College sports are an essential part of our culture. Every season thousands of students and alumni gather around the TV and purchase tickets to view their favorite team in action. This tradition holds the same for ASU.
The Sun Devils were off to a great start this football season with monumental wins over Missouri and USC among others.
However, after the homecoming game, ASU suffered a devastating four-game losing streak, which caused a huge uproar amongst Sun Devil fans everywhere.
Earlier in the season the Sun Devils were expected to win the Pac-12 South, but they didn’t.
Fans have seemed to reach a general consensus that the football team’s recent failure is due to head coach Dennis Erickson.
At Friday’s game against California some students in the student section were shown holding signs that said, “Fire DE”.
Some students are even trying to get the hashtags “#FireDennisErickson” and “#FireErickson” to become trending Twitter topics in the Phoenix area. Erickson has definitely become a social pariah.
Erickson has coached the Sun Devils for five years, but Monday the decision to let Erickson go was made public.
“We love Coach E,” senior defensive tackle Bo Moos told The State Press. “Like I said before, obviously the blame is ultimately going to be put on him, but we don't feel like it should be. If that ends up being the case, then I'm just glad that this is my last year, because I wouldn't want to play for anyone else."
No one wanted to fire Erickson when ASU was winning games left and right. Erickson was doing just fine. Now that the team isn’t doing so well, everyone wants to blame the coach.
It seems that whenever a team does poorly, the coach is always at fault. Case in point: UA just recently replaced their head coach before the season was even over.
While Erickson may be to blame for the team’s recent performance, there is no way that he is the only one at fault. Let’s not forget that the players are the ones out there on the field, and not the coach.
While Erickson is responsible for the plays during the game and motivating the team, does he really need to be fired? The team’s recent misfortune may be due to other underlying factors such as the players or other coaches. In fact, this may just be a bad time for the team.
Since there is no way to prove who is at fault for the Sun Devils’ gradual decline in performance, it seems Erickson took the blame.
Let’s just hope that next season our football team will be in it to win it.
Reach the columnist at agales@asu.edu Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.
