The Week 7 matchup between K-State and Arizona State will feature two of the youngest coaches in all of college football: Kenny Dillingham and Collin Klein. They are tied for the youngest in the Power 4 conferences, and only Kirby Moore of Washington State (35) and Zach Kittley (34) are younger Division I coaches.

While Dillingham didn’t play football at Arizona State, like Klein, he is at his alma mater. An injury in his high senior year forced him to stop playing and get into coaching. He became the offensive coordinator at Chaparral High School at 21 years old, and was hired just two years later by Mike Norvell as an offensive analyst at Arizona State. He went back to Tempe in 2023, after spending the previous season as the offensive coordinator at Oregon.

Both of these guys are looking to lead their alma maters to a Big 12 Championship, and this is one of those games that could be pivotal in that pursuit.

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Offense

Quarterback Sam Leavitt wasn’t able to live up to the hype after leading the Sun Devils to the Big 12 Championship in 2024, and he announced he was transferring to LSU during the off-season. Dillingham and his staff were quick to fill the vacany, as they picked up former Kentucky quarterback Cutter Boley in the transfer portal.

Boley was the highest-rated quarterback to ever commit to Kentucky, as he was a consensus 4-star recruit. He had an up-and-down freshman year in 2025, as he threw for 2,160 yards, 15 touchdowns and 12 interceptions. In a loss to Tennessee, he showed off the talent by throwing for 330 yards and five touchdowns.

The offense lost two great playmakers in Kaleek Brown and Jordan Tyson. Brown was one of the best running backs in the Big 12, as he rushed for 1,141 yards and 4 touchdowns. Tyson had to deal with injuries, but he still had 61 catches for 788 yards and eight touchdowns and ended up going No. 9 to the New Orleans Saints in the 2026 NFL Draft.

One guy who could make a strong impact in the Arizona State offense is Boston College transfer Reed Harris. He had 39 catches for 673 yards and five touchdowns. He is a matchup nightmare, as he towers over defensive backs with his 6-foot-5 frame. He plays a style similar to Tyson, and he stands three inches taller and 17 pounds heavier.

Defense

There are a lot of changes on the defense at Arizona State, but defensive lineman C.J. Fites is a player who is capable of being an anchor on a defense. He took a major leap last season, finishing the year with 27 tackles and 6.5 sacks. He was named a preseason All-Big 12 defensive tackle and is a guy who figures to hear his name in the 2027 NFL Draft. Fite’s presence will force offenses to throw double-teams at him, and should open up opportunities for others to get after the quarterback.

The two leading tacklers last year were linebackers Jordan Crook and Keyshaun Elliott, who had 101 and 98 tackles, respectively. With both of these players gone, Martell Hughes is a guy who the Sun Devils will need to step up.

While there were losses in the off-season, the Sun Devils’ secondary has a chance to be one of the better units in the country. They bring back two very talented safeties in Adrian Wilson and Jessiah McGrew. The cornerback duo of Rodney Bimage Jr. and Montana Warren was good, but the arrival of LSU transfer Ashton Stamps.

He made major news last year after he hit the transfer portal after playing in only one game against Louisiana Tech. While it was a weird year, he is the type of talent that could give the Sun Devils the best secondary in the Big 12.

Schedule

In today’s college football, many teams are becoming hesitant to take big challenges during the non-conference season. However, that isn’t the case with the Sun Devils, as they go to College Station to take on Texas A&M in Week 2. After that game, the schedule lightens up. Including the matchup against K-State, four of Arizona State’s next five games will be at home.

The challenging part of the Sun Devils’ conference schedule is that some of their toughest matchups are on the road. They have road trips at Texas Tech, BYU, and Arizona, who are looked at as contenders in the Big 12.

Outlook

Dillingham has been outstanding early in his tenure in Tempe. After going 3-9 in his first year in 2023, he helped lead the Sun Devils to an 11-2 record and an appearance in the College Football Playoff during the 2024 season. Last year, they finished the year 8-5, despite losing quarterback Sam Leavitt early in the year.

The Big 12 is wide-open, and the Sun Devils once again to have the pieces to compete for a spot in the conference championship.

Game Info

Date: Saturday, October, 24
Time: TBD
TV:  TBD
Location: Mountain America Stadium
Series history: Arizona State leads the all-time series, 6-1. The Sun Devils have dominated this series, and won the most recent game 24-14 in 2024. The only time the Wildcats have knocked off Arizona State was in the 2002 Holiday Bowl.

SANTA BARBARA — The late-morning sun peeked through a gauzy veil of fog, bright laughter echoing over the giddy whisper of tulle as the brides posed for pictures outside the Santa Barbara County Courthouse.

