I knew that Polk would be back, I just didn't think it would be this soon, but at the same time it doesn't surprise me either. We are his family for all intents and purposes, even if we pissed him off to the point of extreme insanity. I'm actually glad that he is back and is mending fences without meddling, or at least I don't anticipate him meddling with Cohen. The fact remains that he is a big part of our baseball program, and it would be sad for him to just leave like he did, right or wrong. I will give him credit for getting our program to a point where we could go out and get a coach like John Cohen, at the very least. I hate that he had to come back instead of going out like he did in 97.
Another angle on this, and I have absolutely no clue whether this happened or not, is I do think it is possible that Raffo may have gone to him at some point and asked for the job, or dropped a hint like "so, who is going to be the HC after you retire" and Polk gave in and told him he would give Raffo the job.
I also thought that your comment about Polk knowing that Cohen was the right guy all along was interesting, because maybe in Polk's twisted mind, he thought that he give Raffo the keys to the car, but stay along as a safety net and give him some head coaching experience, and then when we run him off, bring Cohen in. That way they both could achieve their dream of being the HC at MSU.
My second scenario doesn't seem very plausible to me, why would you want you choose someone who would fail and hurt your program? I do think that the first scenario could have happened, and Polk being loyal to his former players and coaches just simply went too far by showing his loyalty to Raffo.
Now, what I think really happened is that Polk knew that he couldn't cut it in today's baseball community. He saw that very early in the season that our team was going to be pretty bad, with injuries mounting left and right. Then you had the NCAA investigation, which was probably started by someone very close to the program. Then, his safety net, LT was going to be gone by July. I think all of that signaled to Polk that he could possibly be in trouble. I do think he wanted to keep on coaching, but I think he saw what was going on, decided to wait until the Ole Miss series and kind of play it by ear. After we lost two out of three to them, and were outplayed in every game except for Bowen's inexplicable near no-hitter, he decided to make a break for it. He tried to force Raffo in as the new HC while there was turmoil in the AD, with the plan that by doing so he would protect his staff, his players, keep his promise to Raffo, and at the same time, he would later reveal that he would be staying on as a volunteer assistant, which would keep him involved in the program. I'm sure that his plan was to go along with a national search if Byrne went that direction, while still promoting Raffo, and he would in the meantime try to sabotage the search so that there was no other choice but Raffo. I think his plan almost worked, except I don't think he counted on our fans sending Cohen mass e-mails begging him to come that apparently overrided Polk begging him to stay at UK, and I don't think he counted on us supporting Byrne like we did.
At any rate, I'm happy that he has apparently gotten over all of this. I certainly happened a lot sooner than I thought.
