Like I said, I expect us to win 30 games. That's only a seven game improvement. It's very doable. Especially since we lost some games to people like Air Force, and Arkansas-Little Rock.
If we do worse, people will blame Polk and rightfully so. It was his decision to recruit exclusively from "the camp" and basically sit on his *** and write letters to the NCAA and his ex-players while pretty much everyone else in the SEC, and country for that matter, were out trying to win and move their programs forward. Polk is more of a teacher than a manager, if that makes sense. He got more satisfaction out of taking some "nice boys" and teaching them about the game and getting them to the point where they could go to a Regional and that was it. He didn't care if we won a NC or not. That's just how he was at the end of his career- I do think that there was a time that he maybe wanted to win a NC, but he lost interest for whatever reason. A lot of people have forgotten, but Polk used to a very aggressive recruiter and was innovative in his own right at the time. We didn't just get lucky that Will Clark and Palmeiro showed up at the camp one summer, if you know what I mean.
We used to be the cutting edge program in the SEC, but lately we've gotten way behind. Cohen is just now bringing in computers and things like that to help our players with their game. He also put together a pretty good class with a good mix of Fr. and JUCO players that I think will help pretty soon. We will have to fight off MLB for a player or two for the first time in quite awhile.
But McNickle deserves a lot of the blame to. Maybe even more than Polk. I honestly think that my Mom with a "Pitching for Dummies" book would have been more qualified to coach pitchers than Russ McNickle. We had no plan whatsoever. It was basically go out there, and get your pitches in and go home. He is the reason why our entire starting rotation went down with injuries last year, as well as our closer. We had Jesse Carver in the weekend rotation at times. I think we go to a Regional last year if our pitching staff doesn't go down if want my honest opinion, and I believe that Polk would still be our coach if that had happened. I think Polk bailed when he saw that the **** was about to hit the fan and tried to force Raffo in, of course we now know that Polk would have still been around as a "volunteer coach" and would have still been calling the shots. And our hitting went downhill after all of the coaching controversy started, but we had some key injuries there to, so I think we would have only been a little bit better. McNickle hurt us as far as recruiting pitchers because we had a reputation for ruining arms. You can look at some of our Fr. pitchers and tell that we were the only major college offer for most of those guys.
At the same time, in some sort of sick way, if McNickle had not sucked so bad, we may not have Cohen right now. I don't think Raffo would have been the best coach for MSU right now. And I don't think that the MSU job would have been best for Tommy Raffo right now either. I think MSU fans want a more aggressive coach, and I think that MSU fans also want a coach that they feel is going to give them the best shot at winning a NC. That's why Cohen was hired.
You can't really compare MSU baseball to Ole Miss basketball because there are so many MSU people that care a lot about MSU baseball as a group vs. Ole Miss basketball. Baseball is the one sport at MSU that we can really truly brag about in terms of a national scale, and I would daresay that most of MSU's well- known athletes nationally were baseball players. Even now, we have Papelbon, who many are saying is the best closer in baseball right now, and Paul Maholm, who is the Pirates ace. I think a lot of people feel like we have a legit shot at winning the NC in baseball, moreso than some of the other sports, but I think people were afraid that if our baseball program had to undergo a massive rebuilding project, that our window of opportunity might close. Getting Cohen was almost like a "save MSU baseball" campaign.