Moments earlier, Zoë Weber and Jordan Cantor of Hollywood had traded vows above the compound’s famous Sunken Garden. The brief, heartfelt legal ceremony was made sweeter because the date, June 26, was the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage across the U.S. in 2015.

Minutes before that, their officiant, Santa Barbara County Supervisor Roy Lee, had married off Brittney Hua, 27, and Steven Ly, 26. The Arroyo High School sweethearts made their relationship official that same day 11 years ago, an anniversary that matches their San Gabriel Valley area code, 626.

Lee was soon rushing across the lawn to join Carmen Cardenas Ayon and Santiago Martinez, both 28, who’d come up from Compton for the last-minute wedding of their dreams.

The groom, a bus mechanic, was starting his shift around 4:30 am Wednesday morning when he happened to check the courthouse website for cancellations and saw Friday’s open call event.

“He was like ‘We can get married on Friday in Santa Barbara!’” the bride recalled. “And I was like ‘OK, let’s do it!’”

Less than a decade ago, courthouse weddings were still the purview of camera-shy celebrities, mid-life second marriages and mother-to-be brides. But since the pandemic, their popularity has boomed — transforming certain courthouses and municipal buildings into sought-after locales to tie the knot.

Snagging an appointment to elope has become almost as difficult as scoring Olympics tickets.

In Santa Barbara, marriage appointments open 90 days in advance, with new slots released every hour while the courthouse is open. On a recent weekday, slots in October vanished in less than five minutes.

“They pretty much get picked up as soon as we release them,” said County Clerk Melinda Greene. “We have people from all over the world.”

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Here comes the bride — and another, and another and another… 

So-called “micro weddings” have emerged as an industry unto themselves amid the soaring costs of a traditional ceremony. A recent Bank of America analysis pegged the average cost of an American wedding at $36,000 — significantly more expensive than a year of rent at the median price in Los Angeles, or two years of in-state tuition at UC Berkeley.

“A lot of my elopement brides are low-key and private,” said Asha Marshall of So Fetch Photography, who specializes in courthouse ceremonies. “They don’t want to be spending all that money.”

The shift toward boutique legal ceremonies has transformed the marriage business and the municipal buildings where such nuptials take place, turning elopement from a breezy wedding alternative into a formal contact sport.

“It books up so fast, you have to be online at the exact time [of day] you plan on having your appointment,” explained the photographer, whose viral 2024 snaps helped supercharge the Santa Barbara courthouse’s popularity on social media. “A lot of my brides get stressed out.”

Shuting Zang, 28, is photographed on her wedding day at San Francisco City Hall.

(Sarahbeth Maney / For The Times)

Santa Barbara’s Moorish Revival hall of justice has long been Southern California’s most coveted civil marriage spot. Vice President Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff took their vows in its storied Mural Room in 2014. Reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker were wed on the steps outside in 2022.

But officials say demand has exploded in recent years, thanks in part to Pinterest and TikTok.

“We see dozens a day, starting at 8 o’clock in the morning,” said Lee, the county supervisor and officiant for the day, whose office is across the street. “I see them line up right there outside the doors.”

Ly, the newlywed from El Monte, said that in order to secure their spot at the Santa Barbara courthouse, he and his bride were prepared for an experience akin to buying stadium tour tickets.

“Both of us were on two separate computers, each of us trying to copy and paste the details so we could get in early,” he said.

“I let him do the first one,” his wife, Hua, said. “He didn’t get it, so I did the second one and I got it.”

Others, including Amy Rodriguez, were left scrounging for cancellations.

“I decided one night, let me double check if there’s an opening,” the bride said as she waited for her groom-to-be near the front entrance to the courthouse, where wedding parties must pass through a metal detector. “I logged in — it was literally midnight, maybe one o’clock — and got the slot.”

The race to the clerk’s window is not limited to Santa Barbara. Other popular courthouses such as the L.A. County Courthouse in Beverly Hills and the Old County Courthouse in Santa Ana have seen a similar spikes in demand.

But no municipal building in the state compares to San Francisco City Hall, where Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio tied the knot in 1954.

Elias Salem, 33, left, and Samuel Tyler, 33, of San Francisco pose after being married at San Francisco City Hall.

(Sarahbeth Maney / For The Times)

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Today, the gilded Beaux-Arts building sees as many as 7,000 marriage ceremonies a year. That’s two-thirds again more than its Santa Barbara rival, which does about 4,000, and roughly the same number as take place at the Norwalk headquarters of the Los Angeles County Registrar, a top contender for the country’s busiest wedding venue after New York’s Manhattan Marriage Bureau and the Office of Civil Marriages in Las Vegas.

