Bobby Hurley officially out as Arizona State head coach

After much speculation, Arizona State has made it official: Bobby Hurley is out as the men's basketball coach.

The writing has been on the wall all season, as athletics director Graham Rossini opted to have Hurley coach into the final year of his contract last year rather than fire him or work out an extension. Hurley himself has been candid in recent weeks about the fact that his time with the Sun Devils is coming to an end.

His tenure was not without its up's and down's. Hired after two seasons at Buffalo, the latter of which saw the Bulls make the tournament, Hurley undertook a proper rebuild in Tempe. By his third season, the Sun Devils were a tournament team, though they lost in the First Four.

Arizona State followed it up the next year with another tournament bid, beating St. John's in the First Four before falling to, ironically, Buffalo in the next round. Many pundits expected Hurley to become the first coach in program history to make three consecutive NCAA Tournaments, but the COVID-19 pandemic canceled March Madness that year.

Since then, the program has languished. Two straight losing seasons put Hurley on a very hot seat, and a return to the Big Dance in 2023 took some pressure off. However, that year was followed up with a 14-18 season in the Sun Devils' last with the Pac 12.

The move to the Big 12, a significantly better basketball conference, did not make things easier.

Hurley went 13-20 in his first year in the new league, winning just four Big 12 games. His team saw improvement this year, nearly doubling their conference record and finishing 16-15 in the regular season. It was Hurley's first winning record since the last time the program made the tournament.

The final stretch of this season included upset wins over two ranked opponents, Texas Tech and Kansas, which harkened back to the glory days of Hurley's run in the desert. There once was a time when Hurley looked to be building something in Tempe, but the fallout from the pandemic and a hesitancy to embrace NIL and the transfer portal ultimately halted the program's growth.

Now, Rossini will be tasked with finding someone that can recapture that magic from the early years of Hurley's tenure and go beyond it. Just a year ago at this time, Rossini made the move to land Molly Miller for the women's basketball program.

That move paid off in spades. Miller led the Sun Devils to the second-biggest turnaround in all of women's basketball this season, and a spot in the NCAA Tournament. At the same time, she's managed to get Arizona State in the mix for plenty of high profile high school recruits.

The success of Miller, as well as the beginnings of a multi-year renovation for Desert Financial Arena, will serve as indicators of how good this job opening can be. Rossini knocked it out of the park with Miller; now he'll try to find the next stud coach.