It makes me sad to know that the one thing that made me so many memories and love coming to visit Mississippi State has fallen this far. Even though I haven't been to Starkville in a long time, I always had the baseball team to fall back on.
SEC baseball coaches don't think much of our team.
- Thread starter patdog
- Start date
I wish I could go par for a course! Where did that saying come from? If I parred a course I would feel like I won a National Championship.
Running the table in baseball against OOC teams would be a good accomplishment. Polk didn't say, "That’s Baseball" for no reason. Somewhere along the line a Maine or a Southern plays above their head and we don't play up to standards.
It would be a good accomplishment. But it also wouldnt be an indicator of future success in the SEC.
Air Force, Austin Peay, Mt Saint Mary, Georgia Southern, Evansville all at home. Throw in southern miss, UNO, and South Alabama and never leave the state of mississippi.
Its a downright awful OOC schedule.... and its one where if we go undefeated we wont get that much credit for it... and if we lose 2-3 games it'll be a bad sign.
Im actually surprised we were even allowed to schedule this.. its that bad
I'm definitely in the minority here, but I think we'll be in the mid-upper half of the conference when it's all said and done. Scoring wasn't our issue last year and the steps we've taken should show improvement where it was needed. The new pitching coach is actually developing pitchers. I'm looking forward to seeing what he's done with Dohm and Cijntje. I think getting Pico and Stone back could be big.
8-5 and 6-7 w/ Music City and Outback Bowls got Moorhead fired. Lemonis last 2 seasons is 53-56 (6th and 7th next to last and last in W) w/ his very own players instead of Cohen holdovers. He excels or leaves one way or the other this year.
If you’re going to fire him for not hosting you might as well fire him today. That’s an insanely high expectation. I expect that if he makes the tournament he will be retained. I think you would be justified in firing him if he sneaks in as a 3 seed, but I would be mildly surprised.
Well we can be reasonable about it. If we are a competitive team that is a 2 or 3 seed because the SEC is incredibly strong, it is what it is, nobody in their right mind would want to fire him.
It’s not a high expectation for our program, but it is for him. And that’s and indictment on Lemonis. He has lowered the standard. I don’t understand why he just gets a pass. Not to mention the community that depends on summer baseball.
You must not remember some or Ron Polk’s OOC’s. Credit goes to Brunswick over at ED for the historical stats. Below is the OOC from 1990’s CWS team:
Season started with Busch Challenge in NOLA - LSU, UNO, Tulane. Not bad.
Then Birmingham-So (NAIA), Jackson St. (SWAC), South Alabama x2 (Regional team), Memphis x2; La Tech x2; William Cary x2 (NAIA); and Illinois St. x2 all pre conference.
Mid week included UNO x2; USM x2; Jackson State (SWAC); Delta State x2 (DII); NE La x2; and UNA (DII).
That Championship isn't a "get out of jail free card", you sound like a University of Northern MS fan talking about their 60's and 70's football teams , "We won the Mad Magazine National championship one time back in 1967 blah blah blah."
What good did that Championship do us in '22 and '23? We won 1 more game than we lost in '23 and got swept in 4 conference series. We lost 4 more than we won in '22. The week after we won the championship that team was split up and gone, FOREVER. Lemonis had a job to do the year after that championship and failed miserably, stunk up the West terribly less than a season after that Championship to the extent of embarrassment, again w/ HIS PLAYERS and a transfer portal. TN beat us 27-2 in '22, but Lemonis won a Championship in '21. Vandy beat us 26-3 last year but Lemonis won a Championship in '21. That Championship was fun for awhile but again, its over. You still have him up on a "coach of the year" pedestal for it even though TWO Championships have been won since then by conferenece rivals while we didn't even sniff the conference tournament. Get over it and demand some accountability instead of basking in mediocrity for something that happened 32 months ago.........
What happened in the 90s and whats happening now isnt the same.
Much has changed since the 90s. If you want to bring back 1 round of regionals, -5 hot bats, 40 home run guys then have at it.
Now nearly all teams travel to tournaments that have other quality competition. Or host a quality opponent in their OOC schedule. I believe we are the ONLY team in the SEC to not do that.
For a school that hangs it hat on baseball, to not even compete with the upper tier in the non conference is again a lowering of the bar.
That being said the OOC leading up to the SEC schedule in the schedule you presented, is still better by a significant margin, that the one we are playing.
Historically it is a very high expectation for our program. Since the format changed to 4-team regionals in 1999, we've hosted as a 1-seed 6 times. Out of 24 tournaments, that's 25%. We've missed the tournament more often in that span (7 times).
2016-2021 and particularly 2018-21 were incredible, and it's fine to have higher expectations since then. But the idea that this is just what our program is now is just... not grounded in reality.
