Sun Devils rise with her choices

EMPE, ARIZ. —  A little over two years ago, she was part of Mike Garrett’s senior management team, helping guide the fate of USC athletics.

Now, Lisa Love is in the big office here, the one with the sixth-floor view of Sun Devil Stadium and north to suburban Phoenix, with its buttes and camelbacks and thousands of newcomers every month.

She is the queen of an empire that, until now, has always been run by kings.

When she became the 21st athletic director at Arizona State University in July 2005, few alumni knew who she was, what she stood for, or whether she could make a difference. Now, their measurement of her has become the same as that of her ailing father, Tom.

“A few weeks ago, when I was back in Texas visiting him, instead of just saying hello, he called me close so he could whisper something to me,” Love says. “I got my ear up next to him and he says, ‘Hi, 6 and 0.’ ”

Love is looking for that term of endearment to be updated soon. If Arizona State, ranked No. 6 nationally, can pull off an upset today at No. 4 Oregon, she will be expecting, from the 81-year-old retired aerospace engineer, a whisper that gets her nickname up to 9-0.

It may not be fair that an athletic director’s worth is weighted heavily toward the records of football and basketball teams. But it’s reality.

Love, 51, is the CEO of a multimillion-dollar college sports corporation that has always been a major player in NCAA national title competition. But more consistently in sports such as baseball, track and field and softball.

Now with football in the hands of Coach Dennis Erickson and basketball with Coach Herb Sendek -- both recent Love hires -- the good-old-boy network in college sports has taken note. Love just keeps moving forward with the same kind of tough enthusiasm that she always had as the Trojans’ volleyball coach and athletic administrator.

“Arizona State is a dream opportunity, a glorious project,” she says.

She says her school had lost “spotlight value” even as it continued to succeed at a high level in minor sports, and says her goals included getting the Sun Devils “on the chessboard, on the elevator going up.”

“I do not want Arizona State to be referred to any more as a ‘sleeping giant.’ I’m fed up with that phrase.”

Love, a Texas Tech graduate with a master’s degree in sports administration, learned her craft first as a volleyball coach at Texas Arlington. She got that job at age 24 and did so well that she has already been inducted into the American Volleyball Coaches Assn. Hall of Fame. She came to USC in 1989 to coach the volleyball team, and a year later Barbara Hedges left as Mike McGee’s main assistant to become athletic director at the University of Washington.

When McGee asked Love to move into administration, she balked because she had just begun to build the Trojans’ women’s volleyball team, and they worked out a deal where she would do both.

Within a year, McGee had departed to take over the other USC, University of South Carolina. When Garrett replaced McGee, Love continued her dual coaching and administrative roles, and that eventually became full-time administration, as she and Daryl Gross, now athletic director at Syracuse, shared the heavy-lifting duties as Garrett’s deputies.

“We had 19 sports, and Daryl and I split them,” Love says. “It wasn’t along gender lines. He had some women’s, and I had some men’s.”

She also was watching, learning and gathering impressions. One such impression led directly to the hiring of Erickson, a choice that had many second-guessing because of his tendency to get restless and look elsewhere. ASU is his sixth college stop -- including two national titles and several controversial moments at the University of Miami -- and he also coached the Seattle Seahawks and the San Francisco 49ers in the pros.

“I was in Mike Garrett’s suite in the Coliseum,” Love recalls, “and we had a tough, close game going against Oregon State. Dennis was their coach.

“I remember watching his team put together a long drive near the end of a very close game. And I remember how precise it was, how well his players managed the situation and the clock. They went all the way down to about our 11-yard line, their field-goal kicker missed and that is the only way we won the game.”

Garrett took a run at Erickson before Pete Carroll took over, and when Love decided that Dirk Koetter needed to be replaced after six years at ASU and a 40-34 record, that afternoon in the Coliseum popped into her mind. Now, with an 8-0 record heading into today’s big game in Eugene, and that No. 6 national ranking, the hiring of Erickson appears to be an inspired one. “Somebody asked me the other day if Dennis Erickson had met my expectations,” Love says. “I said no. They looked at me kind of funny, like what does this woman want? Then I laughed and said that he had gone way past my expectations several games ago.”

The ASU press book lists Love as one of six female athletic directors at NCAA Division I schools with football, and Love says the gender issue, at least for her, has been nonexistent.

In the next few weeks, she will continue to visit the strongest man she knows, as he fights pancreatic cancer back in Texas. Unrealistic as it is, she wouldn’t mind a couple of new whispers from Tom Love.

One would have an especially nice ring. Hi, Ms. BCS.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com.

To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.