Title: “The Clock That Beat Us”
The desert air was cooling, but inside the stadium in Provo, the tension was climbing. Arizona State trailed BYU 31-28 with just under a minute to go in a game that had already seen four lead changes, two blocked kicks, and a fumble returned for a touchdown. Head Coach Kenny Dillingham stood on the sideline, headset pressed tight, heart pounding like the war drums of Tempe.
Jayden Rashada, the Sun Devils’ young quarterback, had just converted on fourth-and-8 with a back-shoulder dart to Elijhah Badger. The ball sat on the Cougars’ 23-yard line. ASU was in field goal range to tie — or better yet, to win. The offense scrambled back to the line, but confusion reigned.
Dillingham looked down at the laminated play sheet in his hand, then up at the clock: 0:37.
“We’ve got time, clock it!” he shouted.
Rashada glanced toward the sideline, unsure. His fingers went to his helmet, trying to decipher the play call. The crowd was deafening, a blue-and-white tsunami crashing over the field.
No play came in. No substitution. Just hesitation.
By the time the next snap happened, 18 precious seconds had bled off the clock. ASU tried to reset, but the pressure was on. They ran once — a draw that netted only two yards — and then took too long huddling again. On third down, chaos: a miscommunication at the line led to a sack. With the clock still ticking, ASU called its final timeout with just six seconds left. The field goal unit rushed out, panicked.
The 41-yard attempt hooked left.
Game over.
The silence in the ASU locker room afterward was heavy, funereal. Dillingham stood before his team, eyes hollow but jaw clenched.
“This one’s on me,” he said. “One hundred percent a mistake. I mismanaged the clock. That’s not on Rashada. That’s not on our line. That’s not on anyone else.”
Reporters caught up with him later in the tunnel. The air outside was thin and cold, but Dillingham’s face was flushed with frustration.
“Look, I tried to outthink it,” he admitted. “We had a plan. We just didn’t execute it — or I didn’t. When you get into that moment, sometimes you want the perfect call. But the perfect call is useless if the clock beats you. And tonight, it did. That’s on me. One hundred percent.”
Fans and analysts would spend the next week breaking down the final minute frame by frame. Some would argue that Dillingham, a young coach with a fast-rising profile, had been too eager to win it outright instead of securing the tie. Others praised his ownership of the mistake — rare honesty in a sport where blame often gets deflected.
But inside the Sun Devils’ building, the focus shifted fast. No one dwelled. “Control what we can control,” Dillingham repeated to his players in film session. “Next time, we manage the moment. Not the other way around.”
The mistake became a lesson. A hard one. A costly one. But perhaps, in the long arc of his coaching career, a defining one.
Still, the scoreboard in Provo would never forget.
31-28.
Time expired.
