was did he do the things he did just to do them as cheaply as possible vs being incompetent? Most of his decisions revolved around "keeping MSU in the black", whether that be a coaching hire or a decision such as the luxury boxes at Dudy-Noble.
Staying in the black is a good thing, but at the same time to make money you have to spend money. People are not going to pay to watch an inferior product. Maybe LT realized that, but just put out a product that enough people would pay for.
But, what upset me the most about LT was the fact that there were a lot of times where he would rather see our teams not do something good so that he wouldn't have to deal with something, be it an NIT game, a Regional, or a bowl game. I remember him bitching about how much it cost MSU to send the basketball team to New York to play in the NIT semi-finals one time.
That, and I think his poor mentality came from being around MSU in the 60's and 70's, which was time where we either sucked at everything except for baseball for a few years, or when we did have success in football for doing the exact same thing that the Bear and Vaught were doing, were severely punished by the NCAA. It just seemed like he never got out of that mindset, whereas a lot of our fans started seeing that we COULD compete because of guys like Polk, Jackie, and Richard Williams and yes, Stansbury- eg. "Hey maybe we CAN win a National Championship in baseball. We CAN go to bowls every year and put a respectable football team on the field, and etc".
LT's fatal flaw was that he failed to have vision and pay for quality, and always took the "safe" route whether that be Polk II vs Manieri- which that was my turning point for wanting the guy fired, both Polk and LT , or Croom vs Jimbo Fischer because Jimbo had an agent, or be it something like the Junction.
