Arizona State’s latest fundraising efforts highlight fan apathy for men’s basketball
Arizona State’s decision to retain Bobby Hurley as their men’s basketball head coach into next season – currently the final year of Hurley’s contract – was met with skepticism, to say the least.
Those sentiments took an even sharper nosedive after the loss of Joson Sanon to the transfer portal and losing out on 5-star recruit Koa Peat to rival Arizona.
The rapidly waning fan interest was made appallingly clear, though, in a recent fundraising competition that the Sun Devil athletics department just wrapped up. Arizona State’s donation arm, the Sun Devil Club, recently concluded their third annual Back Your Devils week, which calls on donations to various sports programs and tracks them against each other.
The final results were, to put it mildly, not positive for men’s basketball:
Hurley’s program didn’t even make the top 10 of programs for the university. They were surpassed by several non-revenue Olympic sports, including water polo and both men’s and women’s swimming, the latter two of which just won the Big 12 championship.
All told, men’s basketball finished the fundraising challenge with $5,925 raised from 22 total donations. The donation figure ranked 16th among Sun Devil athletics programs, well behind football and baseball and even falling behind hockey and women’s lacrosse.
In terms of total dollars pulled in, men’s basketball ranked 15th, just ahead of softball but behind several other non-revenue sports that just don’t generate as much excitement in a typical year as basketball does.
For comparison’s sake, women’s basketball finished with $6,345 on 25 total donations, both ranking ahead of men’s basketball. The program saw a sudden surge in donations with the hiring of Molly Miller as the new head coach, whose addition was announced with just three days left to go in the Back Your Devils week challenge.
While it’s good news that Arizona State is seeing so many donations roll in for their non-revenue sports – all told, they raised $313,171 across all 26 sports – the fact that men’s basketball was effectively reduced to an also-ran in the competition is a dark omen for the program under Hurley.
Fan apathy is reaching an all-time high right now, evidenced by the fact that nobody wanted to give to men’s basketball on the level of the university’s other flagship programs. Given that Hurley’s retention was at least partially motivated by a sudden groundswell of support from several prominent basketball boosters, this most recent development can only be viewed as a death knell for the embatled coach.
