Heard from a friend in Monroe that Lemonis is a finalist for the ULM job. I’m not high on him as a coach, but thought he might hold out for a bigger name than ULM.
Lemonis a finalist at ULM
- Thread starter G-Dawg
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Lemo definitely strikes me as a guy who could be comfortable being a developmental program at a lower level.
He could hold out for a year or two for a bigger gig but I’m sure he feels an obligation to his staff to help find them employment because they weren’t cashing those big checks. The headlines read that Lemonis was fired but in reality the entire staff was fired, sans Parker.
He needs a low key, relatively low expectation gig to rebuild his coaching future.
Its hard to know what was off with him since 2021. But honestly speaking, I never got the impression that he couldn’t recruit, or that he didn’t know the game. Locker room discipline, culture, and complacency seem to be the main factors. If he re-ignites the fire, I could see whatever change of scenery he chooses being successful for him. Certainly wish him the best.
I lived and coached in Monroe at NLU (basketball) which is now called ULM years ago. It is a good place to live and expectations in sports are not real high as far as football. I think Lemonis would be ok at ULM as he would not be under any pressure. I wish him the best.
I don’t think he’s getting a P4 coaching job. Maybe in the Big 10. CUSA or Sunbelt sounds about right for him. People understand that nothing he’s done before or after the first 4 years he was at State thats anything special at all.
Sometimes you have to be the alpha as head coach and from what I can see - he wasn't an alpha. From 19-21 - he had alpha's that were also good players.
Its more than a rumor according to AI:
That's a good landing spot for him, and I think he's a good option for them, but I'd be a lot more bullish on their prospects if he had sat out a year. I don't know how much was just him being complacent and/or losing some fire, but it's enough of a possibility that I'd rather hire him after he sat around for a year missing baseball.
I hope he lands somewhere and has success. I will always be thankful for his leadership leading up to our championship, just like I will always be mystified at the cliff we fell off afterwards.
Still, he's a great guy and I wish him nothing but the best.
Still, he's a great guy and I wish him nothing but the best.
I just checked. Monroe has a Lowes AND a Home Depot so the bucket supply would never become a problem. I bet the deal is as good as done.
Can you imagine how much we would all love buckets if lemonis had kept it rolling after the natty?
Would be a great job for him. Fairly good fan support, and their fans can brag how their coach has a natty.
The recruiting misses, particularly in the portal, were striking.
I’ll just agree to disagree. Reese, Frei, Ledbetter, Sullivan, Yeager, DeBrule, Dohm, Simmons, Khal Stephen, Hujsak, Reeves and Larry were all quality additions. Ligon and Joe Powell were 2 more solid contributors. That’s 14 guys in the past 5 years from portal or COVID year that really helped us. May have been some others I missed in there. But you can’t build an entire team through the portal at the SEC level. Gotta have the high school players as the foundation. Being able to land 3-4 guys per year in the portal that are solid players and strong contributors means you are doing your job.
Juco guys like Preston Johnson and Ben Davis have been huge additions. Overlooked players that our staff found.
From the HS ranks, Lo and Bednar were 1st rounders and were obvious studs. Dakota Jordan was a stud. Hines was our all-time HR king and was a very good college player. Loftin was a guy everyone wanted who has battled injuries. Mershon was a talented guy. Siary was an overlooked recruit who has been developed into an SEC weekend starter. Pico Kohn battled injuries but was still an elite arm that became our Fri night guy and will likely be taken in the Top 5 rounds. Highfill was a highly sought after player who flashed as a hitter as a freshmen before injuries took their toll.
Have we had misses? Of course. So has everyone else. But overall, talent hasn’t been what has held us back.
List all the misses. And attempt to be half as detailed as you were with the additions.
He whiffed on every big fish he went after. If you bring in enough guys from the AAC and the subelt, one or two are bound to hit at some point.
chatgpt say he rolling in at 260 based on a photo, so that would be about a 70 pound differential, almost two 5 gallon buckets of water
Simmons, Ligon and Dohm all gave us nothing. And that’s the biggest issue from a personnel standpoint. We didn’t get impact pitching from the portal.
Amani Larry was awful. Debrule was just serviceable at best. We had a really good offensive portal this year.
Nothing changed with Lem. He was always lazy. He just inherited the country’s toughest program with good players. He made it soft over his tenure.
You were the one that brought up the misses. SoI’ll mostly leave that to you.
A better question would be where have we had a profound lack of talent that has held us back? I’ll certainly give you the 2021-2022 pitching recruiting class that Foxhall went near 0-fer on, if not for Pico. And that class ultimately cost him his job. Catcher between 2021 and 2nd half of 2025 Joe Powell was certainly an adventure. But overall, we’ve had enough pieces. We were far from the most talented team in the country in 2021 when we won it all, or in 2013 when we almost did.
