The internet may be buzzing about Ime Udoka, but on a scale of one to holy-shit-that’s wrong, the Celtics’ coach’s suspension doesn’t even rate compared to the subterfuge that just landed recently-fired Arizona State University football coach Herm Edwards on the unemployment line.
Edwards was one of the more popular—if not successful—head coaches in the NFL during his time in pro football from 2001 through 2008, and he followed that up with a stint as a knowledgeable and liked commentator on ESPN. But his time at Arizona State was a different story, according to a new piece from the Athletic, which says that among other things, that folks inside of Edwards’ own program were willing to leak info to the team’s opps just to help hasten his exit.
Edwards, 68, finished 26-20. He posted six Top 25 wins and never lost to rival Arizona, but his time in the desert mostly will be remembered as a failed experiment, one that fractured the fan base’s confidence and caused issues within the athletic department. An opposing coach recently told The Athletic that it wasn’t hard to get intel on this season’s team because some within Arizona State athletics wanted a coaching change.
It really be your own people.
Believe it or not, Edwards had even bigger problems than people who worked for him being willing to share info and take Ls just to get him fired (which is a remarkable sentence to type). There was an NCAA investigation into the school’s recruiting practices and how much Edwards knew about any violations. There are accounts of him being either disengaged as a head coach or of there not being clarity about what he was expected to do to earn his $3.9 million annual nut, depending on who you asked. There were power struggles between staff and administrators...you know, all the normal shit that happens in big time college athletics, assuming you consider ASU, which hasn’t sniffed a Pac-12 title since most of its current players were just about in preschool, big time.