Arizona State's relatively new athletic director Graham Rossini last week hired a search firm, Elevate, to help him hire a replacement for departed basketball coach Bobby Hurley. That's about $250,000.
Arizona State University athletic director Graham Rossini speaks during an Arizona Board of Regents meeting in Tempe.
The last time Arizona hired a search firm to find a head coach was 2018, it hired and recycled recently fired Texas A&M football coach Kevin Sumlin, which might've been the single worst hire in modern UA sports history.
The top coaches at Arizona the last 50 years all were hired with no outside help. Cedric Dempsey hand-picked Iowa's Lute Olson. Dave Heeke targeted NFL assistant Jedd Fisch. Greg Byrne hired football's Rich Rodriguez, tennis' Clancy Shields and basketball's Adia Barnes while flying solo. Dempsey, who is also responsible for hiring UA coaching icons Mike Candrea and Frank Busch, once offered the UA football coaching job to Ohio State's Earle Bruce, Boston College's Jack Bicknell and Baylor's Grant Teaff, before moving on to Hawaii's Dick Tomey.
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Dempsey did so without outside assistance. He had his cards lined up and ultimately hit the jackpot.
When Arizona atheltic director Dick Clausen hired future three-time College World Series champion Jerry Kindall to be the UA's baseball coach in 1972, he told me he flew to South Carolina to offer the job to Gamecocks coach Bobby Richardson, a former New York Yankee all-star. Richardson declined but told Clausen he should pursue Kindall, the Minnesota Golden Gophers assistant coach.
Home run.
What's puzzling about Rossini's search to replace Hurley is that he had at least a year to survey the coaching landscape while Hurley, a lame duck, exhausted his contract.
The elite ADs don't need to pay a fortune to find a winning head coach. It should be intuitive. Arizona's Desireé Reed-Francois trusts herself; she has hired four head coaches in two years for track, swimming, women's golf and women's basketball, all without paying a penny to a search firm.
Advantage, Reed-Francois.
Former ASU coach Bobby Hurley's name is in the Big Dance record book
