What would be an ideal athletic director hire in your minds? What does the person need to have and/or have done to be a success?
Athletic Director Skills/Qualities/Experiences
- Thread starter ZombieKissinger
- Start date
The ability not to hire buddies.
Or better buddies
Speaking of ideal athletic director**, I saw LT this weekend under the stands talking to some fans. Haven't seen him in years.
Can you expound on this because is reads as though you are implying Selman and Lebby were somehow best friends while at OU. And they may have crossed paths they were both at OU together about a year. This false narrative that he was only hired because they were friends is so dumb. Shane Beamer and Selmon are great friends Beamer wife is from Starkville I think so of you all confuse that relationship with Lebby and Selmon, that or y’all just hate on him for no reason
The ideal athletic director would have the ability to identify the signs of well coached teams in football, men's basketball, and baseball (in that order) and use that to identify coaching candidates. But good luck with that. There are just too few hires made to really know whether an AD is good at identifying talent.
Outside of that, my ideal candidate would be somebody that had spent 5-6 years at a job at a have not school and shown improvement across the board in the athletic department. Success of the big 2 plus baseball, fundraising, gameday experience, attendance, fan/alumni engagement, etc. Even better if that's clearly the result of implementing a solid strategy he developed and not tied to an unusually lucky hire in football say, or changing conferences, etc.
Yeah don’t bring logic into this. Also, don’t bring up the fact that Selmon wanted Elko before the A&M/Stoops debacle
I'm still unclear on the Selmon dislike. He certainly hasn't done anything to impress me. He made what doesn't look like a good hire in Lebby, but it was a normal bad hire. We hired a successful coordinator at a P4 school.
We had a good hire in place for basketball, and he hasn't chased him off yet.
He could have fired Lemonis after 2023 and he didn't. Not really blaming him for not firing a national championship winning coach right when he started the job. Looked like it might have been the right decision last year. Not looking great so far this year. But at worst another bad decision that is a typical bad decision of a P4 AD and not one that was obviously wrong or indefensible at the time he made it.
If you care about women's basketball, he inherited a new, looking to be mediocre hire. But do you want to spend buyout money on women's basketball, especially after two years?
Selmon has made exactly one big decision that with hindsight isn't looking good but it's certainly not a done deal.
The reality is that Keenum and Cohen put us in a tough spot and in his one opportunity to make a decision that could really change the direction of the athletic department, he didn't manage to do it, but I don't think any AD anywhere is 100% on football hires. I'm not sure how many even make a good hire every 2 out of 3 chances.
Bad lazy football hire. Didn’t fire a baseball coach who finished last & next to last in back to back seasons. Lot of big donation announcements, but little indication there’s actually much cash available.
Until Keenum goes this is all a mute point.
Significant SEC experience is my biggest priority. They need to know firsthand how cutthroat this conference is.
A good AD in the SEC:
1) invests heavily into football and utilizes every available resource to build the program
2) see point #1
3) invests in MBB. Find a coach who can take you to the NCAAT, outside of that, success in MBB is a crapshoot.
4) see point #1
5) the rest of the club sports (baseball, WBB, softball, golf, etc) you need to be strategic and do the best you can to be competitive, but ultimately these sports do not matter. They suck revenue - any success is a cherry on top.
1) invests heavily into football and utilizes every available resource to build the program
2) see point #1
3) invests in MBB. Find a coach who can take you to the NCAAT, outside of that, success in MBB is a crapshoot.
4) see point #1
5) the rest of the club sports (baseball, WBB, softball, golf, etc) you need to be strategic and do the best you can to be competitive, but ultimately these sports do not matter. They suck revenue - any success is a cherry on top.
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I stand by it. I don't hate him. He has not showed he's a good AD. Either Lebby was a lazy hire or he was a buddy. We will find out when he makes his next hire.
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To some in the fanbase it only matters that the next AD is white.
Would prefer a 35 under 35 candidate but I guess we get on the job training then too!
We hang out with different parts of the fanbase
Nobody give a sh*t about color. If you can do the job, people will be happy. If you can't, they won't.
It's W's and Greenbacks that drive the needle. Don't be retarded.
What if I told you I disliked the white ones too????????
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These guys usually have two personalities - one, the slick talking fund raiser; the other, the project manager/administrator type. I think, for MSU, it's probably best to have the fundraiser type because that's where our biggest issue lies. But it's also good to have the opposite type as the deputy or assistant AD. So many folks just want to hire people just like them.
Never assume everyone on the interwebs is a white male, and definitely don't assume they don't like something because of race.
