Love made the right call
Judging from her column Tuesday, Laura Thorson clearly doesn't understand football.
When a coach has two wins in six years against ranked opponents and puts up a goose egg on wins in California in the same time period, beating your rival is a moot point.
So what if Dirk Koetter took us to a bowl game for the third straight season? It was also the sixth straight season Arizona State football has had at least three losses under Koetter.
The best record Koetter had in the Pac-10 in his six years here was 5-3. That is a very mediocre record. If you like 5-3 conference records, then go root for Boston College.
If 7-5 and a fourth place finish in the Pac-10 year in and year out is good enough for you, then please, transfer to Kentucky, where 7-5 is like winning the national championship (see 2006).
You have to look at the big picture. Koetter was an up-and-coming coach who inherited a program that was just four years removed from a 10-1 season and a Rose Bowl berth.
The program hasn't ascended to greatness since then and has remained merely mediocre under his watch, including having the 114th-ranked defense in 2005.
OK fine, so Arizona State doesn't quite have the football traditions of USC or Michigan, but they can definitely do better and are better than 7-5 each year.
If I remember correctly, John Robinson had a very similar tenure as Koetter when Robinson was at USC: 7-5 every year, 9-3 at best. They fired him.
Larry Coker went 58-15 at Miami and got fired.
So why would Arizona State, which is the second largest school in the nation, hold itself to less of a standard? If six years and three of his own recruiting classes isn't long enough to turn a program around, then nothing is.
Lisa Love made the right decision. The program wasn't going anywhere. The fans weren't supporting the team.
Koetter was getting out-recruited by UA every year. If you want to compete with the USCs and Michigans of the world, you have to upgrade from Koetter.
Going to the Mickey Mouse bowl every year against some nobody opponent doesn't reflect well on the program, especially one that has gone to two previous Rose Bowls.
A change had to be made.
Todd Weber
JUNIOR
Blame student government for meal-plan woes
In response to James Quinn's letter in Tuesday's State Press, the author is absolutely right to complain about the mandatory meal plan.
Perhaps the only area where I disagree with him is what he chooses to complain about.
Sure, the extended hours never happened and the food options are severely limited. But the biggest shame in all of this is how this meal plan came to be in the first place.
While student government is supposed to be standing up for student interests (i.e., opposing mandatory fees), its own leaders were President Crow's most militant supporters when it came to imposing the mandatory meal plan.
The likes of Aimee Gipper (the would-be Undergraduate Student Government vice president who chaired the meal plan committee) and Liz Simonhoff (the current vice president) both supported the administration's meal-plan proposal, saying it was in the "best interests" of the students.
As if they know better than me how to manage my finances.
And their reward for imposing this fee on our backs? One becomes homecoming queen and the other gets re-elected vice president.
That's the real injustice.
So you see, it's never been about the meal plan's crappy food and failed service.
It's about a spineless student government that gets rewarded for rubberstamping Crow at our expense. And we can thank Gipper and Simonhoff for that.
Chris Peterson
SENIOR
