Dave Heeke and Cedric Dempsey sat together in the athletic director’s suite during Arizona’s rousing victory over San Diego State last week, kindred spirits who could share stories for hours about the dark side of Arizona’s athletic history.
The Albion College graduates — the same alma mater of Arizona’s first athletic director, Pop McKale — have witnessed the UA athletic department at its lowest level.
Dempsey became Arizona’s AD in 1983 when the Wildcats’ basketball team went 4-24, the football program was serving an NCAA probation and the school didn’t have two nickels to rub together.
Ten years later, Dempsey was widely viewed as the top AD in the country, hired away to be the executive director of the NCAA.
Heeke has seen worse, if that’s possible. His football program went 1-23 between the second half of 2019 and the end of 2021. The pandemic ravaged the department’s finances, creating a $45 million deficit. His basketball program has been under investigation for five years, a reputation-wrecking period that led FBI agents to knock on the door of former coach Sean Miller.
“It has worn on all of us,” Heeke says. “It’s been a long, hard road.”
Many other ADs would’ve been overwhelmed by the mess Heeke inherited when he arrived on campus in April 2017, but much like Dempsey in the 1980s, he has been a problem solver.
As he and the 90-year-old Dempsey celebrated Arizona’s blowout victory at Snapdragon Stadium, Heeke described the feeling in a text message this way:
“It felt good. Love the vibe. Head down. Hard work. Care about people. Good things happen.”
I’m not suggesting Heeke is on a Dempsey-type trajectory that will place him among the elite ADs in college athletics, but you can make a strong case that he has performed so well under extraordinarily negative circumstances that he could be considered the Pac-12’s most accomplished AD.
He is all aboard the positivity train, as are his two bright hires, Jedd Fisch and Tommy Lloyd, who have helped restore good vibes to the Tucson sports community.
A few days ago, Heeke began a 30-minute conversation not about the shock and awe of USC and UCLA abandonment of the Pac-12, or about the tormenting unrest in college athletics, but about becoming a grandfather for the first time.
Ryan and Merisa Heeke recently became parents of Van, now 4 months old.
“I guess I’m not 38 years old anymore,” Heeke said with a laugh.
But his challenging five years at Arizona might seem more like 38.
“This hasn’t been the easiest five five years, but the next five years may see even more shakeup,” he says. “I’m not saying it’ll all be bad; hopefully we can stabilize things and keep our guiding principles in alignment. We’ve lost so much control to outside stakeholders; this run for money has taken so much out of the hands of athletic directors. I don’t think it’s healthy.”
This is no rookie. It became apparent during crisis upon crisis in the UA athletic department that Heeke was prepared for whatever popped up, good or bad. Mostly bad.
His formative years in college athletics were anything but stable. In his first eight years at Oregon, Heeke worked under four athletic directors: Bill Byrne, Rich Brooks, Dan Williams and Bill Moos. It was before Nike money changed the future of the UO athletic department, in effect, becoming a model for the next 25 years.
The collegiate model is so 1990s. Today, money rules.
“I get it,” Heeke says, “but I don’t think it’s healthy. I think we’ve lost touch with the soul of college athletics.
“In a global sense, college athletics have become more business oriented, a pro model, more of a business concept. Inside higher education, those elements don’t align. That’s what we’re working with now.”
Five or 10 years from now, it’s possible that Arizona won’t be part of what is now Power Five football. It’s more and more likely that the nation’s top 25 or 30 football programs will break away and play their “amateur” version of the NFL. Heeke is frank, saying he is uncertain where Arizona will be “when the music stops.”
“This used to be a profession with a lot of friendships,” he says.. “But that has really broken down. It’s really unfortunate.”
Strictly on wins and losses, Arizona finished 35th in the Learfield Athletic Director’s Cup standings last year, the overall measure of an athletic department’s success in all sports. That’s a long way from the UA’s steady Top 10 finishes from 1995-2010, the golden era of Arizona sports, but it still resides in the top neighborhood of college athletics.
In overall sports rankings, the Wildcats are ahead of football-blessed powers Clemson, Michigan State, Iowa, Penn State and Baylor, and are within a few percentage points of Top 25 finishers Auburn, Oregon, Wisconsin and Texas A&M.
Indeed, Arizona holds its own in almost all sports against all Power Five schools. That’s not bad following the worst four years of UA football since the 1950s, a period in which the Wildcats went 10-31 and had the lowest average attendance at Arizona Stadium since 1972.
Sure, much can be blamed on Heeke’s hiring of former football coach Kevin Sumlin. There’s no avoiding that. But across the Pac-12, almost every school has botched the hiring of a coach in the last decade. Washington hired Jimmy Lake, Washington State blew it on Nick Rolovich, USC has had multiple failed hires, Oregon State and Oregon blundered with the hirings of Gary Andersen and Mark Helfrich, respectively.
This time, Heeke appears to have found the right man, Fisch, to restore the UA football’s reputation.
Fisch deserves credit for one of the master roster rebuilds and culture facelifts in modern Pac-12 football history. His football IQ is off the charts, his salesmanship and work ethic match any Arizona coach of the last 50 years. Plus, he restored fun to UA football.
Yes, Fisch is 2-11 overall, but the foundation has been laid.
Heeke now has more time to devote to the overwhelming changes in college athletics, from Name, Image and Likeness to the transfer portal to fundraising to a rebuild of the once-formidable swimming program to the welfare of more than 500 athletes.
“We walk the halls with hundreds of student-athletes every day,” he says. “We’re trying to do the right thing for them, and that doesn’t get talked about enough anymore.
“We’ve got to make sure we don’t lose our core values, the soul, of what this is all about.”
When the UA softball team clinched a berth in the Women’s College World Series last spring, Heeke watched an impromptu celebration as every softball player and coach jumped into the hotel swimming pool.
He kicked off his shoes, threw off his hat, sprinted 10 yards and plunged into the water.
When he came up for air, he was smiling, a telling snapshot of his first five years at Arizona.