I don't disagree, but the problem is we will likely hire an "up-and-coming" asst AD who has only been tasked with one of those aspects (see Selmon). If you are fishing in the assistant barrel, you'll likely only get to pick one trait, not two.
We need the project manager type. Someone who has experience with the conception and execution of projects. I think that would excite donors. A person that can come in and say "here's what we need and here's how we do it". IMO that would motivate the pocketbooks.
Bad, maybe. But Lebby was a successful OC that had also been an OC in the SEC and came from a good coaching tree. If Selmon hadn't come from OU, would anybody have considered it lazy?
Bu actually, I do walk back my comment that it was a "typical bad decision." He should have never hired Lebby without a plan to get a DC with some experience on the opposite side of the ball. That would maybe be a forgiveable mistake for somebody inexperienced in hiring head coaches except that he was hiring a new coach in large part because the former coach was arrogant enough to put an inexperienced coordinator opposite of him for his first head coaching gig. So yes, absent extenuating circumstances nobody knows about, that was an unforgiveably bad decision making process and with so little to go on, Selmon should be viewed as having done a terrible job, even if it was really just one decision. It seems like he didn't give any thought to the process of hiring a head coach and didn't bother asking anybody else with experience about it. Again, that's assuming there were no extenuating circumstances, although I'm not sure what circumstances would excuse it. Should have had an almost sure thing lined up to get the job and several backup options.
Yeah, what was really frustrating about the whole Lebby hire was it was so obvious that were were doing exactly the same thing we had done with the coach we fired after one year. If it didn't work last time, why do exactly the same thing again. Inexperienced head coach hires inexperienced coordinators and makes wholesale changes. What could possibly go wrong?
Yes you definitely see how everyone around here loves and respects LT, Cohen, and Loaferz. And obviously the reason everyone wants Lemonis, Lebby, and Keenum gone is because they aren't white enough**
Selmon could've hired Nick Saban to replace Arnett and we still would've struggled to win 3 games last year. The hole that was dug from Leach's passing and the subsequent hiring of Arnett (not much else you could've done, though) put our program in a historically bad place which also coincided with the NIL era and Cohen's horrible response to it. Judgement on Lebby (and by extension, Selmon) begins this August.
That's just absurd to say that we were in such a bad spot that a good coach couldn't get us in position to compete with a 4-4 MAC team. Certainly we could have had a much better coach and only won 4 games because of how tough our schedule was, but we didn't give ourselves a chance by putting a first time defensive coordinator with a first time head coach.
I was also the exact same thing we did with Mullen. How'd that work out for us? Ya'll can hate Mullen for leaving, but there's no denying he's one of the best HC's we've had in program history and brought us unprecedented success.
Yeah, because Saban set the world on fire in his first year at Alabama. Oh, wait....
Mullen won five games but somehow it felt like a winning season with a bright future. Last season was dark with a feeling of no future. The HC didn't even recognize a change had to take place on defense. Defense was bad all season and we had no change in coaching.
That's fair. I think we'll know a lot more about Lebby as a HC come August & September...
My kingdom for someone with Ninja's knack for positive energy, positive action, can-do spirit, and unwillingness to allow entrenched interests to dictate corrective action. Ninja inspired a ton of confidence in the fan base. We desperately need that no bull$h!+ confidence and swagger back in athletic leadership. It carried over to coaching leadership and re-set fan expectations.
Is it possible Selmon got to Starkville, saw he was gonna be micromanaged by Keenum, and said 17 it ?
I hope he works out and I hop Selmon works out. I just want to win and I don't care who leads them. I just don't want another Croom situation. That was shear misery.
Saban didn't have the transfer portal. And he still improved them from 2-6 to 4-4 in conference. Had a terrible loss to UL Monroe and a bad loss to MSU courtesy of a couple of defensive TDs (I think? I know we had a pick six at half) but also beat Arkansas (8-5) and Tennessee (10-4) and stayed within a touchdown of LSU (12-2) and three points of UGA (11-2).
It was not the same thing at all. Mullen hired a former head coach to be his defensive coordinator and talked about how important it was to him to have a defensive coordinator with prior head coach experience.
Just to put that in perspective, we've hired two coaches in a row that were more arrogant coming into their first time head coaching gig than Dan Mullen was. Torbush wasn't even a good defensive coordinator for MSU, but Mullen not being too arrogant to think experience was important gave him a floor on the opposite side of the ball that at least gave him a chance to be competitive against a tough schedule.
Put simply, I want an AD that understands what State fans cherish, but that also has the vision to move our entire university forward. I also expect any AD to leave things better off than when he/she got here.
My continued disappointment with the current admin is that after 2+ years, I don’t see how anyone could truthfully say that any of those boxes have been checked