TEMPE — ASU football kicked off spring practice on Tuesday with speakers blasting Queen’s “We Are the Champions” on repeat.
DJ Khaled’s “All I Do is Win” and a few others made the rotation, too. For the most part, Freddy Mercury was an honorary Sun Devil for the day.
In the mind of head coach Kenny Dillingham, last season’s accomplishments — winning the Big 12 Championship and making an appearance in the College Football Playoff — no longer matter.
That is why he intentionally played the Queen classic on repeat: To drive home a lesson.
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“I wanted it to become monotonous like, ‘Who gives a crap?'” Dillingham said. “Like you’re going to be told so many good things forever. You better just let it become monotonous to you that it becomes irrelevant. Nobody cares, right? So we’re just trying to make last year irrelevant because nobody cares anymore. So we’re going to do things and play things that make last year irrelevant. We talk to our guys. We’re going to handle success fine. How are we going to handle this year when we get punched in the face?
At ASU's first spring practice, Kenny Dillingham kept playing, “We are the champions!” so it would become monotonous.
"We're trying to make last year irrelevant because nobody cares anymore." pic.twitter.com/zxEYoL3fa9
— Arizona Sports (@AZSports) March 25, 2025
“Because nobody’s punched us in the face. Nobody’s talking about punching us in the face. They’re just giving us our roses. So we got to be ready to get hit in the face this year, not the handle success part. We’ll be fine there. It’s when we get hit.”
Quarterback Sam Leavitt was not exactly a fan of “We Are The Champions” being the day’s most-played song.
“Well, I can’t speak for everybody else, but it was annoying me,” Leavitt said. “I don’t care about last year’s championship. Obviously, it was fun for the moment, but I don’t want to hear that no more.
“I’m going to tell (Dillingham) to turn it off because we’re not champions anymore. It’s a new season. We got more to prove.”
Regardless of the musical message, the sentiment within the team is clear — the Sun Devils are moving on from the accolades of 2024 and turning the page to 2025.
“A sailboat doesn’t sail on yesterday’s wind,” Dillingham said, crediting new assistant coach and former QB Trenton Bourguet for sending him the quote. “There’s not a better quote for this year than that. You don’t go nowhere if there’s no wind. And our leaders, our best players are the wind of our program. They’re the guys that are going to push this boat and everybody else is just going to be on the boat and they’re going to go with it.
“And our best players got to be the winds that move this boat and we’ll only go as far as them.”
Part of that wind of leaders is Dillingham himself. On Day 1 of practice, he set the standard of perfection, paying attention to even the smallest details, which included his own whistle-blowing.
Blowing his whistle a second early to stop a drill or play could have a long-term effect on his players’ effort.
Dillingham also admitted that having the referees blow the whistle instead of doing it himself at times was another aspect that he had to clean up.
“I just still think part of the not running to the whistle is my fault because we were blowing the whistle so fast,” Dillingham said. “So when I said not run to the whistle, the whistle wasn’t elongated enough for them to actually run to the ball, to really see what the true effort level was.
“So part of that’s on me that I got to get cleaned up.”
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