What sold the program from a recruiting standpoint before NIL was our fanbase, stadium, history. Now with NIL, it's $$$ and that's a place where I question if we can compete in the SEC - even in baseball.
Discuss.
Discuss.
Last edited:
Has Mississippi State Baseball lost it's advantage?...
- Thread starter dawgstudent
- Start date
As long as Lemonis is here, yes
His inability to evaluate, develop, and put competent coaches around him counteracts every advantage that we have as a program whole
But give him the boot and bring in a legit Top 10 coach? We’d be back to battling for Omaha within a couple of years. I’ll say again… 24 of the top 25 crowds in college baseball history is no joke. This fanbase supports baseball like no other, and the return we’re getting right now is ludicrous
His inability to evaluate, develop, and put competent coaches around him counteracts every advantage that we have as a program whole
But give him the boot and bring in a legit Top 10 coach? We’d be back to battling for Omaha within a couple of years. I’ll say again… 24 of the top 25 crowds in college baseball history is no joke. This fanbase supports baseball like no other, and the return we’re getting right now is ludicrous
Is money the actual problem in baseball? I am a nobody and know nothing. The only info I get is from Charlie’s random comments on his show. If I recall he’s said we have the money to offer good packages in baseball. Maybe he’s leaving out that we can’t do that for the biggest transfers. IDK.
Honestly I’m genuinely curious how we stack against the rest of the SEC in NIL for baseball. That would sway my opinion on this offseason tremendously depending on how it shakes out.
Honestly I’m genuinely curious how we stack against the rest of the SEC in NIL for baseball. That would sway my opinion on this offseason tremendously depending on how it shakes out.
State went to Omaha ten times between 1971 and 2018. That is one trip to Omaha every 4.8 years. Are you saying that if we got rid of Lemonis we would go to Omaha once every 4.8 years?
No we can’t compete but the “fans” are going to blame it on the one coach who has won a natty.
Nobody blames the guy who wrote one book and wasted nearly 2 decades before the rest of the league caught up
Nobody blames the guy who wrote one book and wasted nearly 2 decades before the rest of the league caught up
And this my friends is the only thing that matters when talking about NIL. Can we offer a kid $100k to be (or stay) a dawg? I’m sure, but what difference does that make when 8 other SEC schools can offer him $300k?
With the way that Lemonis is hitting the portal, one of these three things has to be true. 1) Our NIL is not fine 2) Lemonis is absolute a$$ at evaluating or 3) Both
And to follow that up, if NIL really is part of the problem, Lemonis and Selmon are doing a really bad job telling us that they need more
We are the poster child for mediocrity. And Lemonis has nothing to do with, As soon as Zach Selmon realizes it....he's outta here.
3 - It’s both. Agree that Lemonis & Selmon are both doing a poor job.
You hire a big ten mid coach, you get big ten mid outcomes. Recruits and their families/handlers aren't blind.
If our NIL is fine and the best players are still going elsewhere and rejecting our offer then our program clearly doesn't have the appeal it once had.
If NIL isn't an issue, who do we out compete for top guys? Or are the top players going elsewhere because they don't like Lemonis?
Lemonis is the common denominator. This isn’t hard. Hand this program to a DVH or Vitello or Pollard and none of these lame excuses would be necessary. This is why we lose. We would rather find and excuse than think we can do better
People laughed at me on the other board when I said that Lemonis is the problem. we have the funding, but recruits don’t want to play for him. We certainly have an advantage, but we need a coach that knows how to handle this landscape. Hopefully Texas A&M will hire him so that we don’t have to do that buyout thing in a year.
Several of the players at TAMU and Tennessee listed their top places to play. The dude was on most all their list, so why did they chose the program they did over ours? My guess is A money nil, B we never offered C coach D just where they wanted to school/academics E geography/family.
Big thing to me is our culture as a program looks lost. Your best players aren't your vocal leaders and we don't even do the little things right like base running. Lemonis got lazy which killed all momentum we had from the program cohen built with that dog culture. His recruits kept it up for a few years after he left. Maybe cohen took his hand off the program after lemonis won the championship and decided to let him have it. Idk. But it took a drastic turn south after all points back to lemonis screwing the pooch with talent evaluation and and with development and setting a program culture.
With the resources we have put in baseball the last 40 years compared to the rest of the NCAA, we have really underachieved.
How much is Goat paying you to start these threads?
Lemonis hasn’t adapted his recruiting philosophy towards the portal or approach/tactics surrounding recruiting since he got here. Make it fun and it’ll be fun. Don’t make it fun and it won’t be. Fully funding 4 sports with NIL probably isn’t helping our cause either.
