Well Rosebowl has concluded Lem should get one more year...

[Seinfeld]

The last time we had a baseball coach in a “do-or-die hot seat” we won the SEC.

The problem here is that Lemonis’s do or die season was this year, and instead of pulling us out of the gutter, he somehow managed to dig a hole even deeper

 

[Msuirondawgs]

Actually I don't have a problem with the rotation change for LSU, I have a problem that he didn't do this sooner. Obviously our team can't hit Friday night SEC aces, so why pitch your best guy on Friday night? Concede that game and throw the few arms you have and try and win on the back end. When you waste Cade on a game you can't score runs for him, that makes no sense. Unfortunately Lemonhead is late to the party on this strategy. Throw a sacrificial lamb on Friday with your weakest bullpen arms and bring Cade in on Saturday for a chance to win one game. Then throw Gartman and Cientje on Sunday to give you a fighting chance to win another game or even win the series. Our coach doesn't even know his team.

If you had enough quality arms you could have a straight up, honest rotation. We don't.

Yep I figured this was the reasoning when I saw his choice in Siary. Very well said.

 

[maroonmania]

Putting the whole Lemonis situation aside, has RoseBowl ever come out on the side of firing ANY coach who hadn’t themselves already resigned?

Rosie is not going to come out openly and advocate firing any MSU coach. At best he might totally avoid the topic. I'm a little surprised Hadad has been as open as he's been suggesting MSU should make the change (comparing giving Lemonis a 3rd year after 2 horrendous years to the same thing we did after JWS had two horrendous years which just resulted in another horrendous year). Most of these MSU media guys just don't want to sour relationships with any HC just in case that coach indeed ends up being back. If there were ANY signs of hope with Lemonis I would be OK with bringing him back but I just don't see any.

 

[thekimmer]

Rosie is not going to come out openly and advocate firing any MSU coach. At best he might totally avoid the topic. I'm a little surprised Hadad has been as open as he's been suggesting MSU should make the change (comparing giving Lemonis a 3rd year after 2 horrendous years to the same thing we did after JWS had two horrendous years which just resulted in another horrendous year). Most of these MSU media guys just don't want to sour relationships with any HC just in case that coach indeed ends up being back. If there were ANY signs of hope with Lemonis I would be OK with bringing him back but I just don't see any.

Yeah, I don't think Lem is going to be dropping in on the hadad christmas party again this year.

 

[thekimmer]

Actually I don't have a problem with the rotation change for LSU, I have a problem that he didn't do this sooner. Obviously our team can't hit Friday night SEC aces, so why pitch your best guy on Friday night? Concede that game and throw the few arms you have and try and win on the back end. When you waste Cade on a game you can't score runs for him, that makes no sense. Unfortunately Lemonhead is late to the party on this strategy. Throw a sacrificial lamb on Friday with your weakest bullpen arms and bring Cade in on Saturday for a chance to win one game. Then throw Gartman and Cientje on Sunday to give you a fighting chance to win another game or even win the series. Our coach doesn't even know his team.

If you had enough quality arms you could have a straight up, honest rotation. We don't.

The reason he didn't do it until now is because it is a tacit admission of defeat. I would imagine the strategy is to do anything to at least win a game against a top opponent as a desperate attempt to sell keeping him around another year.

 

[thekimmer]

This would be an argument to keep him if Lemonis had just barely missed a Regional in 2022 and 2023. Like one of the first couple teams out with fluky losses and an RPI that crashed on us because our good wins turned out not to be that great.

This is what I don't think the 'give him another year' crowd refuses to factor in and that is just how bad we have been these past couple of seasons. I have managed people my entire nearly 40 year career and when someone's performance is failing the amount of leeway you are willing give them is affected by the degree of failure and any signs of improvement they are making. The level of performance failure could scarcely be any worse and he has shown nothing in two solid years to show any improvement whatsoever.

 

[Perd Hapley]

Dude, did you not read my post? I explained why Cohen had one bad year and Lemonis had 2.

If not for the injuries, our 2022 team would have at least made a regional and matched the 2014 team.

Your comment about injuries preventing further success in 2022 certainly has merit. But, the other thing is that our schedule was so bad that we needed probably 16 regular season SEC wins just to get in the RPI Top 50, which where you almost have to be to feel good as an at large team.

You could certainly make a case that a healthy Sims, Simmons, and Auger adds 4-5 more wins, easily. But I don’t know about 7 more wins. And even if we got them we’d be in that 3-seed territory, nowhere close to the high 2-seed that the 2014 team got….and they probably would have hosted had they not dropped 2 games to friggen Holy Cross at home. Had 18 SEC wins heading into Hoover.

Cohen and Butch just never had a total dud of a pitching signing class like what we had in 2021, and that had probably as big of an impact on the 2022 season as the injuries. Whether or not that recruiting problem has been resolved by the Foxhall firing is what I think is the key question at this time….one that will not be answered for quite a while (if at all). But Selmon and our money guys have to collectively decide whether they believe it has been resolved or will be resolved with the next PC over the next few weeks.

 

[maroonmania]

This got me thinking about which coaches did survive and turned things around.
Recent examples I thought of:

• Dabo Swinney went 6-7 in 2010 and was thought to be on the hot seat going into 2011. They won 10 games that year and the rest his history.
• Jim Harbaugh was getting heat just a couple years ago because they couldnt break thru and have a big season/beat Ohio State. I think he even took a pay cut to help silence some critics. Then bam, he does beats OSU in back-to-back years and led Michigan to the playoffs last year.
• Bianco saved his job with last year's run, but it's yet to be determined if that was a fluke or if it results in long term success (not looking positive with this season).

What other college coaches survived the hot seat and went on to have a great tenures?

Show me someone, ANYONE, who had great success in his first 2 years as HC of a program then TOTALLY tanked his 3rd and 4th year only to turn it around big time in his 5th year and beyond. That would have to be the comparison here. I mean Cohen started off rather poorly but everyone knew that Polk II had let the program run into the ground. And in that day and age you had to turn a program around primarily through recruiting and developing. Getting in a bunch of high quality plug and play transfers wasn't really a thing.

 

[ChinaDogSunflower]

OK. I listened to his rational, non-emotional reasoning. Primary reasons cited were maintaining continuity of recruiting coupled with the potential of returning players particularly some that did not play this season due to injury.

All valid points but I disagree and here are my rational non-emotional reasons.

It has been my observation that coaches on a do-or-die hot seat is almost always an exercise in putting off the inevitable. I also think that we needed to see at least the tiniest spark of life this season to lend some credibility to him being able to do the job and we saw the exact opposite. What I see is a program in a death spiral and based on that the likelihood he will get us out of this is not worth the risk of the additional damage that will come from another year like these last two. We need to trust what our eyes are telling us.

National Champs '24 or bust