Gautreau to Head Coach

[The Peeper]

Your

It’s time to promote Gautreau to head coach and start all over next year. There is no reason for our baseball team to be this bad.

Your 1st sentence is 100% wrong. Your 2nd sentence is 100% right.

This may be a bigger problem than just misjudged talent. I find it odd that we've heard very little really from the players or coaches which makes me wonder if there are some deeper problems. When we start to lose control all the wheels fall off... every time...

What's going on?

I think we haven't heard from any players speaking about it because there aren't any leaders on that team willing to stand up and rally them. It's a bunch of individuals playing for themselves and not their coaches, fans and school. We are entering a new era where I'm afraid that will be the norm instead of the exception, in all sports, where transferring from one school to another is as easy as dropping a class

 

[ababyatemydingo]

Why did we hire LLLLLLLLLLLLLemonis to start with ? What qualifications did he have ? A losing record in the B10 ?

Because Cohen screwed up the search and was down to his fourth or fifth choice and had to ask one of the candidates that he missed on for a recommendation, when he was out of ideas

 

[ronpolk]

If we’re bringing someone home, it needs to be Lane Burroughs.

I don’t have any problems with him being on a short list. I do think he’s a great coach. Top 2 on the list for me are McDonnell and Godwin. I know McDonnell turned us down before but if I’m the AD I make him turn me down again. Then I move to Godwin.

 

[chuckster.sixpack]

You should withhold your hundreds of thousands in donations until that happens. It will be very powerful. Good job.

Bbbut, he does give $15 per month to the Bulldog Initiative

 

[ababyatemydingo]

I don’t have any problems with him being on a short list. I do think he’s a great coach. Top 2 on the list for me are McDonnell and Godwin. I know McDonnell turned us down before but if I’m the AD I make him turn me down again. Then I move to Godwin.

McDonnel isn't coming. He and Lemonis were best men at each other's weddings. He's who recommended Lemonis to Cohen

 

[mdndog1966]

What has he won to make him the #1 choice for Miss State?

He was a good fit there before. He has won his conference 2 years in a row. If the rebs had not pulled a quick one this year he would be 2-0 against them. When he was here before he was a great recruiter.

 

[dog99walker]

How many passed ball and wild pitches today?

 

[tired]

You can’t use basic logic.
i can think we suck and things are bad without thinking I should name the next coach.

No1 here is naming the next coach, it’s a message board, for conversing about topics, such as, who might be our next baseball coach.

I would go with a young coach that knows the game, and is a leader of men. Whoever that may be, he’s out there. Just need Selmon to identify him. What about you?

 

[Trojanbulldog19]

Because Cohen screwed up the search and was down to his fourth or fifth choice and had to ask one of the candidates that he missed on for a recommendation, when he was out of ideas

Because McDonnell told him no and he told him to hire his buddy instead

 

[paindonthurt]

No1 here is naming the next coach, it’s a message board, for conversing about topics, such as, who might be our next baseball coach.

I would go with a young coach that knows the game, and is a leader of men. Whoever that may be, he’s out there. Just need Selmon to identify him. What about you?

My point is there are people who think they know.
They will get butt hurt when it’s not their guy.
It happens often. We can pull up the threads. Those people are morons.

I have no idea who we should hire. But I know this. You could name our next coach and he could be the Saban of baseball and it might not work out.

 

[Perd Hapley]

If things continue to head south, I think any autopsy of the Lemonis hire and tenure has to closely examine the fact that he didn’t really have a long enough track record at IU to demonstrate that he could build something of his own. 4 years is a pretty good sample size in football or basketball when making a hire, but not in baseball. The recruiting timetable is entirely too long, and you don’t really know what the new coach can do over the long haul until you see the product after 5 or 6 years and see the culture that is entirely his.

With that in mind and mostly because of the Selmon connection, I’m kind of keeping an eye on Skip Johnson at OU this year. Right now I’m probably out on him, but I’m open to having my mind changed. He’s a guy that went to a regional year 1, followed that with a few down years that still weren’t so bad, and then last year had the run all the way to the title series. Now he’s in Year 6. OU has started the year with some head scratching OOC losses, but did take the series against a ranked TCU team this weekend. If they are able to cobble together another regional team, he might be a dark horse.

But really, we’d just need any guy with a long enough track record to know he can build and sustain success. Butch, Burroughs, and of course Godwin would also fit the bill obviously.

