TEMPE, Ariz. — If you want to know why Lisa Love is
out and Steve Patterson is in as Arizona State University’s new athletic
director, president Michael Crow explained it during a Wednesday news conference
at the Carson Student-Athlete Center.
“Sports is not a business for us; it is an academic enterprise,” Crow said.
“But to make this program work, we need to earn $100 million dollars a year.
We’re not earning $100 million dollars a year.”
Here’s a stunning revelation: College athletics is about money. Wins are great.
So are bowl games, NCAA tournaments, cool stadium experiences and hip, black
uniforms, but none of it happens without cash — cash that ASU is not earning
with a 6-7 football team and a 10-21 men’s basketball team.
“We have serious resource limits,” Crow said, “serious resource constraints.”
Enter Patterson, who many felt was being fitted for the position when ASU hired
him nearly nine months ago as chief operating officer and managing director of
the Sun Devil Sports Group, ASU's new athletic marketing division.
Patterson’s pro sports resume is impressive. He spent nearly a quarter century
as an executive in the NFL with the Houston Texans, the NBA with the Houston
Rockets and Portland Trail Blazers, and in professional hockey with the Houston
Aeros of the AHL. Prior to arriving at ASU, he was the president of Pro Sports
Consulting.
Among his accomplishments, he played a key role in reducing the Trail Blazers’
enormous annual losses, a major, coalition-building role in getting Reliant
Stadium built in Houston and a major role in bringing the Super Bowl to
Houston.
Some will question whether Patterson has the credentials required for this job,
given the vast cultural differences between professional and college athletics.
But perhaps that’s nothing more than a product of old-school thinking that
pervades the hiring process at American companies and institutions.
Judgments often seem to be based on whether the candidate can check off all the
requisite experience boxes and not concerned enough with that candidate’s
intelligence, innovation and creativity. If the goal is to take an enterprise
to unachieved heights, perhaps the priorities are out of whack.
Nobody knows if Patterson’s pro sports experience will translate at the college
level. Only time will tell if Crow’s choice proves prudent or foolish, but he
deserves the benefit of time on this front.
If you’re sniffing for immediate areas of concern, you should instead wonder
why Patterson fired more than 100 employees in his first year on the job with
the Blazers, as The Oregonian’s John Canzano reported. Was it a simple matter
of getting the team’s economic house in order, like former AD Gene Smith did
several years ago at ASU, or was there more to the story?
You should wonder why past employees in Houston and Oregon, as well as
employees in ASU’s own house, have described Patterson’s leadership style as
arrogant, dismissive, condescending and even dictatorial. Was it sour grapes,
or is there something more to the claims?
Regardless of whether Patterson was the right hire, it was clear Love had to
go. She was at the helm when some wonderful things were happening at ASU,
things for which she will likely never earn enough credit, like seven national
championships. But an athletic director is ultimately judged on the success of
a department’s two cash cows, men’s basketball and football.
The former is clearly in disarray, with players transferring and losses
mounting at an alarming rate.
You can make a sound argument that if kicker Alex Garoutte makes one of three
field-goal attempts in Pasadena last fall, none of this would matter — that
we’d be viewing an entirely different picture with Dennis Erickson still
coaching and Love still talking in $10 words.
But college athletics isn’t a game of almost. It’s do or depart, and Love never
forged the kind of alliances with the alumni and booster base to survive such
downturns because she was never comfortable in public settings.
To be fair, there were elements of the ASU population who were never willing to
accept her simply because she was a woman.
“The question of Lisa’s gender did prove to be challenging with some folks that
she was dealing with. Yes. Absolutely,” said Crow, calling it a bias. “Was it a
determining factor? No. But is this a male-dominated role? The answer is yes.
Is it a male-dominated function? Yes.”
Love should have known that going in. Some sports, particularly college
football, are a minefield of old boys’ networks. It might be a pathetic reality
that some have not evolved beyond this point, but if Love couldn’t handle that
reality and the ensuing public responsibilities, she was not equipped for the
job.
“Both Lisa and I know this is a tough assignment, and both Lisa and I know
we’ve run this path about as hard as we can run it,” Crow said. “I have so much
political capital to spend to advance the university, and Lisa and I agreed
that her political capital, relative to advancement of this role, had been
spent. We’re not on the path that we’ve wanted to be on, so we’re continuing to
adjust.”
Patterson is the latest adjustment — the Sun Devils’ fourth athletic director
in the past 16 years, pending approval by the Arizona Board of Regents and a
contract whose terms he said were not yet settled on Wednesday. When he spoke,
his words sounded the same as his three predecessors, but the coming results
are all that matter to Sun Devil nation.
“Sun Devil athletics has to win, first and foremost,” Patterson said. “We need
to be consistently competitive. We need to be top-ranked in the Directors’ Cup
every year. We need to vie for national championships. We need to have some
fun, and I think we’ve missed a bit of that with some of the teams we’ve had
this year.
“I think we’ve got all resources to do that here. I don’t see why we can’t do
it. We have great strength in numbers, great strength in assets. We need people
to give us a chance.”
