Odds and ends
July 14th, 2007, 9:18 am · Post a Comment · posted by Dan Zeiger
Athletic director Lisa Love arrived at Arizona State University as it began an experience that the Sun Devils are hardly foreign to — probation. The two-year NCAA penalty for improper benefits and lack of institutional control expires in November.
“We didn’t get anything punitive, just watch out, you’re on probation, and you’d better institutionally figure it out,” Love said. “In October, we’ll file our final report, and soon after, we’ll be off probation and clean.”
ASU’s eight major-infractions cases tie it with Southern Methodist for the most since 1953, when the NCAA’s enforcement system was instituted.
(SMU gets the tiebreaker by virtue of it receiving perhaps the most infamous punishment in college sports history, the 1987 football death penalty for violations that included boosters paying players thousands of dollars.)
Next on the list of shame are Auburn, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, Wisconsin and Wichita State, with seven major cases each.
The 2005 probation was ASU’s first major case since the men’s and women’s track programs were penalized in 1997. The other cases were in 1954 (football), 1959 (football), 1980 (football and men’s track), 1985 (baseball, men’s gymnastics and wrestling), 1986 (men’s basketball) and 1988 (men’s and women’s track).
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While Mark Dunkerley, director of annual giving for the Sun Devil Club — one of the athletic department’s two fund-raising arms — acknowledged that ASU must do a better job of tapping donors, contributions to the annual fund are up $1.085 million from last year.
That includes a increase of $322,460 in football scholarship premiums, $322,862 in basketball scholarship premiums and $171,836 to the general scholarship fund.
“It’s not where we need to be,” Dunkerley said, “but we’re moving in the right direction.”
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Women’s gymnastics coach John Spini said that the growth of ASU’s satellite campuses will play a bigger recruiting role in coming years, as athletes get increasingly faced with the possibility that they will have to commute to take major-core classes.
The university has three satellites: a Polytechnic campus at the former Williams Air Force Base in Gilbert; ASU West, located on Thunderbird Road between 43rd and 51st avenues in Phoenix; and a downtown Phoenix campus, at the Mercado at Seventh and Van Buren streets.
“With the majors changing, it could be tough to tell a kid that, for you major, you have to go 20 minutes that way or 40 minutes this way to go to class, then come back here and train,” Spini said. “But that’s the direction President Crow wants to take us, and we’ll have to find a way to deal with that.”
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ASU is putting an even bigger emphasis than normal on its two biggest revenue producers, football and men’s basketball. In that endeavor, there is no better school to emulate than the University of Florida, which has back-to-back NCAA titles in men’s hoops and won the Bowl Championship Series title game in January.
Asked if she would trade all of ASU’s athletic achievements this year — the school placed 10th in the Directors’ Cup standings, a measure of overall success — for what Florida did in just two sports, Love said no.
“I’m committed to a broad-based, successful program,” Love said. “Our pole vaulter cares as much about how good she is as our middle linebacker cares about his play. Because (football and basketball) are so high-profile, people are really crazy, and it would be super-positive with big parties, but I’m not inclined to do something that would be at the expense of a broad-based program.
“That’s deeply meaningful to a lot of people’s lives in this building and on campus. You meet Amy Hastings, one of the best distance runners in the world, and you’d want to do all you can to fund successful cross-country and track programs for her. That’s what we stand for here.”
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Love plans to, starting next year, call an annual summer press conference to report on the state of ASU’s athletic department.
