From new uniforms, to a new football coach, to a new athletic director, the changes within the ASU athletic department keep coming.
Steve Patterson was announced as the Sun Devils’ new athletics director Wednesday morning, replacing Lisa Love after seven years at the helm of ASU athletics.
Although Love found success during her stint at ASU, the football and men’s basketball programs combined for 16 wins in 2011-12, and a lot of the blame was thrown in Love’s direction.
A change in leadership will likely please the fan base and is exactly what ASU needed to do.
“Lisa Love achieved what we asked her to achieve and here we are seeking to achieve more and wanting to achieve more,” ASU President Michael Crow said.
Patterson, who has spent the majority of his career on the business end of sports, will likely perform his new duties with a more financially focused mindset. Ultimately, sports are a business and if ASU wants to achieve “more,” they need an increase of funds.
Crow and Patterson believe the school needs to earn $100 million a year to operate. The school has not been earning that much in recent years, but Patterson’s mindset coupled with his experience may help.
Everyone either involved with, or rooting for, ASU athletics wants to see the football team in the Rose Bowl and the basketball team dancing in March, but neither of them has happened since 2009.
Prior to the start of the 2011 football season, everyone was talking about the team’s “potential.” There were glimpses of the team’s true talent throughout the season, but the squad was never really able to harness their potential and achieve the expected level of success.
The “It’s Time” campaign needed a major program to be successful in its first year. Football’s early success delighted the ASU fan base, but a five-game losing streak at the end of the season deflated the excitement. Then, before it even started, men’s basketball lost its top recruit for the season and finished with only 10 victories. Baseball is banned from the postseason this year, leaving softball as the only ASU program to represent the new design on a national scale. “It’s Time” quickly turned into a joke among students.
“We need to be consistently competitive,” Patterson said. “We need to (compete) for national championships and while we do it, we need to have some fun out there, and I think we’ve missed a bit of that with some of the teams we had this year.”
Realizing potential is easy but bringing it out and building upon it can be difficult. Patterson acknowledges the potential with ASU athletics, but needs to find a way to unleash it.
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