Arizona State Hires Todd Graham, Who Leaves Pitt After 311 Days On Job

After about a week of silence, Todd Graham is spoke out about his controversial departure from Pitt in an interview with CBS Sports’ Dennis Dodd. Graham abruptly resigned as the Panthers head coach last week, hopping a plane and heading to Tempe to take the Arizona State head coaching job. It was a move that left his former players, and Pitt fans, jilted and angry.

Graham’s recent comments probably aren’t helping, and it’s difficult to buy what he’s selling. He says he stepped way out on a limb when he resigned from Pitt, noting that he had no assurances Arizona State would hire him. All of this should probably be met with an eye-roll.

The way their head coaches tend to stick around for like 1,700 Graham years* before leaving town. Drives him crazy to see so much time invested in just one city.

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So how much more is he making at ASU than he was at Pitt? As Panthers receiver Cam Saddler shares in an anecdote, Graham’s not banking any more in Tempe than he was before:

Whatever it is that motivates Graham’s employment decisions, it’s apparently not money? A man of mystery who makes one want to trot out all of the Dark Knight quotes.

New Arizona State coach Todd Graham has built himself up a reputation, even before leaving Pitt after 11ish months on the job. There’s the Todd Graham’s Inferno incident, and here’s Pat Forde:

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Arizona State made the surprising move to hire Todd Graham. Now it’s time for Graham to get out and recruit.

SB Nation’s House Of Sparky, however, sees a lot of hope with this class:

And once again, new news trumps last week’s news. This “Projecting...” series was supposed to include the new offenses at Arizona State, Kansas, etc., but for the second straight day a surprising hire cut in line. Whereas Arkansas State’s hire of Gus Malzahn was surprising from a “He took a big pay cut a year after passing up a huge raise to coach Vanderbilt” standpoint, Arizona State’s hire of Todd Graham was surprising more from an “I cannot believe they would tempt karma like this” perspective.

Graham now takes on his fourth head coaching job in six seasons (he spent one year at Rice, four years at Tulsa, one year at Pitt), broke up with his players via forwarded text message, and introduced himself to Tempe with basically a Mad Libs version of last year’s introduction-to-Pittsburgh speech. He has, to say the least, not made the most wonderful impression with his actions of the last 24 hours, and he has made ASU’s last vagabond coach (Dennis Erickson also had one-year coaching tenures at Wyoming and Idaho and a two-year tenure at Washington State) look like a model of loyalty and deep roots.

Todd Graham had a flight to catch and a press conference to get to on Wednesday morning, resulting in a hastily assembled text message to his players at Pitt and a somewhat messy departure. It was just under a year ago that Graham took the Pitt job, but it didn’t take him long to flee town for the head coaching position at Arizona State. And just hours after Graham resigned from Pitt, he was introduced as the Sun Devils’ next head coach at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon.

Graham was the only person offered the job, university president Michael Crow said, hoping to dispel some of the ‘myths’ of the Sun Devils’ coaching search. Athletic director Lisa Love also felt Graham would treat Arizona State as a destination, not another jumping off point as he hopes between jobs. The Sun Devils head coaching job will be Graham’s fourth in the last six years, though Love was confident he will be a long-term fit.

Todd Graham bolted out the door and hopped a plane to Arizona State on Wednesday morning, leaving players and fans at Pitt jilted. Just one season after he took the Pitt job, Graham got a case of the wandering eyes and accepted the head coaching position with the Sun Devils in a move that seemed to come out of left field, making for an interesting morning.

After the jump, a few of the highlights from his timeline.

The things football coaches do when hopping on the carousel and hopping off at a more lucrative job are rarely honorable, and usually leave at least some people left in the coach’s wake feeling betrayed and used. Few players will be more justified in that anger than the Pittsburgh players who heard that their coach, Todd Graham, was leaving for Arizona State via a text message Graham sent to his director of football operations to forward to the team.

The text of that text message, via the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Pittsburgh coach Todd Graham will head west to become the new head coach of Arizona State, according to Yahoo! Sports’ Pat Forde. Graham will replace fired ASU coach Dennis Erickson.

