Arizona State is turning to Mikey Keene at quarterback, with the Arizona native and Chandler High School alumnus set for his first start as a Sun Devil against Kansas State on Saturday at Mountain America Stadium. The move gives the Sun Devils a new voice on offense as they try to steady a season that has slipped to 3-3 and 1-2 in Big-12 play.
The change comes after a 53-25 loss to Texas Tech, the kind of game that can force a staff to look harder at what is not working. Kenny Dillingham said he and his coaches spent nearly four hours after the loss going over where Arizona State stands and what the program needs to improve, asking whether the team could have done better structurally or in practice while it was being built. He said the staff went through the same sort of self-check that teams make when the margin for error starts to shrink.
But Dillingham is not treating the answer as a wholesale rebuild. He said Arizona State does not need drastic changes, and he pointed to the fact that there is still half a season left and the team has not played its best football. That fits the larger shape of the program under his watch: he arrived in 2023, went 3-9 in his first season, then guided the Sun Devils from a last-place projection in 2024 to a Big 12 championship and a College Football Playoff berth before last season ended at 8-5 with a Sun Bowl loss to Duke in the Sun Bowl.
The friction now is that the record does not match the memory of that run. Arizona State is coming off a 55-19 home loss to Baylor on Oct. 3, and Dillingham has already said he is letting the football team down. Senior defensive lineman C.J. Fite described the fix in plain terms: going back to the basics, knowing who the Sun Devils are, trusting the culture and the standard, and not trying to do anything special. That is the opening Keene steps into, and it is a test of whether a new starter can clean up an offense without changing everything around him.
What happens next is straightforward. Arizona State gets Kansas State on Saturday, and Keene will get his first chance to show whether the quarterback switch can help the Sun Devils stop the slide and make the season feel more like the one they expected to have.
