Blogging with the Devils

My apologies for the blog inactivity during the last week. Much of that was beyond my control, as we had a software switch that shut the Tribune’s blogs down for a few days.

Then, when we got back up and running, the switch resulted in old posts appearing as one giant paragraph, with art missing or out of place. As a result, much of my blog time during the last couple of days has been spent simply making the posts, all 91 of them, presentable — not to mention readable — again. I will not tolerate an unsightly blog, and neither should you.

Among the recent Sun Devil goings-on:

Much of the chatter among Arizona State fans in the last couple of days has been on this column from the Seattle-Post Intelligencer regarding Dennis Erickson.

Through an ASU spokesman, Erickson denied attempting to convince running back Deonte Jackson, or any of his former Idaho players, to follow him to Tempe, as was asserted in the linked column.

With Erickson returning to one of his former schools, Washington State, last week, his nomadic coaching tendencies were again subject to criticism; the Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review fired its salvo in the days before the game.

Should ASU defeat Washington on Saturday night, the Sun Devils will likely enjoy their highest-ever placement in the Bowl Championship Series standings, which debut on Sunday. BCS Guru has the Sun Devils 11th in its unofficial standings, compiled after last week’s games.

ASU has appeared in the BCS standings in one season, 2004, peaking at No. 14.

Baseball coach Pat Murphy recently made a large donation of baseball equipment to Girls And Boys Town, the non-profit organization dedicated to housing and educating at-risk children. Its national headquarters is near Omaha, Neb.

When the Sun Devils played in the College World Series in June, they practiced at the Girls And Boys Town campus twice. At the time, he called the facility a “tremendous place to develop kids lives and give them a chance.”

Finally, it has nothing to do with ASU, but this has got to be the car-dealership commercial of the year. I have been chuckling non-stop for two days.

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The performance of the Arizona State defense against the rush against Stanford on Saturday was impressive, but not good enough to set a school record, as I mistakenly reported in Sunday’s edition of the Tribune. The minus-2 net rushing yards is the Sun Devils’ best only since 1996.

After Saturday’s game, an ASU official distributed a list of lowest-rushing-yards-allowed games, but writing on deadline, I glossed over the time frame that was clearly stated in the heading.

The minus-2 figure is not even close to a school mark. The Sun Devils held San Jose State to minus-107 rushing yards in 1968, and there are at least four other game totals lower than what ASU surrendered on Saturday.

My apologies for the error.

In the rankings released on Sunday, the Sun Devils are 18th in the Associated Press poll, 19th in USA Today (coaches) and eighth in Jeff Sagarin’s computer ratings. And yes, I double-checked the numbers and made sure that they are for this week.

ASU’s planned indoor practice facility is similar to one at the University of Texas.

Arizona State University athletics has four items on the agenda at the Arizona Board of Regents meeting on Sept. 27-28 in Flagstaff.

At the forefront is ASU’s request for approval of construction of an indoor football practice facility, one of seven new university projects scheduled for the first year of a capital improvement plan for fiscal years 2009-11.

Plans call for the $6-million, 96,750-square foot facility, expected to be funded primarily through donor gifts, to have an inflatable “bubble” roof similar to a structure used by the University of Texas. It would be located adjacent to the Sun Devils’ current practice fields at Rural Road and Sixth Street, stand 65 feet tall and house a 120-yard artificial turf field.

The school has submitted for approval contract extensions for three coaches: Herb Sendek of men’s basketball, Greg Kraft of men’s and women’s track and Louie Quintana of men’s and women’s cross country.

ASU wants to award Sendek another contract year, extending his deal through April 15, 2012, at his $900,000 annual salary.

Kraft figured to be in line for a nice raise after leading the women’s team to indoor and outdoor national championships this past season. He would receive a salary bump of more than $32,000 annually — to $165,000 — on a deal running through June 30, 2012.

After working on a year-to-year basis, Quintana would receive a multi-year deal at $60,000 per (up more than $13,000) through June 30, 2012.

The former logo at Culpeper (Va.) High.

Fernando Morales travels the country, helping provide Arizona State University with protection of the school’s most valuable commodities — its name and image. And he can do that important job without leaving his desk.

As coordinator of ASU’s trademark and licensing office, Morales is always on the lookout for unauthorized use of the Sun Devils name and Sparky logo, which are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

“I do a lot of searches for ‘Sun Devils’ on the Internet,” Morales said.

