Arizona State has just announced that its Vice President for University Athletics, Ray Anderson, has tendered his resignation which is effective immediately. Ray Anderson will remain at ASU as a professor of practice in the sports law and business program in the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law. Jim Rund will serve as interim AD.

Ray Anderson's hire of his long time friend and one-time client, Herm Edwards as ASU's football head coach flowing the 2017 season is when Anderson's tenure took a sharp turn south. It was a move that reeked of nepotism and was seemingly criticized not only locally but nationally.

Not only did Edwards produce a pedestrian 26-20 record, which also included zero division/conference titles and a 1-2 bowl record, but the fact that multiple allegations of recruiting violations, mainly during the COVID-19 recruiting dead period that took place, have placed a huge dark cloud on the program ever since that summer of 2021. The claims that there wasn't enough of a paper trail to dismiss Edwards during that year are curious at best since four of his assistants were essentially shown the door due to the investigation's findings.

Last year we learned from an athletic department source that in the spring of 2022, Edwards, who was fatigued by the ongoing NCAA investigation, seeing his roster being depleted not only by a handful of assistant coaches but also by numerous talented players utilizing the transfer portal, offered Anderson his resignation at that time.

The fact that Anderson convinced Edwards to stay, aside from the obvious coddling of his buddy, was also done due to the reason that it would have been impossible to even attempt and hire a suitable replacement head coach to lead the program, with just months prior to the season's kickoff. Nonetheless, that session resulted in arguably the worst campaign in the program's history, a 3-9 mark. Anderson was also responsible for a $4.4 million buy putout when Edwards and ASU parted ways just three games into the 2022 season.

Furthermore, Anderson wasn't compelled to self-impose a postseason ban ahead of a season when it was clear it was going nowhere fast. Instead, he saddled first-year head coach Kenny Dillingham with that ban less than a week before the 2023 season opener.

In a 2018 interview with SBNation, Anderson said that he would "hand the keys back to the (ASU) president." If the Herm Edwards hire would have failed. Over a year after Edwards departed the program, Anderson finally followed on his word.