 

[Anon1664516582]

Because Cohen screwed up the search and was down to his fourth or fifth choice and had to ask one of the candidates that he missed on for a recommendation, when he was out of ideas

This is looking like cohen’s Rick Ray deal with the male cheerleader from jackson prep

 

[8dog]

With that in mind and mostly because of the Selmon connection, I’m kind of keeping an eye on Skip Johnson at OU this year. Right now I’m probably out on him, but I’m open to having my mind changed. He’s a guy that went to a regional year 1, followed that with a few down years that still weren’t so bad, and then last year had the run all the way to the title series. Now he’s in Year 6. OU has started the year with some head scratching OOC losses, but did take the series against a ranked TCU team this weekend. If they are able to cobble together another regional team, he might be a dark horse.

But really, we’d just need any guy with a long enough track record to know he can build and sustain success. Butch, Burroughs, and of course Godwin would also fit the bill obviously.

Hard pass on Skip Johnson. May miss the tourney for the 3rd time in 5 seasons. They went to regionals the year before he took over. Had a boat load of talent last year and was a 2 seed.

 

[Perd Hapley]

Hard pass on Skip Johnson. May miss the tourney for the 3rd time in 5 seasons. They went to regionals the year before he took over. Had a boat load of talent last year and was a 2 seed.

Which is all why I said I’m probably out on him unless they get back to the regionals again this season. Again, just a name to follow because of Selmon.

 

[Uncle Ruckus]

He was a good fit there before. He has won his conference 2 years in a row. If the rebs had not pulled a quick one this year he would be 2-0 against them. When he was here before he was a great recruiter.

So a guy who has won 2 conference titles and never made it out of a regional should be the head coach at MSU? State hired someone with a similar resume before and look where they are now.

 

[mdndog1966]

So a guy who has won 2 conference titles and never made it out of a regional should be the head coach at MSU? State hired someone with a similar resume before and look where they are now.

State is not the same job it was years ago. A lot more programs are investing money into it now. Why do you think we hired lemonis? We were turned down by better coaches. We can not hire a top 5 coach anymore. Burroughs is top 10 for sure

 

[DoggieDaddy13]

Does anybody think our hitting is all that? Maybe in comparison to our pitching and fielding, but it ain't.

Goatreaux is a cool dude and he may be okay as a hitting coach, but we need a proven head coach to get us back to competitive/hopefully dominant against the SEC.

 

[NukeDogg]

The entirety of our offense this weekend came from one guy twice (Hines Sat, Clark Sun). The offense as a whole showed absolutely nothing this week. Just no discipline. When you get a RISP, your job as a hitter is to get them in. Period. Productive AB's is the name of the game. I've seen nothing from our offense the last two years that would make me think Geautreau is worth promoting to HC.

When the other team makes errors and gives us walks, we leave the bases loaded. When we give free passes and HBPs/errors, the other team puts up 3-4 runs off it. I'm going to try and look up stats on how many times teams leave the bases loaded. It happens to us multiple times per game.

 

[Dawgg]

I've long said making the SEC Tournament and the NCAA should be the floor for this program. We're 9th in the NATION in NCAA appearances and have the most appearances in the SEC (for one more season). If you look at our tournament appearance history, we don't miss it often. I don't know why we shouldn't expect to make the postseason every season.

Here are the seasons we've made the NCAA tournament, the gaps between appearances and who the coach was at the time of the appearance.

Season	Gap	Coach
1949	2*	Patty
1953	3	Patty
1965	11	Gregory
1966	0	Gregory
1970	3	Gregory
1971	0	Gregory
1978	6	Polk
1979	0	Polk
1981	1	Polk
1983	1	Polk
1984	0	Polk
1985	0	Polk
1987	1	Polk
1988	0	Polk
1989	0	Polk
1990	0	Polk
1991	0	Polk
1992	0	Polk
1993	0	Polk
1996	2	Polk
1997	0	Polk
1998	0	McMahon
1999	0	McMahon
2000	0	McMahon
2001	0	McMahon
2003	1	Polk
2004	0	Polk
2005	0	Polk
2006	0	Polk
2007	0	Polk
2011	3	Cohen
2012	0	Cohen
2013	0	Cohen
2014	0	Cohen
2016	1	Cohen
2017	0	Cannizaro
2018	0	Henderson
2019	0	Lemonis
2021	0**	Lemonis

*The NCAA tournament began in 1947. That's why there's a 2 in 1949.
** There was no NCAA tournament in 2020, so that's why there's a 0 in 2021.