The school’s reputation can ride on Morales’ searches; the ASU and Sun Devil names and Sparky logo have been featured on pornographic Web sites, he said. But much of his hunting centers on high schools and small colleges around the nation.

ASU has a legal interest in cracking down on such unauthorized use of its properties. Should a high school distribute a product with a Sun Devils name or Sparky logo on it that has, say, lead paint, sharp edges or is flammable, the Tempe university could be subject to a lawsuit.

“When we find them, we have to do something about them,” Morales said. “If we don’t, we lose the ability to protect our name. If those schools or whoever made a product that hurts someone, the courts have said that if your name or logo is on it, you can be held responsible.”

A recent discovery was at Culpeper (Va.) High, which had been utilizing Sparky as its Blue Devil mascot. The school agreed to make a logo change; it is uncertain if the nickname as drawn the interest of Duke University.

Morales said that he has dealt with unauthorized name/logo use at about 20 schools. This week, he found two more with a Sun Devils nickname; Salem High in Virginia Beach, Va., and Sandia Prep High in Albuquerque, N.M., will be hearing from him soon.

Morales said that ASU’s protection of its properties is firm, but fair.

“You don’t want to turn people off to ASU by being too heavy-handed,” Morales said. “If a school has invested a lot of money in a basketball floor with Sparky on it, we’re not going to make them rip it up right away. We will be flexible. You can look like an ogre if you do it wrong.”

A few years ago, Tucson Sunnyside High (Blue Devils) had a Sparky logo on its football helmets — which ASU officials conveniently discovered when the team played in a state championship game at Sun Devil Stadium. ASU offered to pay for the the design of a new logo for Sunnyside.

ASU afforded a small college in Mississippi four years to phase out its logo.

If a school wants to keep the Sun Devil name or Sparky logo, ASU can work out a licensing agreement. That would require assurances from the school that any name/logo products it distributes will be safe.

“We could license the logo for, say, a penny a year,” Morales said. “People forget that trademarks were not created to make money off of. They were created to protect consumers. If we have assurances that will happen, that’s acceptable to us.”

Forget about bidding on that game-worn 1975 replica helmet or jersey during the silent auction at the 2008 ASU football awards banquet.

The team wearing vintage uniforms next season — the 50th anniversary of the opening of Sun Devil Stadium — is a nice idea but will likely not happen. A school spokesman said on Tuesday that the equipment operations office estimates that such an endeavor would cost a minimum of $40,000, money that the football program feels it can spend better elsewhere.

Derek Shaw (Fresno Bee photo)

Derek Shaw, the well-traveled and oft-troubled former Arizona State quarterback, has been suspended indefinitely from Fresno City College’s team for what coach Tony Caviglia called “things he needs to take care of in his personal life.”

Said Caviglia, “His priorities need to be re-established.”

Shaw, who arrived in Tempe as a highly-touted recruit in 2005 and was gone by the end of spring drills in ‘06, was slated to start for the Rams, who open their season on Saturday. The Oceanside, Calif., resident originally committed to Miami (Fla.), signed with ASU and transferred to Texas Tech, where he spent one semester before winding up in Fresno.

Now, one has to wonder if he will play again anywhere.

Neil Parry

The visiting radio booth at Sun Devil Stadium on Saturday will contain an inspiring story.

The color analyst for San Jose State’s broadcasts is Neil Parry, the former Spartans player who returned to play in 2003 after having part of his right leg amputated. The amputation stemmed from a 2000 game against Texas-El Paso, in which Parry, covering a kickoff, suffered a gruesome break in which the bone pierced through the skin, leading to an infection.

Parry — brother of Seattle Seahawks fullback Josh Parry, also a SJSU product — does speaking engagements about his experience and hopes to turn his story into a movie. He also has ambitions to coach.

ASU has eight players who have received undergraduate degrees, tying the school for fifth (with Pittsburgh) in Division I-A.Boston College has the most with 17, and Washington has 11. Auburn and Notre Dame are tied for third with nine each. Mississippi, Southern California and Virginia have five apiece.

The Sun Devil graduates are offensive linemen Robert Gustavis, Zach Krula, Mike Pollak, Julius Orieukwu and Brandon Rodd, safety Josh Barrett, cornerback Littrele Jones and tight end Tyrice Thompson.

I have been asked if I am working on a story on the one-year anniversary of the bizarre, season-defining quarterback shakeup at Arizona State that saw Rudy Carpenter being named the starter after Sam Keller had the job for less than 24 hours.