Missing the tournament the last two years obviously impacts the decision. He probably should have been let go last year. But he wasn't. For the amount of improvement we would have to show in order to be a top-2 seed, I just don't see how you would fire him.
Can you not see the middle ground here? It was against the norm for Moorhead to get fired after those seasons, and it was more due to player upheaval than wins and losses, plus he did not win a national title or even get close.
All of this adds up to Lemonis getting this 5th season, or 6th really, I guess. If he fails this year, he's gone.
1990 was a different era. That schedule was much tougher than this year's anyway. Delta St. and UNA were better than a lot of Div. I teams at the time, and UNO was a traditionally good baseball school back then too.
Ya'll are absolutely insane. You act as if we have this incredible embarrassment of a program. We are still recruiting very well rankings wise, so no matter happens with Lemonis, we will build back quickly.
We just came off the best run in our history. Yeah, you read that right. It wasn't the 80s. It was 2016 to 2021. And then add Cohen's stretch right before that. These are the damn glory years.
We had a bad luck year in 2022, it happens. 2023 was rebuilding. 2024, we should be back. If not, we move on. I will say this, if we do move on, I hope we go out and get a hard-nosed coach. Lane Burroughs is my choice, I want those 2011-2013 Cohen style players back.
Lane Burroughs was my choice last time too. We could do a lot worse. Of course, that's assuming he bounces back from a bad season last year (they're picked 3rd in the preseason CUSA coaches poll behind Dallas Baptist & LIberty).
You tell us we're all crazy, but you sound like Biden telling us the economy is doing great. It's not that we haven't lived through bad seasons, we have. We have had a down season or two. Hell, I know, because I sat through some of them myself. But at least we were competitive even with the good teams when we had bad seasons. We have not been a competitive team since we left Omaha. It seems that every time we lost the last couple of years, we lost tremendously. It wasn't even close.
The Ol bad luck in 2022 i dont buy.. nor do i call 2023 a rebuilding year.
Both are excuses and not reality. You can give someone one pass but not two. He failed miserable in one of those years, take your pick to which one you prefer to call it.
This made me start thinking about some of the elite coaches, and how many have had these down seasons, and by down, I mean near .500 overall and less than 10 SEC wins. Dave Van Horn has had ONE in 21 years at Arkansas. That's unbelievable. O'Sullivan has had none in 16 years. Bianco has had maybe 2 in his 24 years. Tim Corbin has never had one in 21 years. Ray Tanner never had one in 16 years. Nationally, Augie Garrido had some there at the end. Pat Casey had some early, but once he built and got rolling, it was over.
It sucks that we had to compete against a lot of these guys in the SEC. Sucks even worse that we haven't found one of them. Pretty obvious now that even Cohen and Lemonis are in the second tier of coaches, good but not elite (well we will see on Lemonis). This includes guys like John Savage at UCLA. You can win a natty without being an elite coach, it's rare, but it happens.
I still wonder if Paul Maneiri could have been that guy for us, had he come on at that time in 2001 when he was fired up and ready to roll. Remember, LSU didn't hire him for like 5 years after we turned him down, and he had 5 more elite years at Notre Dame before what he did at LSU. We can think what we want about him, but he was an elite coach.
I get it, it's hard to explain the blowout losses to Tennessee and Vanderbilt and such. But we did take series from the national champions in both years. It's not like we were just dead on arrival. After that Ole Miss series in 2022, we were in good shape, but pitching just ran out due to the injuries. 2023 was a slog, no doubt.
That's what they were, whether you call it that or not. We had bad injuries in 2022 with an older team, and we were a younger team in 2023. That's fact.
The only thing you can really debate is whether they should have been as bad as they were. I think we could all find common ground there. And honestly, it appears that most things point to Foxhall (admitted he's an easy target currently).
I still don't know how he fell off so fast. I never liked that he called pitches, but his results were still solid. Similar to how I don't like Lemonis' recrootin, but his on-field coaching had been solid. Maybe that's the answer, recrootin simply fell off, even though the rankings were good.
We went 26-30. With a team that returned 6 of their top hitters from the national championship team. The only arm we missed due to injury was sims. And that was a coaching mistake ttrying to convert him into a starter more than anything. That team lost non conference series to Tulane and Long Beach State. Then they quit. Not because of lack of pitching. And lost their last 8-9 or whatever many games at the end of the year.
That wasnt bad luck. That was one of the most mis-mananged teams i've ever witnessed.
We started the same 8 guys all season and our Friday and Saturday night starters NEVER missed a start. There wasnt any bad luck on that team outside of Sims.
In 2023
You still had 4 starters coming back offensively, and 2 older players transfer in to play. How does that one make us young? Where else were we young because I must be missing something. Having 2 freshman start for you in the SEC doesnt make you young. We can be inexperienced... but again if we went 26-30 the previous season.. why were we inexperienced?
