When surveying the six-year festival of dysfunction that has enveloped Arizona State football, it’s tempting to start with this latest act, in which the school nukes itself with a bowl ban five days before the season opener. That news was delivered Sunday morning to an unsuspecting team, and it comes at a time when the NCAA is all but eliminating postseason bans.
But we’ll get to that stunning and suspicious decision in a few paragraphs. First, let’s review this theater of the absurd one act at a time, to see how it reached a clownish climax Sunday. Let’s begin when a onetime agent and his former client went into business together.
On Dec. 3, 2017, athletic director Ray Anderson (the onetime agent) hired Herm Edwards (his former client) to be the Sun Devils’ football coach at the spritely age of 63. The weird move was poorly received at the time—and, after some moderate early success, we can now say, in hindsight, that it was a raging disaster.