 

[The Peeper]

If things continue to head south, I think any autopsy of the Lemonis hire and tenure has to closely examine the fact that he didn’t really have a long enough track record at IU to demonstrate that he could build something of his own. 4 years is a pretty good sample size in football or basketball when making a hire, but not in baseball. The recruiting timetable is entirely too long, and you don’t really know what the new coach can do over the long haul until you see the product after 5 or 6 years and see the culture that is entirely his.

With that in mind and mostly because of the Selmon connection, I’m kind of keeping an eye on Skip Johnson at OU this year. Right now I’m probably out on him, but I’m open to having my mind changed. He’s a guy that went to a regional year 1, followed that with a few down years that still weren’t so bad, and then last year had the run all the way to the title series. Now he’s in Year 6. OU has started the year with some head scratching OOC losses, but did take the series against a ranked TCU team this weekend. If they are able to cobble together another regional team, he might be a dark horse.

But really, we’d just need any guy with a long enough track record to know he can build and sustain success. Butch, Burroughs, and of course Godwin would also fit the bill obviously.

With that logic this is really only the beginning of Lemonis 4th year since the '20 season was only 16 games long. He's had 3 full ones and now a partial, are we supposed to wait for year 5 or 6 to evaluate him using your above description?

 

[Uncle Ruckus]

State is not the same job it was years ago. A lot more programs are investing money into it now. Why do you think we hired lemonis? We were turned down by better coaches. We can not hire a top 5 coach anymore. Burroughs is top 10 for sure

Please tell me how Burroughs is a top 10 coach? I agree it's difficult to pull coaches in baseball, but it doesn't have as much to do with more programs investing. It's just how baseball is. LSU, the biggest baseball school in the country, had to go to at least their 3rd choice. It's just how it is. But State can find a coach with a better resume than Burroughs.

 

[Perd Hapley]

State is not the same job it was years ago. A lot more programs are investing money into it now. Why do you think we hired lemonis? We were turned down by better coaches. We can not hire a top 5 coach anymore. Burroughs is top 10 for sure

I would augment that by saying we’ve never been able to hire a Top 5 coach, and even Top 10 is pushing it unless we have some pre-existing connection like we did with Cohen or Polk II. Its just very rare for coaches at that level to job hop in college baseball. LSU was able to pull Maineri and Jay Johnson, who were each Top 10-15ish coaches, and A&M was able to get Schloss who was probably Top 10. But it doesn’t happen much. Even LSU got turned down by Bianco, for instance, and he’s an alum.

 

[Perd Hapley]

With that logic this is really only the beginning of Lemonis 4th year since the '20 season was only 16 games long. He's had 3 full ones and now a partial, are we supposed to wait for year 5 or 6 to evaluate him using your above description?

How in the world did you get that out of my post? The whole point is that if Lemonis had stayed 5-6 years at IU, we might have seen some of the things we are seeing now in the latter years of that tenure and we would have gone a different direction. Or maybe not, it could be that a lot of our current situation is due to post-natty complacency. But still, more data is better when making a hire. Anyway, he’s very much on the hot seat and is very much being judged off this year and last year. I never said anything contradictory to that.

 

[IBleedMaroonDawg]

Why did we hire LLLLLLLLLLLLLemonis to start with ? What qualifications did he have ? A losing record in the B10 ?

He went to back to back CWS. If he is so ******, how did he accomplish that? The idea that our players coached themselves is silly. He does have some real problems of his own making but it didn't blow up immediately.

He is OK when it comes to managing established players and made the right decisions to win a national championship. Having Chris Sims in the bullpen really helped. It looks like he really is bad at identifying talented players to begin with and I can't see any player development at all I think he let himself be suckered by our pitching coach. He has let things become disarrayed it is alarming. It's not just our pitching. The way we play in the field or bat in crucial situations makes it look like we have a complete lack of leadership on the field I am in the dugout.

He has not been able to pull the reigns back to get us in line. Injuries to our pitching arms last year took us out of contention, but he has never figured out how to get us back in contention. If he doesn't improve enough to at least make us look like a competitive baseball team by the end of April, he is definitely going to find a new job. I hope he can only because I'm a Mississippi State baseball fan but I really don't have much hope it will happen.

 

[Maroon Eagle]

Thanks again to @Dawgg

 

[Perd Hapley]

He is OK when it comes to managing established players and made the right decisions to win a national championship. Having Chris Sims in the bullpen really helped. It looks like he really is bad at identifying talented players to begin with and I can't see any player development at all.

Good post and I think this part above is worth a closer look.