End of the day, you can’t say Lemonis sucked as a game day coach / strategist, a motivator / culture builder, AND a recruiter / identifier of recruiters when we’ve been 32-28 in SEC play and in the postseason the past 2 years. He had to be capable in at least one of those areas…..because teams with both bad players and bad coaches get obliterated in this league.
We've had a collection of midgets on the middle infield. We haven't had a dominant closer since Sims left. Our catching situation has been embarrassing. Our middle of the order guys over the last four years have been incredibly inconsistent. Our stars have underachieved. We haven't had a true ACE in a while. Most of our guys have not performed in the clutch.
That 2021 team (constructed mainly from players Lemonis inherited) had premium defense up the middle, a shutdown catcher, clutch players, and legit frontline AND bullpen arms. We were built for tourney runs. As those players ran out of eligibility, we have regressed. They were replaced with lesser players.
And every time we have gone after big portal fish, like Montgomery or the handful of pitchers we've pursued, we have whiffed. All the names you mentioned have been solid to good. Solid to good in the SEC gets you regional road games at best. We have to get better.
Not sure if serious.
Dohm had a 1.23 ERA in 30 innings as our closer last year, and a 10-4 record over 2 years and 70+ innings. Not sure what more you want. Injuries of course kept it being even better. Not much the staff can do to control that.
Ligon was the Sunday starter / occasional bullpen arm we expected him to be. Wasn’t a star but didn’t suck either. Had some good moments and certainly finished strong and was improved this year. His ERA was about equal to the league ERA as a whole. 80+ innings in 2 years.
Simmons had some very key moments on the 2021 run for us, and given what he had to come back from….had a hell of a year as our top arm from the pen for most of the season.
Saying any of those guys “gave us nothing” is pretty ridiculous.
You conveniently forgot about Stephen from just last year. And yet another that I forgot about was Tyler Davis who was very reliable for us once Parker took over.
Larry struggled last year but was a .963 OPS player who went 19-21 on SB attempts in 2023…..and was also was solid at 2B. Far from awful.
Serviceable is OK, and he was very good defensively. This isn’t a video game where you just go grab 5 guys to each give you 1.100 OPS and 25 HR’s when you have 5 guys leave. I’m not sure you are grasping that.
Agreed.
So he’s lazy and he sucks at recruiting and he’s soft, yet we’ve still won more games than we’ve lost the past 2 years in the most elite league in America. It’s literally not possible for ALL of those things to be true at the same time.
Unless he just wants to stay in the south, I would think he could do a lot better than ULM. They have pretty decent baseball facilities for a smaller school, but their budget is pretty small. Upside is they will hold on to a coach for a long time even if he is not successful. Federico had no success there and they held on to him for 8 years even though he never had a winning season.
Not to mention Lemo would probably be making 1/10th of what he made at MSU. Federico's salary was 126k
Not to mention Lemo would probably be making 1/10th of what he made at MSU. Federico's salary was 126k
They also have a Firehouse Subs. Those buckets are only $3 and come with a lid!
"Won more games than we lost" is a helluva low expectation for this program. We went to omaha 4 straight years ending in 2021 and it's been a shltshow since. I know the "winning more games than we lost" response to that is coming, but if that's the expectation at Mississippi State, yeah, that's a shltshow.
Dohm pitched 1.1 innings in conference play. And that’s what matters. Pull any of these guys conference stats You would never take them if you knew that’s what they were gonna do. I’m not going to go reccite them all. Anyone that looks at them will agree with me. I mean Larry hit .213 with a .775 OPS
I didn’t conveniently forget Stephen. He was awesome. Why would I argue that? But you gotta get more than 1 starter that can help you on the mound in 4 years.
I didn’t say he sucked at recruiting. I said we didn’t have enough impact arms from the portal. That’s been our primary personnel issue. And yes we are soft as hell. We had 11 draftees AND Hines last year and were a 2 seed. Possibly the worst coaching job of his tenure.
He obviously didn’t meet the standard these past few years. That’s not up for debate.
But the point is that you simply can’t win more than you lose in the SEC with bad coaching, bad culture, AND bad players. At least one (if not more than one) of those things has to be very good / elite for the other 2 to suck, given the results that we had. This narrative that all of them were terrible just isn’t true.
Never made the argument that they were terrible. Only that they weren't good enough. And that's on the coach that's recruiting them.
And we are paying him $ millions. The lower his salary the more we have to pay, as we will pay the diff between what we contractually owe and what the ULM job pays him. No doubt, they can get him cheap.
In 2024? Yes. