I’m buying. I think that’s the only context where it makes sense to do the mid-season firing of a natty winning coach. And seems to have been managed very well, if that is the case.
Buy / Sell: The BOC deal was 99% done before we fired Lemonis
- Thread starter Perd Hapley
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It’s funny that you ask this because this exact thought crossed my mind for the first time while listening to T&L this morning.
I’m a big believer in taking the rip off the bandaid approach when something isn’t working, but the timing of the Lemonis firing has always been weird. Doing it with a team that was still fighting for a postseason birth was weirder. Then, doing it so that we could hand the reigns over to a guy that clearly wasn’t going to be our next head coach pushed it over the top.
For me, this seems eerily similar to the Howland situation, and I’m convinced that Selmon has been very confident in our ability to land O’Connor for awhile now
I’m a big believer in taking the rip off the bandaid approach when something isn’t working, but the timing of the Lemonis firing has always been weird. Doing it with a team that was still fighting for a postseason birth was weirder. Then, doing it so that we could hand the reigns over to a guy that clearly wasn’t going to be our next head coach pushed it over the top.
For me, this seems eerily similar to the Howland situation, and I’m convinced that Selmon has been very confident in our ability to land O’Connor for awhile now
Buy. Not necessarily 99%, but I think we pretty much knew who we were hiring barring something unforeseen.
I think they had gauged interested. No way it was a done deal.
I was a proponent of the mid-season firing. But I think the rationale behind actually doing it was that we knew there was an easier stretch of schedule coming up, we knew a firing was needed, and we didn't want to risk Lemonis winning a couple of series and making the inevitable firing more difficult.
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Percentage was arbitrary.
But I think we likely had a signed MOU in hand before we announced the ouster of Lemonis, and likely made the decision to make the move after the UF series loss at home….if not earlier. Legally, a signed MOU is as far as you can possibly get with a candidate without firing the incumbent.
Sell. Early Last week there was reporting that he was probably staying at Virginia. Apparently we had to come back with a really strong counter offer to lock him in.
Either his agent sent a filler out or word got out he was not happy with UV job and possibly helped in the decision to fire Lemonis when he did.
Strongly disagree. I think the decision was made a lot earlier than it was communicated. If you remember back about 6 weeks ago, we were in a spot where we had just surprisingly taken 2 of 3 on the road against Alabama, seemed to be playing better baseball, and if we could have gone 4-2 or better in the Florida and Auburn series, we still had a path to 17-18 wins and a possible host site if we did that.
Florida showed up in Starkville sporting an SEC record of 1-11 against teams not named Missouri, and many thought a sweep of them was possible or even likely based on where both teams were at. Instead, what happens? We lose 2 of 3 at home to that team, then we drop the Governor’s Cup that Tuesday.
I stood by Lemonis far longer than most, and even I knew he was done after that Florida series. I refuse to believe that the guys running things didn’t come to the same conclusion by that time, if not before. There’s simply no way that we fired him after the Auburn series with no plan in place whatsoever. We had a very high degree of confidence on at least O’Conner (if not O’Conner and some others as well) before we made the move.
Sell. 3 or so weeks ago he practically said he wasn’t interested. After not making tournament is when his tone started to publicly change about the difficulty inherent in not coaching in the SEC. Plus I think he only recently got to taste our Walmart potato salad.
I truly think he was frustrated having to fight for resources despite his resume and not making the tournament solidified what he was seeing in the shift of modern CBB.
We had just lost 5 of our last 7 games, we wouldn't have gone to the post season had we not fired him, and I wasn't seeing much "fighting" from that team.
As for Parker, he was 11-4 once he took over, pretty "over the top" huh? You don't "hand the reigns over permanently to a guy that's got only 5 seasons of being a position coach at 2 schools and say "here's a multi million dollar program for you", now go figure out how to recruit, sign, and retain athletes; conduct camps; smooze alumni; create budgets and spend within that budget; negotiate uniforms and equipment; etc etc etc
Buy. I think to be a good AD you always have feelers out to multiple candidates well before the time comes to make decisions.
After the resignation or termination of said position, then the ability to fly under radar is increasingly more difficult.