Goat's gonna go down with the ship on this one. But his earlier post disproves his point. The simple fact is good coaches just don't have back-to-back seasons like 2022 & 2023. They just don't.
Wow. That's idiotic. And I don't even like Lemonis all that much.
Throw in Stone Simmons and Brooks Auger, along with Sims. That's a HUGE hit, a lot of innings, especially when you consider the cumulative effect over the course of a week.
If you're going to say they quit, you'll have to say it was during Mizzou and Florida and Tennessee. They were solidly in a regional after they won the Ole Miss series.
I can't make you see logic.
What? I already said Lemonis was a Tier 2 coach.
You act like it's easy to find those guys I listed. The time for that was 2002. That era is pretty much over.
Seriously man, you acting like I'm an idiot and you're an authority on baseball doesn't jive with history. Remember your opinion on Cohen early on, every time you want to get high and mighty.
idiotic?
Simmons and Auger? I'll give you simmons but there is no way we came into the year counting on auger. Auger was a pen guy. We had 2/3rd of our weekend staff not miss a start and had several contributors on the national championship team still available to pitch.
We were 8-10 in the SEC after the ole miss series. Half a season doesnt make a season. You cannot defend the season's end and you cant say its because the pitching collapsed. We had the same guys starting as we did all season. Same guys hitting. We quit. Thats squarely on the ol ball coach
and cant make me see logic? Again if we have 4 starters returning, and we brought in 2 guys from other schools that had played for 3 seasons. How are we young? Please explain. Inexperienced... OK.... but young?
J don't know much about the team so far, but I do know that the coaches don't do these rankings. They are always handed off to some assistant to do because the coaches are much too busy.
Agree-- there is no excuse for it.
Either:
A) He needed to do a better job in 22, by getting his boys to finish strong, even if there was no natty in sight. OR
B) he needed to bench them and get some of the other guys experience so 2023 didnt happen.
to call one 26-30 season a bad break because of luck when you return 70% of a national championship team and ONLY lose 2 guys to injury... the entire starting lineup plays virtuall all seasonlong.... but we got unlucky??? is plain silly....
And i still dont get how we were young in 2023. Inexperienced maybe... but we werent young. Hancock, Clark, Forsythe had nearly 1000 at bats between them. Hines had a full season under his belt and both Ledbetter and Larry came with lots of at-bats under their belt. Dohm, Smith, Hunt, Gartman-- all seasoned vets too.
We either didnt recurit or evaulate the talent well enough... but we werent young.
I tend to let my emotions get to me when it comes to baseball. I have too many memories of being able to beat whoever we were facing, no matter even if they were a blue blood sports program.
There are new contributors every year, and Auger had become one that emerged. You guys can't just sit here and say that because we didn't count on someone in 2021, that they don't have a role in 2022. Players come and go in college sports.
Exactly, they just vote based on the previous year and any type of limited knowledge they have off the top of their head. Look at the final 2023 standings, and the preseason 2024 poll. Dang near identical, save for some minor movements here or there.
Our fans do this too, as evidenced in Huntdawg's post.
Never said he didnt have a role.
But we you start the same 9 all season long. 6 of which were starters on the national championship team. When you start 2 of the 3 weekend guys ALL SEASON long. You start the 3rd guy all season long as well after losing sims. And you still have 3-4 pen pieces from the previous year.
You cant chalk that up as bad luck. Thats actually good luck. I mean if we knew our starting lineup would stay in tact all season. 2/3rd of our weekend staff would never miss a start, and we only lose 2 guys in our pen.
We went from the penthouse to the outhouse in 1 season.. with 70-75% of the team in tact. You cant blame bad luck for that. Bad coaching. Bad play. Bad something... but we certainly didnt get unlucky that year.
The way I look at it, we are Mississippi State, and we had to pay a price to get that first title (and the greatest run in baseball we've ever seen from 2011-2021). Semi-joking, but still. A couple rough seasons is easier to stomach knowing we have reached the pinnacle. And no doubt Ole Miss winning it all too clouds the judgment and makes it suck worse.
But we had our chance in 2002 to do it right, and we made an Emm Stake decision that knocked us off track for a decade while our rivals built up at our expense. We finally got back, but it cost us some capital.
Good news is, we've still got players, we've still got a nice stadium, we've still got a loyal fanbase, we're still attracting good recruits. And we have a national title banner. We will be fine no matter what.
That fanbase is not what it used to be. People are becoming increasingly annoyed with the attitude surrounding it. Also, players are now more spread out and Don’t necessarily care about stadiums. They want to play for winning coaches. We also have to continue to recruit outside of Mississippi. These guys think they are all that but in reality the talent is much better outside of the state. There is a lot mediocre players masquerading as elite talent that we have signed
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