When it comes to both managing established players and developing new and established players, I think all those things WERE happening for 3 years, but now they are not. I don’t know why.

When Lemonis took over in 2019, there weren’t too many really established guys (multi-year starter types) on the roster. Mangum, obviously. Lets look at other players that became very important:

Tanner Allen - .797 OPS as a freshmen under Henderson. Good player but still had a lot of room to grow and was just getting started. Ballooned up to .943 in 2019 and then to 1.072 / SEC POTY in 2021. All that happened under Lemonis.

Jordan Westburg - went from being “banana boy” who mostly rode the bench in 2018 to a 1st round pick in 2019-2020 under Lemonis.

Justin Foscue - hit .241 with a sub-.700 OPS as a freshmen in 2018 under Henderson. Became a monster and a first round pick in 2019-2020 under Lemonis.

Rowdey Jordan - solid player throughout his career, but had his best season in his 3rd full year under Lemonis in 2021.

Ethan Small - went from 3.2 ERA / 122 K’s in 2018 to 1.93 ERA / 176 K’s under Lemonis. Another 1st round pick.

JT Ginn - only played for Lemonis. Solid freshmen season before arm trouble set in.

Logan Tanner - only played for Lemonis, was probably the best catcher in the country in 2021.

Will Bednar / Landon Sims - only played for Lemonis. Badasses that more or less carried us to the natty.

So all this development and improvement and coaching was happening for 3 whole years, and now its all a total shitshow. It could only post-natty burnout / complacency, or bad recruiting…and I don’t think that its bad recruiting. The whole thing has a very Richard Williams in 1997-1998 sort of feel.

 

[The Peeper]

How in the world did you get that out of my post? The whole point is that if Lemonis had stayed 5-6 years at IU, we might have seen some of the things we are seeing now in the latter years of that tenure and we would have gone a different direction. Or maybe not, it could be that a lot of our current situation is due to post-natty complacency. But still, more data is better when making a hire. Anyway, he’s very much on the hot seat and is very much being judged off this year and last year. I never said anything contradictory to that.

"4 years is a pretty good sample size in football or basketball when making a hire, but not in baseball. The recruiting timetable is entirely too long, and you don’t really know what the new coach can do over the long haul until you see the product after 5 or 6 years"

This is how I got that out of your post. Sounds to me like you're saying he hasn't had long enough when you stated, "you don't really know that the new coach can do over the long haul until you see the product after 5 or 6 years."

 

[Perd Hapley]

"4 years is a pretty good sample size in football or basketball when making a hire, but not in baseball. The recruiting timetable is entirely too long, and you don’t really know what the new coach can do over the long haul until you see the product after 5 or 6 years"

This is how I got that out of your post. Sounds to me like you're saying he hasn't had long enough when you stated, "you don't really know that the new coach can do over the long haul until you see the product after 5 or 6 years."

Yes, and we are now in Year 5 with Lemonis. We are now seeing the beginning of everything being his…..recruits, staff, development, strength and conditioning, training / discipline, and what have you. And obviously it doesn’t look good at present time. And of course it was still mostly his last year, too.

What I was saying is his body of work at IU, while solid, was maybe not a big enough sample size to get the full picture. And for future hires, we should look at guys with a longer duration of success at one spot.

 

[Rupert Jenkins]

What did he win at IU ? I don't remember anything special. If we hired a middle of the pack at best football coach out of the Big 10 nobody would be pleased and we would call it a garbage hire. Often a new coach can come in and improve things with new approaches and then after a couple years it fades away. Thats what we had happen.

 

[Perd Hapley]

What did he win at IU ? I don't remember anything special. If we hired a middle of the pack at best football coach out of the Big 10 nobody would be pleased and we would call it a garbage hire. Often a new coach can come in and improve things with new approaches and then after a couple years it fades away. Thats what we had happen.

Didn’t win anything major, but 3 regionals in 4 years at a school that only had 7 regional appearances in their entire history when he took our job is significant whether you want to believe it or not. IU is a historical doormat program.

I mean for comparison, people right now are pining for Burroughs who has only 2 regionals in 5 years at La Tech and those same 2 in 9 total years as a HC. And there’s still an argument that he would be good….I’m not a Burroughs hater by any means.

 

[beachbumdawg]

What did he win at IU ? I don't remember anything special. If we hired a middle of the pack at best football coach out of the Big 10 nobody would be pleased and we would call it a garbage hire. Often a new coach can come in and improve things with new approaches and then after a couple years it fades away. Thats what we had happen.

We did - his name was Mxxrehead