ASU's Todd Graham: The Smartest Bad Hire in College Football History
Everybody knows that when it comes to college football, even the gods choose sides. There are Winners and Losers, by divine right.
Nobody considers Todd Graham to be a holy figure. But he was brought in to change the gods' minds about Arizona State football, a team whose place has been to get to the Big Game and then to blow it, to get its fingertips to the mountaintop before someone stomps on them.
| 2006 | Rice | 7-6 | New Orleans Bowl-L |
| 2007 | Tulsa | 10-4 | GMAC Bowl-W |
| 2008 | Tulsa | 11-3 | GMAC Bowl-W |
| 2009 | Tulsa | 5-7 | |
| 2010 | Tulsa | 10-3 | Hawaii Bowl-W |
| 2011 | Pittsburgh | 6-6 | |
| 2012 | Arizona State | 8-5 | Fight Hunger Bowl-W |
| 2013 | Arizona State | 10-4 | Holiday Bowl-L |
| 2014 | Arizona State | 8-1 |
.jpg?w=256 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
When Arizona State hired him three years ago, it was a perfect match of a bumbling athletic department and carpetbagging coach. They would both get what they deserved. Somehow, that turned out to be a perfect fit. The gods? Well, this year Arizona State beat USC on, yes, a Hail Mary. It beat Utah when a top kicker missed a short field goal in overtime. And now, it crushed God's team, Notre Dame, 55-31 on Saturday.
It was like Lucy trying to pull back on the football and Charlie Brown drilling a 50-yard field goal anyway. It was the Chicago Cubs beating the New York Yankees in a big moment, if you can imagine it. (As a Chicagoan, I can't).
ASU figures to be ranked seventh or eighth in the College Football Playoff poll Tuesday and is suddenly in the national championship conversation. Is this a great moment for an I-told-you-so from Graham?
"How the search went here, the expectations of who they were going to hire … (fans thought) 'Who did we hire?' " Graham said last week on the Pac-12 coaches teleconference. "They really didn't know who I was. Didn't know much about me. It just wasn't a lot of positives."
Arizona State thought it was going to get June Jones, or possibly Kevin Sumlin. Somehow, those deals fell through. Even more amazing is that school officials, being publicly ridiculed during the search, landed on Graham.
Just five years earlier, Graham quit his job at Rice after just one season. He was named Conference USA Coach of the Year, signed a contract extension and then…left for Tulsa. Rice was so angry that its band put together a performance called Todd Graham's Inferno the next year when Tulsa, and Graham, came to town. Yes, that was a reference to Dante's Inferno, and Dante's trip to the pit of hell.
He later left Tulsa for Pitt, where he stayed—again—one year before going to Arizona State. He literally slipped out of Pittsburgh in the middle of the night, only telling his players he was gone with a text that said (via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), "The timing of the circumstances have prohibited me from telling you directly…"
Graham is not a study in disloyalty or anti-commitment as people have labeled. Sure, he has done some sneaky things, treated his players poorly. But coaches shouldn't be expected to stick around in any job longer than they want, longer than it seems like the right place to be.
He isn't even a symbol of the greed of college football, as people have also portrayed Graham. He is just a guy who has left a job as soon as a better one came along. Be honest: You would do the same thing. You know, too, that loyalty from your employer lasts until roughly .05 seconds after an investor starts getting nervous. And one-sided loyalty just makes you a sucker.
Understandably, Arizona State has been an I'll-believe-it-when-you-prove it football fan base. That's fair. Why shouldn't it be? The point is: It is safe to buy in now. A piano is not about to drop out of the sky.
ASU was 5-40 against teams ranked in the Associated Press poll in the 14 years before Graham arrived. Under Graham, it is 7-6, including 7-3 the past two years.
It's not easy to just start believing. Earlier this season, quarterback Taylor Kelly injured his foot. And in the first game without him, ASU was humiliated at home by UCLA. The gods! Nope, that was ASU's only loss. Now, Kelly is back. And the defense was harassing Notre Dame quarterback Everett Golson all night.
So it's time to loosen up, Arizona State fans. College football is built on passion. The ABCs of the sport are Argument, Bias and Chaos. And those things are exactly the reason people were wrong in thinking that the school had made the wrong hire in Graham.
The guy wins everywhere he goes. He just happens to go as soon as he wins. That's OK. Loyalty and longevity are not required to make for a highly successful coach, or program, anymore.
According to The Seattle Times' Bud Withers, his paper ran a poll a few years ago asking readers which Pac-12 school had made the best coaching hire: Washington State (Mike Leach), UCLA (Jim Mora), Arizona (Rich Rodriguez) or Arizona State. Graham pulled in 2.39 percent of the vote.
Graham said he left Pittsburgh because his family never fit in well there. That tells Arizona State fans they are his family now, which suggests long-term loyalty. The problem with that point is back to the ABCs of college football. In a sport built on passion, players and fans think of the program and its coach as part of a family (until he loses). So a winning coach cannot leave to help his family, as if his family is some other entity.
When recruiting, coaches tell parents that the team will be a second family. The coach is the second father. People buy into that. It's mostly just a sales pitch, but coaches believe it when they say it. Then something better comes along. Another family.
So it's time now for the college football world to admit it was wrong about Graham and Arizona State, whether their fit was genius or merely a happy accident. And it's time, too, for ASU fans to see that Graham was the right guy.
That means they'll buy into the ABCs. The irony is that Graham can't hurt you until you buy in. But that's OK. Have fun today and worry about that tomorrow. The long term doesn't apply anymore.
For now, Graham is a loyal member of the family. He is a Sun, well, Devil.
Greg Couch covers college football for Bleacher Report. He also writes for The New York Times and was formerly a scribe for FoxSports.com and the Chicago Sun-Times.
.jpg?w=480 "Ohio State Team Doctor")