“Over the last three to four years it’s been really dramatic,” said Cheri Tran, a popular elopement photographer in San Francisco. “When I did my first City Hall elopement six or seven years ago, we were only dodging 20 or 30 people. Now it’s hundreds.”

The TikTok-driven crowds leave many locals in the lurch. Tran nudges her brides toward the Marin County Civic Center, Frank Lloyd Wright’s final public building. Others, like photographer Anna Perlman, encourage “adventure elopements” in Joshua Tree or Big Sur.

Officials, too, have sought creative ways to relieve the pressure. On the last Friday in June, San Francisco and Santa Barbara both opened their books to scores of additional couples, ushering in a brief return to the romance of last-minute marriage.

“There were simultaneously four or five couples trying to take a picture on the staircase,” said newlywed Daniel Tran, 28, who chanced upon one of the extra slots opened for San Francisco’s annual Pride wedding event. “One of our witnesses took a picture, and you could see couples on every floor getting married. It was a little jarring.”

Newlywed couples wait their turn for photos on the grand staircase during the busiest wedding day of the year at San Francisco City Hall.

(Sarahbeth Maney / For The Times)

A similar scene played out in Santa Barbara, where officials agreed to marry couples without an appointment for “Palindrome Day,” a sought-after anniversary that reads the same backwards and forwards.

“This is the first time we’ve ever done no appointments out here,” Greene said. “We authorized overtime and we’re gonna take short lunches and we’re just gonna get as many as we can through.”

By 11 a.m., the building’s lush courtyard was aflutter with white dresses and mascara-streaked tissues, cameras snapping from every angle as clerks flitted back and forth with marriage licenses.

Some, like the El Monte couple, had planned their nuptials for months. Others, like the pair from Compton, had pulled their ceremony together virtually overnight.

But few had managed an eleventh-hour affair quite as swiftly as Susie Villacis and Gaspar Garcia Jr., who cruised into town around 2 a.m. Friday morning after hunting down an all-inclusive civil ceremony from halfway across the state.

“To be honest, it was last minute — it was yesterday,” the bride said of the decision to marry in Santa Barbara.

With their Catholic wedding in Ecuador looming, the San Francisco couple needed a license and a civil ceremony ASAP.

“We were going to get married at San Francisco City Hall, but the earliest appointment was September,” Villacis said. “This was the only place we could do everything in one go.”

Lee, the county supervisor, was happy to oblige. The black-robed officiant led the pair through their wedding vows, pronouncing them husband and wife as their mothers looked on with tears in their eyes.

Garcia dipped Villacis for a dramatic first kiss. Then the trio posed for a selfie.

The Front Range Passenger Rail District is rallying support from the cities where the future rail line will operate. Denver City Council got on board with a proclamation made Monday at its regular meeting. Denver is the latest of nearly a dozen municipalities to publicly express its support for the railway. 

Councilman Darrell Watson sponsored the proclamation that received unanimous support.

“Right now, we’re dealing with forest fires throughout the state,” Watson said. “That air that’s coming in, having a cleaner approach to transit is important, and the Front Range Rail provides that.”

The proclamation also supports the creation of two additional “special events” stops that are south of Union Station and therefore would need voter approval. 

“One is on South Broadway and I-25 for the new Denver Summit stadium, as well as Burnham Yard for the new Denver Broncos stadium,” explained Sal Pace, the Front Range Passenger Rail District’s general manager.

For Pace, the support is another step in the right direction for future expansion. 

“We’re asking the local municipalities to agree with the station locations and the placement of stations across the district,” Pace said. “That way if we refer a ballot question, that it’s done in alignment with the local municipalities, such as here in Denver.”

But city support also brings monetary gains.

“Because of its population, Denver will be receiving $225 million in local return Pace explained. “And for passing this proclamation, they’ve just qualified themselves for an additional $22.5 million in local return dollars,” he said. “That money will be coming from any future tax revenue that a district is collecting.”

“This is a unique opportunity, not just for Denver, but for anyone that loves rail and anyone that lives in the Front Range,” Watson added.

The first phase of the railway that the Colorado Connector (CoCo) will make trips on goes from Denver up to Boulder, on to Fort Collins. That phase is already funded and is expected to begin service in 2029. The Rail’s board will have a meeting in August on a possible ballot measure for this November. Voters from Fort Collins down to Trinidad would vote on the tax measure to support future expansion if placed on the ballot.