Bordow: What if Erickson had chosen USC?

Valley sports fans are painfully familiar with the what-if game. What if Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw hadn’t been suspended for Game 5 of the Suns-San Antonio Spurs playoff series last season?

What if the Cardinals had held onto Lomas Brown, Larry Centers and Jamir Miller after the 1998 season?

What if Jerry Colangelo had won the coin toss for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar?

But there’s a flip side to the anguish, too.

What if Dennis Erickson had taken the USC job in 2000?

He wouldn’t be on Arizona State’s sideline Thursday night, that’s for sure. And without him, who knows if the Sun Devils are in the front of the line for a third Rose Bowl appearance?

It’s surprising, in retrospect, that Erickson didn’t bolt for USC when athletic director Mike Garrett came calling after he fired Paul Hackett.

Erickson had just done the impossible at Oregon State, leading the Beavers to a Fiesta Bowl appearance and a 41-9 shellacking of thought-to-be-mighty Notre Dame.

There were no more mountains to climb at OSU. The Beavers weren’t going to be national championship contenders every year. More than likely, given their lack of facilities and resources, they’d be a fringe player in the Pac-10, having a good season here and there between longer bouts of mediocrity.

USC, on the other hand, was USC.

Hackett may have brought the Trojans back to earth — his three-year record at USC was 19-18 — but it wouldn’t take long for the right coach to reassert their place in college football’s hierarchy.

Garrett thought Erickson was that coach. He offered him the job and a reported five-year, $7.2 million deal only to be surprised when Erickson turned it down.

There was some speculation that Erickson and the rest of his coaching staff preferred the slower pace of Corvallis. Ore., to the traffic jams of Los Angeles.

That was part of it. Erickson also liked the job he had.

“It had nothing to do obviously with USC,” Erickson said recently. “You have one of the great storied programs of all time there. But we had things going there (at Oregon State). We had been to the Fiesta Bowl. I felt at the time that’s what I was going to do.”

Erickson did stay in Corvallis two more seasons. The Beavers went 5-6 in 2001 and 8-5 in 2002. But then he made what he still calls today the stupidest move of his coaching career.

He accepted the San Francisco 49ers job, anxious to prove that his previous stint in the play-for-pay league — he was 31-33 in four seasons as Seattle’s head coach — was an aberration.

Instead, he quickly discovered he should have either stayed at Oregon State or replaced Hackett at USC.

“I had a lot of thoughts in the two years I was with San Francisco,” Erickson said. “I was thinking of the Pop Warner team I could have coached.

“They hired the right guy, obviously. Pete’s done a great job.”

It’s funny how things work out.

Erickson doesn’t take the college football job he should have and accepts an NFL offer he should have been smart enough to turn down.

And, in the end, it’s Arizona State that wins.