham. “We’re going to put it out on our social. We’re going to have a kicking tryout on Monday. We got to find somebody who can make a field goal.
“It makes it even harder late in games when it’s clearly a kick scenario. That’s when it gets really hard. You’re like, ‘Ah, it’s clearly a [scenario to] kick.’ You definitely want to take points here. There’s no doubt in your mind. [Hershey] hadn’t had a kick this game. He was kicking good pregame, so, I felt good about it, but you know, it is what it is.”
The scenario Dillingham is referring to was on ASU’s first drive of the fourth quarter when it was trailing by 10 points and needed a field goal to make it a one-possession game. After getting stopped on 3rd and 2 from Cincinnati’s 30-yard-line, Dillingham sent out Hershey for his first field goal attempt of the game after converting on his two extra-point attempts in the game. On the 48-yard try, Hershey was wide left.
He’d then have another try on Arizona State’s final possession, still trailing by 10 points with 30 seconds left in the game. The Sun Devils needed to make a 41-yard field goal, recover an onside kick, and then score a touchdown to push the game into overtime. But the team never even got that first part as Hershey was wide left again, which essentially ended the game.
That puts Hershey at 7 for 12 for the season on field goal attempts, including just 3 for 8 on attempts of at least 30 yards. While he’s 20 for 21 on extra-point attempts, not being reliable from 38 yards out—which is the shortest distance of his misses—affects the offensive game plan for Dillingham.
Arizona State has three kickers on its roster, with Hershey, redshirt freshman Carston Kieffer, and grad transfer Parker Lewis. Kieffer missed his lone field goal attempt of the season, while Lewis has only kicked off and hasn’t attempted any field goals. Overall, the Sun Devils have missed their last four field goal attempts, going 0 for 1 last week against Utah and also 0 for 1 the week prior versus Kansas.
“If somebody is [good enough], then, you know, we‘ll add him to the team and we’ll rock and roll from there,” Dillingham said.
He certainly shouldn’t have any lack of interest, considering Arizona State’s student body. The school’s enrollment of nearly 140,000 makes it one of the largest public universities in the nation, if not the largest. Dillingham’s plea for kicking help via a tryout also comes at an opportune time for his team as it has a bye next Saturday before resuming play on Nov. 2 against Oklahoma State.
What makes Arizona State’s kicking woes so surprising is that it is a program known for having some of the greatest kickers in college football history—and Dillingham knows that history very well as he’s a Phoenix native and ASU alum who’s been following the team his entire life.
While an offensive assistant at Arizona State a decade ago, Dillingham got to witness kicker Zane Gonzalez get named a unanimous All-American and win the Lou Groza Award for being the nation’s top kicker. Gonzalez set the NCAA’s all-time record for made field goals (96), which has since been eclipsed by Christopher Dunn of NC State (97).
Prior to Gonzalez, Arizona State had Luis Zendejas booting them through the uprights. He was also a unanimous All-American and made All-Pac-10 each of his four years at the school. All Zendejas did was become the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer with 368 points when he left school, a record which has since been broken. Luis Zendejas’s son, Cristian Zendejas, played for Arizona State as recently as 2021 before transferring, but he led the Pac-12 in both made field goals and attempted field goals in 2019.
Despite the kicking struggles, and Saturday’s loss, Dillingham has turned around the Sun Devils football program. It went just 3–9 in his first season and had an identical record in 2022 under Herman Edwards and interim coach Shaun Aguano. However, ASU is off to a 5–2 start this year in its first year in the Big 12, and one more victory over its final five games will make the team bowl-eligible.
Perhaps, someone who’s not even on the current roster will step in at placekicker and help get ASU there.