Nope. Thought about it a little, but that’s it.

Even though the reasons behind then-coach Dirk Koetter’s decision have not been made public, what is left to write? In the spring, Carpenter made it clear that he has said all he is going to say about the subject, and the two other principals involved, Keller and Koetter, are no longer in Tempe.

As a result, not much has happened to advance the story from an ASU standpoint, other than Carpenter’s brief response to comments made by Mike Keller, Sam’s father, in a recent ESPN.com article.

However, with Keller’s recent appointment as Nebraska starting QB, there is a compelling angle in that part of the college football world, and the Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star and Omaha (Neb.) World-Herald published stories on Sunday.

The Journal Star article indicates that Koetter and Carpenter declined the paper’s interview requests.

The site of some of Arizona State football coach Dennis Erickson’s biggest victories is being vacated.

The University of Miami (Fla.) announced that it will leave the Orange Bowl after this season and relocate to Dolphin Stadium. The school signed a 25-year lease and expects to earn as much as $2 million annually in extra revenue due to the move.

Erickson, who coached the Hurricanes from 1989-94, was 37-2 in contests at the Orange Bowl, which opened in 1937. He won his second national title in the venerable facility with a 22-0 win against Nebraska in the 1992 Orange Bowl game and was coach when Miami’s NCAA-record 58-game home winning streak ended with a 1994 loss against Washington.

“I’m a die-hard Orange Bowl fan,” Erickson said. “We won a lot of games there, and the atmosphere there made it a tough place to play. I have fond memories of it, but (Dolphin Stadium) is a beautiful facility, a nice venue to play in. I’m sure it will be good for the fans. The school, I’m sure, put a lot of thought into (the decision).”

The absence of a primary tenant will likely lead to the demise of the Orange Bowl — it has been suggested as the site of a new stadium for baseball’s Florida Marlins — leaving a hole in football history.

No venue has staged as many notable games. And it’s not even close.On the Orange Bowl field, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Clemson, Miami and Florida State were among those that won national titles.

Two Orange Bowl contests between Miami and Nebraska were especially memorable. Bernie Kosar led the Hurricanes to their first No. 1 finish by edging a mighty Cornhuskers squad in one the biggest upsets in college football history in 1984. Eleven years later, Nebraska coach Tom Osborne removed the championship monkey from his back, beating Miami in Erickson’s last game as the school’s coach.

It is where Vince Lombardi was carried off the field as Green Bay Packers coach for the final time. Where Joe Namath made good on his guarantee. Where Lynn Swann walked on air to make three spectacular catches in Super Bowl X. Where Doug Flutie threw a long bomb into the night that somehow sailed past three Hurricane defenders to settle into the arms of Gerard Phelan.

And finally, the greatest game ever played — the 1981 San Diego Chargers-Miami Dolphins AFC playoff — took place at the Orange Bowl. Find me a better game. I dare you.

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.

The Arizona State football presence in the Tribune on Tuesday is my feature on the competition for the starting cornerback spot opposite Justin Tryon and notebook detailing Monday night’s practice, the first in full pads.

Our paper also published an Associated Press story about former ASU quarterback Sam Keller, who said that transferring to Nebraska is the “best decision I ever made.”

Since I am off, coverage of the Sun Devils’ first two-a-day practices will be ably provided by Kyle Odegard. Barring any major breaking news, my next correspondence comes from here:

(Actually, it will be from my Payson motel room, where wireless Internet access is available. But you get the idea.)

For those making the trip to the Rim Country, drive safely. And pray that the rain stays away.

Perhaps I should have left my backpack and laptop computer at Kajikawa Practice Facility on Saturday night.

I committed an egregious faux pas in my notebook in today’s Tribune, misidentifying the former Arizona State and NFL player that attended the workout. It was David Fulcher, not Anthony Fulcher.

I will not say what college Anthony Fulcher — who I wrote about a lot in the late 1990s, when he starred at Phoenix Horizon High and I covered preps for the Tribune — attended, but Sun Devil fans would say that I made the worst possible screw-up.

My apologies to David, who played at ASU in 1983-85 and was a three-time All-Pro safety for the Cincinnati Bengals. Here’s his career statistics and a nice photo, which came from Fulcher’s official Web site, of him trying to get in Joe Montana’s face during Super Bowl XXIII: