Dennis Erickson was never close to a contract extension
Nov 29, 2011, 7:38 PM | Updated: 8:26 pm
Lisa Love didn’t want to fire Dennis Erickson, but she
also had no plans to give him a contract extension. At
least, not before the end of the season.
“I understood the logic and I understood the excitement
and the fervor, especially when you consider the momentum
it creates for recruiting,” the Vice President of
Athletics told Arizona Sports 620’s Burns and Gambo. “You
still have to play, symbolically speaking, you’ve got to
play the fourth quarter.
“And in our case, November is the last part of the
football season, so you’ve got to play that well.”
The Sun Devils didn’t, as they dropped all four games in
the season’s final month, erasing the optimism brought by
a 6-2 start and replacing it with calls for the head
coach’s head.
Indeed, things can change in a hurry, and that’s why
Love’s patience was, you could say, rewarded.
“I always was like, ‘No, we’re going to wait, finish the
season, there’s plenty of time to make a decision,’ and
approaching it ‘flavor of the day’ was just not going to
be wise,” she said.
So now Love and the Sun Devils move on, looking to find
someone who can take the team further than Erickson did.
Of course, no one imagined this day when Erickson was
hired five years ago, but such is life in college
football.