Graham was hired by Pittsburgh in January after the Panthers’ previous choice to replace Dave Wannstedt, former Miami of Ohio coach Mike Haywood, was arrested on domestic violence charges just two weeks after being hired by Pitt. Prior to his one year in Pittsburgh, Graham had been Tulsa’s head coach from 2006 to 2010, and Rice’s head coach in 2005.

The deal bumps Whittingham’s salary to $2 million per year, which would rank him fourth in the Pac-12 according to last year’s figures, though that’s before big deals for Mike Leach and Rich Rodriguez.

Penn State rolls on amid an identity crisis, while ASU perhaps turns to offensive coordinator Noel Mazzone.

His new deal, according to the report, will pay him around $2 million per year, a raise from his $1.7 million mark (and a full half-mill more than Arizona State was paying Dennis Erickson). The deal’s been agreed to for some time now, making the latest rush of rumors all the more fruitless.

In response to the contract news, Utes blog Block U has taken it down a notch to WHITCON 4:

Those are the only major jobs left vacant at the moment. The ASU gig would seem to be something of a lateral move, though, now that both are Pac-12 schools. This year, Utah paid Whittingham more money than ASU paid Dennis Erickson.

Whittingham has coached with the Utes since 1994, since 2005 as head coach. He’s piloted Utah to a 65-25 record in the Mountain West and Pac-12, two BCS bowl wins, eight straight bowl bids, and a near miss of a division title in the program’s first Pac-12 season.

Thorough -- yes, definitely.

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SMU’s June Jones will not become the next head coach at Arizona State, according to the school’s COO.

Things changed quickly between the school and Jones, according to the Arizona Republic.

The big holdup seems to have come from ASU boosters, who apparently feel as though Jones is Dennis Erickson 2.0. Arizona State boosters likely want to trend young and go with a newer face to the college football coaching game instead of hiring older, more established candidates on the downside of their career.

And so, it’s back to the drawing board for the Sun Devils, who can’t waste too much time before signing day looms any closer. As for Jones, it’s going to make a very awkward discussion with his bosses at SMU, especially now that the Mustangs are about to join the Big East.

June Jones is either staying at SMU or still being considered by Arizona State, according to a pair of somewhat conflicting reports. Whether or not that his return to SMU would have been his preference, anyway was something less than clear, as reports had previously surfaced that Jones was not very popular among Sun Devils boosters.

If Jones is still being considered by the Sun Devils, it would seem to say more their ability to land a bigger name coach than about their love of the one-time Atlanta Falcons coach. Among the coaches they have reportedly considered are Jim Mora Jr., Southern Miss coach Larry Fedora, Baylor coach Art Briles and Houston coach Kevin Sumlin.

So, the same list as every other school, pretty much. Seeing Briles’ name is a nice touch.

Jones is an unconventional candidate, though it’s surprising to hear of resistance. He’s turned around Hawaii and SMU in his lengthy college coaching career. He’s not guaranteed to win in the Pac-12, but there does seem to be some sort of stigma about his specific offensive system. Because the Pac-12 is so cautious about unconventional offenses, apparently.

His run ‘n’ shoot attack would fit right in with the new Pac-12, which has added scorers Mike Leach and Rich Rodriguez to offensive guru Chip Kelly, but it would actually mean an interesting change of pace. Though SMU ranks highly in passing yards, they rank only No. 93 in total offensive plays.

Sumlin led the Cougars to a 12-0 record this season and Houston, with a win in the Conference USA Championship game, is in position for its first BCS Bowl invitation. Houston is 35-23 in four seasons under Sumlin and his current team lead the nation in total offense (613.3 yards per game), scoring (52.7 points per game) and passing yards (449.7 per game).

The list, as has been reported, is pretty much everybody Ole Miss wants plus everybody Arizona State wants. See for yourself! First up, the Star-Telegram:

A&M is a better job than ASU is, plus Sumlin already knows the school and the area. If he’s offered the chance to coach in the SEC, that’s the move. Strong, for his part, has long wanted to become a SEC head coach.

Interest on ASU’s part in Sumlin has been reported since earlier in the week, so there could at least be something there. It would be surprising if the Sun Devils weren’t interested, since Sumlin’s just about the hottest coaching prospect still available.

Get ready for Sumlin to be asked whether he’s been offered and to deny that he’s been offered. The natural order of things is intact.