After the resignation or termination of said position, then the ability to fly under radar is increasingly more difficult.
Sell. There were feelers put out in the back channels before Lem was let go, but no guarantee of someone accepting the job let alone a home run hire. A lot of interest in the job this time around from some great coaches. Personally I think we got the best coach we could've hired at least on paper.
I already answered, see above**
Good question, but I will say this....
I think the decision to fire Lemonis was at least in part due to thinking that the aTm job would be opening. I think Selmon at the very least understood that he needed to get a jump on them, if they were going to be looking for a coach. And I wouldn't be shocked to know that aTm decided not to fire their coach because we already had BOC all but locked up.
So, I guess I would be a sell on having him locked up before we fired Lemonis, but buy in that we had him locked down before aTm could make a decision.
I think the decision to fire Lemonis was at least in part due to thinking that the aTm job would be opening. I think Selmon at the very least understood that he needed to get a jump on them, if they were going to be looking for a coach. And I wouldn't be shocked to know that aTm decided not to fire their coach because we already had BOC all but locked up.
So, I guess I would be a sell on having him locked up before we fired Lemonis, but buy in that we had him locked down before aTm could make a decision.
Certainly not impossible, but I think we probably just had good feedback before pulling the trigger. I don't know how you differentiate between "of course my client would be interested (in using an offer from you to get a raise where he is)" and "of course my client is interested in taking the job" in agent-speak, but I think that most ADs not named John Cohen are able to figure it out and know whether it's safe to pull the trigger.
Not sure where you’re going with this. Nobody disputes that, but it has nothing to do with why you fire him midseason. That’s a difficult move to make without a plan in place of some type.
If selmon is competent, he had his list of potential replacements before the season. He probably started getting feedback from agents after the first couple of sec series. And I’m guessing at that point, they started game planning different scenarios to determine if and when they’d pull the trigger. Surely they looked at that soft end of the season schedule and recognized the possibility of the team getting hot and the benefits of firing before he had the chance to finish “on a hot streak” if they decided he needed to be fired.
all just guesswork, but I would assume that drove the midseason firing. I don’t think they would have pulled the trigger without getting good feedback from agents, but i would hope it was part of the process and they didn’t jumpstart the process because they got word that BOC was looking to move.
But selmon did hire Lenny without a plan for him to get experience on the other side of the ball, so I may be giving him too much credit and maybe we were going to 17 up this process and then just stumbled into this.
Sell. As others have said I think Selmon had put feelers out to see who might be interested but I don’t think BOC was a lock.
Sell, but it was still fast. This thing was pretty well done within a couple weeks after we cut Lemonhead loose. Had to warm some cold feet last week or so but that's about it IMO.
I agree with most of this, but I just don’t follow the “soft end of the season” narrative. First off, the only thing soft about it was Missouri, and that series did nothing for our postseason chances. We had to sweep just to not fall back in the RPI. We didn’t actually gain anything seeding-wise from those wins. The other 2 teams were regional teams, with one of them hosting. And that one that hosted had already beaten us in a midweek game. Florida at home was about as soft as it gets, and they still beat us 2 out of 3.
I also just don’t understand the “don’t let him win a bunch of games and then make it harder to fire him!” mantra, anyway. IF he won all those games, we wouldn’t need to fire him. In some alternate timeline, if he finished 16-14 in the SEC and got us to the Super Regionals, he’d have gotten another year….no question, and that would have probably been the right move under the circumstances if we didn’t have really high confidence in a very high level replacement.
It seems we reached a point where it was unanimous that the potential replacements we had available far outweighed any need to extend any more rope to Lemonis. Because the data available did not indicate at all that we had any chance of the type of finish above, anyways.
I'll put it this way....
If Selmon (a great man whom I would never ever- and did never ever speak negatively about - or constantly criticize on certain online fan boy forums - daily) was not already in the middle of an unofficial in-house coaching search before the SEC season started, then we need to rethink how flawless of an AD he is.
But other than that, I'm just glad I wasn't one of those MSU fans questioning his experience and loyalty and all that. No sir, not me.
