Blogging with the Devils

Derek Shaw

It is a question that I’ve fielded multiple times from curious fans, and one that gets typed out on Internet message boards regularly: Whatever happened to Derek Shaw, the highly-touted quarterback recruit with a howitzer arm that arrived at Arizona State in the fall of 2005 and was gone by the following spring?

Fresno Bee columnist Matt James wrote a nice piece on Shaw, whose supposedly can’t-miss college football career took him from Miami (Fla.) to ASU to Texas Tech to Fresno City College. The Oceanside (Calif.) High graduate, the nation’s most celebrated QB recruit coming out of high school, is in Fresno to try and resurrect his career.

If that’s what he truly wants.

Shaw’s comments about his brief ASU tenure suggest that he was burned out on football before he even arrived in Tempe.

“It’s always been about football. All my life,” Shaw told the Bee. “Football-football-football. I was trying to figure out, ‘What is football?’ When you look at the big picture in this world, what are we all striving for? What’s our purpose here? Is it football? There’s this huge world, and it’s so complex. It can’t just be football. Every single day I gotta get up at 5:30 a.m. and do football? All? Day? Long? Is this what I want?”

On his decision to play at ASU, Shaw said, “I wanted to go (to Miami), but I was kind of in love with this girl at the time. She went to Arizona State and I ended up going with her. We ended up breaking up like a week into being there. It was such a bust. It was just that first experience of love, I guess.”

After a practice during the 2005 season, Shaw told me that he was on the “(expletive) list” of then-coach Dirk Koetter.

“It’s been up and down, a tough transition, Shaw said then. “I picked up a lot of bad habits in high school, and I’ve had trouble getting used to everything.”

Away from home for the first time, Shaw admittedly did too much partaking of the Sun Devil party scene. The pressure to live up to the hype was present — after his arrival, some thought it would not be long before he vaulted past then-unheralded Rudy Carpenter for the No. 2 spot on the depth chart. Add in issues with his father, and it’s easy to see why his head could have been a mess.

Shaw will have two seasons of eligibility after 2007, so a big season in Fresno could earn him another Division I opportunity.

If that’s what he truly wants.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 19th, 2007 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.