Greg Hansen: Bobby Hurley's Devils have yet to break through, but opportunities remain — starting Saturday

Bobby Hurley’s first victory at Arizona State, although unofficial, was his win-the-press-conference address of April 2015.

“We’re going to compete for championships, Pac-12 championships,” he said. “We want to go to the Final Four.”

I bought it. Who didn’t?

Hurley is probably the most high-profile college basketball point guard of the last 30 years, an in-your-face competitor who was so successful at Duke that the Blue Devils won back-to-back national championships and never gave an inch.

The most overused word in sports is “legend,” but Hurley was just that: a college basketball legend, the face of Mike Krzyzewski’s winning machine. Even though Hurley had been a college basketball coach for just two seasons before taking command of ASU’s buried-in-oblivion basketball program, he had taken the low-level Buffalo Bulls to their first NCAA Tournament in history.

Imagine what he could do at a Power 5 school. That had to be what the Sun Devil high command was thinking.

When I saw video of Hurley standing next to beaming ASU president Michael Crow and Sun Devil athletic director Ray Anderson on that spring day, 2015, I had few doubts that ASU had hit a round-tripper. Hurley said “we would like to take it to another level.”

I longed for the day Arizona and ASU would finish 1-2 (or 2-1) in the Pac-12, and give the league a rivalry to match that of Duke-North Carolina.

Now, in Year 8, these are the bottom-line numbers of Hurley’s ASU career:

The Sun Devils have gone 65-67 in the Pac-12.

Hurley has gone 3-11 against Arizona over the most turbulent period of the UA’’s last 40 years. Against the Pac-12’s “Big Three” — Arizona, UCLA and Oregon — the Sun Devils have gone 12-29.

ASU has won a single NCAA Tournament game. One.

Of a possible 141 weeks, ASU has been ranked in the AP Top 25 just 19 times. Arizona? 93.

Yet it is my feeling that Hurley remains the Pac-12 coach with the best chance to break through and, as Hurley said eight years ago, “take it to another level.”

A lot of that is because the Pac-12 is stocked with stuck-in-mediocrity basketball programs, with uninspiring, virtually unknown, head coaches. Over the last 7½ seasons, the Pac-12 has become a league of empty seats.

Hurley inherited a program that had averaged 5,806 fans in 2014-15. This year the Sun Devils, are averaging 6,389.

Is that another level? Not yet.

Hurley has not been the Pac-12’s Coach of the Year and he’s not exactly on a trajectory to do so this year: The Sun Devils lost their most recent game, to the San Francisco Dons, 97-60, and Hurley was ejected for yelling at the referees.

Sound familiar?

Usually, a coach gets fired because he doesn’t recruit well enough. Initially, I thought Hurley’s legacy at Duke would give him an edge, get him in the living room of Top-100 recruits coast-to-coast.

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But the five-star prospects of the last eight years have little or no memory of Hurley. After Arizona’s practice Thursday, I asked UA center Oumar Ballo what he knew about Hurley before arriving in Tucson a year ago.

“I had no idea who he was,” said Ballo.

Is it that simple? That what Duke did from 1990-93 doesn’t register with today’s college basketball players?

This much I know: Being a first-team AP All-American does not lead to coaching success 20 or 30 years later.

After significant research, I discovered that Hurley is one of just seven first-team AP All-Americans of the last 50 years to become a Division I head basketball coach. Those once-great ballplayers have not been able to duplicate their on-court success as head coaches.

Why? You tell me. Here’s the proof:

Duke guard Johnny Dawkins has won a modest 59% of his games at Stanford and Central Florida, with two NCAA Tournament victories in 14 seasons.

Kansas 1988 national player of the year Danny Manning won 45% of his games at Tulsa, Maryland and Wake Forest. He had no NCAA Tournament wins in nine seasons.

Georgetown’s intimidating center Patrick Ewing has gone 73-92 at his alma mater, with no NCAA Tournament wins.

Memphis’ Penny Hardaway has won a single NCAA Tournament game in his four years at his alma mater, part of the mid-level American Athletic Conference.

Arizona’s Damon Stoudamire, who succeeded Hurley as college basketball’s top point guard in the mid-1990s, went 71-77 in four middling years at Pacific. He’s now an assistant coach for the Boston Celtics.

Indiana’s Steve Alford, a vagabond coach who has spent a cumulative 27 years at Missouri State, Iowa, New Mexico, UCLA and Nevada, has never advanced past the Sweet 16 and didn’t win a conference championship in a combined 14 years in the Big Ten and Pac-12.

It’s not like those seven first-team All-Americans haven’t given coaching their full effort. When Stoudamire was an Arizona assistant coach in 2013-14, Pac-12 Freshman of the Year Aaron Gordon was impressed by Stoudamire’s coaching chops.

“He understands the game of basketball better than anyone I have ever met in my life,” Gordon said in 2018. “He understands the game so well and from a lot of different aspects — from the bigs to the guards. He understands the mentalities of basketball players.”

To Stoudamire’s credit, he coached at the more challenging school, Pacific, than the opportunities given Alford, Ewing, Dawkins, Manning, Hardaway and Hurley. Further, Alford is the only first-team AP All-American of the last 50 years to coach at a blue-blood school, UCLA.

Blessed with the richest recruiting turf in the Pac-12, Alford blew it. He was fired at mid-season, 2018, with a 7-6 record.

Now comes Bobby Hurley, 51. Can he break the trend and put ASU on the basketball map?

Put it this way: If his Sun Devils beat No. 5 Arizona on Saturday, Hurley’s president, athletic director and long-suffering fan base won’t care that it has taken him almost eight years to break through.

Sun Devil students will storm the court and the previous seven seasons in Tempe will be forgotten.