If Selmon (a great man whom I would never ever- and did never ever speak negatively about - or constantly criticize on certain online fan boy forums - daily) was not already in the middle of an unofficial in-house coaching search before the SEC season started, then we need to rethink how flawless of an AD he is.
But other than that, I'm just glad I wasn't one of those MSU fans questioning his experience and loyalty and all that. No sir, not me.
Selmon made two huge hiring/retention mistakes in his first year on the job (keeping Lemonis and firing Arnett only to hire Lebby). But he did a great job with the soccer hire when Armstrong left and he literally hired Zimmerman while he was in Raleigh interviewing for the NC State job and an even better job with O'Connor. Hopefully it's a sign he's learned from past mistakes. We'll see come December. This will be the biggest decisions of his career.
In all seriousness, this is what I don't get. There is nothing that tells me that the Lebby hire was a mistake. Yet
I've criticized the guy on most of his decisions since day 1, most all of them. But Lebby was not one. Our roster was gutted and the program was in a huge rut that no coach could have fixed in year 1. If we were going to go the assistant route, and I'm fine that we did, Lebby was close to the top of that list.
Did you even see the disaster that was last fall? That was easily one of the worst MSU teams I've ever seen. And don't get me started on Lebby's decision to hire and then retain the defensive coordinator. He's just looked in way over his head from the beginning to me.
That does not make any sense to me. Why would you not let it be known there would be a change as soon as that determination is made?
Jeremy Foley said it best and the circumstance was related to a coach being fired - "you do today what you know you have to do tomorrow". I actually think that was a statement that he made when Ron Zook got Croomed in the middle of 2004. Do you think Florida had Urban Meyer locked down at that point? I doubt it.
It wasn't that Lebby was an obvious mistake. But we just fired a first time head coach that put a relatively inexperienced coordinator on the other side of the ball. Then we hired a first time head coach and allowed him to put a completely inexperienced coordinator on the other side of the ball. It was just a monumental unforced error in process. A football hire is just going to be a crap shoot and there's not much you can do about that. But you can do basic things to avoid sabotaging yourself. It was an extremely costly learning mistake by Selmon.
Lebby was a perfectly reasonable hire. But it should have been a requirement that he get a coordinator opposite of him with experience. And for all the dumbasses saying we couldn't do that, we have an analyst on our staff that was (and is still) more qualified than Hutzler to be defensive coordinator. He even had P5 head coaching experience, so could have helped Lebby with that transition based on mistakes he made when he became a first time head coach. If a more experience AD had made that mistake I would say it would be a fireable offense. It was just a very expensive learning experience that we unfortunately paid for for Selmon.
I think classifying either of those as mistakes is maybe in the eye of the beholder.
He kept Lemonis after 2 bad years. Result was the next 2 years we were not a great baseball team, but weren’t awful either, and both were leaps and bounds above what 2022-2023 were and kind of proved that period to be a bit of an aberration that could be attributed to Foxhall’s epic fail in the 2021 signing class of pitchers. Made regionals both years (with big possible assist from Parker in 2nd year), and came very close to hosting the 1st year. I’d say based on hindsight that he handled that situation correctly. I highly doubt we’d have been able to pull O’Conner if we make that move in 2023.
And I’m totally with you on Lebby being in over his head, but who else was there? Everyone knew Arnett had to go. We struck out trying to hire G5 coaches who weren’t all that exciting to begin with. We just aren’t a desirable job in football right now, and its not easy to find the next Dan Mullen type in the huge pile of up and coming guys who are desperate to quadruple their salary and know how to say all the right things and pretend that they can get the job done.
If he won enough games to get to 16-14 and made a super regional, that would have been fine. He would have implausibly shown that he didn't need to be fired. But the much more likely scenario is that he would have gotten to 13 or 14 wins, and there would have been some opposition to firing him when he was "close" and came on strong at the end of the season. If he had squeaked into the tournament, it'd have been hard to fire him while he was still alive and be negotiating with replacement coaches. We had seen enough and pulled the trigger before it had a chance to get messy.