We could have hired Schloss to blow a 1-0 lead in the series… that would have been real fun***
No, I don’t think we’ve lost our advantage. We can still compete for the top recruits. Because of the natty, I’ll never say Lemonis was a mistake but I’m pretty sure we can do better at this point. He was the right man at the right time but that time has passed.
There’s nothing wrong with the NIL. State just has someone at the helm who can’t recruit or close the deal on these guys.
Given that we have one national title to our name I would argue that advantage was always tenuous. I don't see any reason we can't be in the hosting discussion going forward but we're no more or less likely to win it all IMO.
Last edited:
If I ever decide to jump off a bridge, I’m going to read Sixpack posts from the day after the College World Series ends because I know it will validate my decision.
Is not just money. These guys want to win and play for good coaches. Lemonis ditched our program kids talk and so do coaches. We also suck at playing the tampering game.
To answer the question, yes. I think it’s a safe bet to say that a top notch coach could take this program and have it in Omaha once every 4-5 years.
That said, I said “battling for Omaha” on purpose because I fully realize that it isn’t easy to get there. It should not be difficult, however, for a coach of this program to put this team in a position to get there on a consistent basis, and next season is about to be the 4th straight year in which we haven’t seen that. This season was certainly better than the last two, but it would’ve taken a damn miracle for this lineup to manufacture enough runs to get back to the CWS, and this shouldn’t be acceptable for our fanbase
Last edited:
We have plenty of NIL that is not the issue. It’s who players want to play and be developed by. Development is the biggest driver right now if NIL can be matched. Which we can match. We have the best fans, top notch stadium, and NIL funding. It’s comes down to who they want to play for. It’s that simple, the good ones want to go pro.
Literally every coach we’ve hired since 1975 has done it. So yeah, unless we just 17 up a hire our coach should have us in Omaha on a fairly regular basis.
But that right there tells me that there’s a problem with NIL. If there’s one thing that pro sports has taught us, it’s that players are going to go where they can get the most $$$ 99.9% of the time, and if a NFLer will turn down $26M/yr because he thinks he can get $30M elsewhere(looking at you Aiyuk), I have to think that a college kid will certainly turn down $200k from us if he can $500k from LSU or Florida.
Either way, Lemonis deserves the heat he’s getting because he either needs to seal the deal or be screaming about what additional NIL he needs. He’s doing neither
NIL is an issue period. We have people on these boards saying we are an elite program, a top 5 program… we don’t have a top 5 nil…. The the gulf between ours and the top is large
tenn, Texas, Texas am, lsu, Florida… all have more nil money going to baseball than we do.
Our nil is competitive but not a difference maker. We are behind the NIL curve and best catch up
tenn, Texas, Texas am, lsu, Florida… all have more nil money going to baseball than we do.
Our nil is competitive but not a difference maker. We are behind the NIL curve and best catch up
I can promise you we are matching NIL offers. If Arky is offering 100k, we have matched it and it came down to development. Lemonis doesn’t have a great reputation right now on development. Parker does, but that’s all. Players just like us hear things. A lot think he is a lame duck coach right now and on a hot seat. They want to go where good players go and have a chance to play post season. They want it to be fun and productive. I’m not saying the narrative is completely correct l, but it is the narrative out there right now.
I don’t think we are at a total disadvantage, but a kid can now choose to go to more places with great coaches and live in a town that may or may not be more appealing to them. Almost every SEC program has good to great coaches and outside of fan support the athletic support is as good almost anywhere in the SEC and getting better everyday. We certainly don’t have the advantage we once did in the league.
No one here will be remotely satisfied with 2 Omaha trips per decade any more.
Honestly, next year feels like Omaha or bust.
If we’re matching NIL offers and losing out on players, we have to fire the coach today. That just can’t happen.
I would personally use my biggest resource the FANS. If the narrative is he doesn’t have the fans and such.. I would change it if I was him. The secretive approach isn’t lending them.. I would blast the visit date through our media accounts. Ask the fans to greet them on campus, show off our best asset. Say Skenes was visiting on Tuesday.. have 15k fans waiting on him to arrive, show him he is wanted and needed and the fans are behind him. It’s a different approach to what Baseball usually is and it might work. Couldn’t hurt any more at this point. State fans are passionate.. I would show the potential recruits just that
Yes. And yes NIL has killed a lot of what we were able to sell.
Very, very unfortunate.
It’s now all about the almighty $$$
I understand that the players probably deserve to get paid. But NIL has simply turned high level college sports completely into professional sports. That won't end well for us, and I suspect it won't end well for college athletics.
I could definitely be wrong.
T&L mentioned this today, and I completely agree. Whether it would move the needle for Lemonis or not is hard to say, but it sure feels like he’s about 3-4 decades behind the times when it comes to understanding what these kids are wanting out of their recruitment