We may have just be saying the same thing in different ways because I 100% agree with the bolded sentence. I assume we had good feedback from a few likely replacements that we felt were a big enough upgrade to pull the trigger and had at least one fall back that we felt was as close to a sure thing as you can get without a formal agreement. I just don't think we had gotten to the point of a MOU or anything. I would assume we got some feedback along the line of "yes, x is interested, it's going to take in the range of y for him to leave,": and maybe also "he is or is not going to entertain matching offers from his current employer if it gets to that point." BOC's agent in particular may have put out the message that BOC was unhappy with UVA and looking to leave, rather than just willing to entertain offers.
In hindsight, it worked out hiring O'Connor, but there's absolutely no way that could have been known 2 years ago. It worked out good in the long term, but it was still a huge mistake for an AD to make.
Did we really strike out on any other coaches? I don't recall. I thought Lebby was the front runner from the beginning. But my memory of that whole thing isn't great.
Because a smart AD and search committee does 90% of the legwork before the eventual move is made. And because that determination might be heavily tied to who we could hire to take his place, and how quickly we could make it happen.
Bottom line is that you don’t fire a national title winning coach in April just to meander through a 2 week search after the CWS that leads to you hiring Lane Burroughs or Will Coggin in late June after all the portal action is complete, because you had no plan in place when you made the move.
The portal all by itself is a reason to both fire AND have your new hire pretty much in place well before the end of the season.
This isn’t quite the same scenario. Zook never won a national title, and MSU baseball isn’t Florida football.
We can agree to disagree I guess. I don't doubt we had a short-list and had made contacts before or at the time the termination, but that's a far cry from having the search and a deal "99%" wrapped up. The same people who reported that he was the lead candidate are still saying he was leaning towards staying at UVA as recent as last week.
The circumstances of Zook and Florida might not be identical, but you missed the forest for the trees. My point was that when you know a change has to be made, you get on with it. I think the situation within the team and program had gotten so bad that the only option at that point was to terminate him, regardless of his prior accomplishments.
I said above that the percentage was arbitrary. Call it 90% or 75% or whatever.
I think we made the decision to fire CL at season’s end or sooner….and that call was made well before it was announced. I think we already had feelers out, and those feelers became legit inquiries once the decision was made. I think once those legit inquiries yielded very strong interest and likely commitment from one or multiple strong candidates, we made the call to go ahead and pull the trigger publicly on CL to start moving the process forward to get ahead of the portal window.
And I think all of that is exactly what SHOULD have happened, if this is how it went down.
This literally doesn’t matter. Nobody was closer to the situation than Selmon and a handful of boosters that were closely involved in the search. This topic is about they acted based on the info they had available. The media is not getting the full picture from either side.
We just disagree on what has to happen to “get on with it”. You can “get on with it” quietly without making the move officially before it makes sense. There is nothing to gain from firing a guy a week or two before you normally would, and a lot to lose related to spooking potential suitors when everybody starts tracking planes and media start asking questions and social media gets ratcheted up. In this case, it’s much better to get the deal mostly done in advance, and then pull the trigger officially. That’s how you stay ahead of the (pre)shítstorm.
Well first off its not just the AD’s decision. It’s really not even mostly the AD’s decision. In 2023, Lemonis’ buyout was a lot bigger, and we had a glorified interim football coach that had to be known to be a risk. You spend all that money to fire both of them, there’s not much left for an O’Conner type, and the staff that he would require to come with him. So, we’d have likely been poaching the mid major and assistant ranks for a replacement. Hard to call it a mistake to do that when you look at the most likely outcomes available. Made a lot more sense to let him change pitching coaches and see what happens. And that outcome wasn’t terrible.
We went after the Liberty coach and a few others.
Maybe we are talking about semantic distinction, but it seems like your argument here contradicts your original statement. You asked if the "BOC deal was 99% done" before we fired him, and I said no. Having interest from "multiple strong candidates" before we fired Lemonis is a far cry from having "BOC deal 99% done" before we fired Lemonis. They are not the same thing.
I believe Selmon had done his homework and was 99% sure he could hire a significant upgrade at HC before he pulled the trigger on Lemonis. To do otherwise would have been very reckless to the point of foolish.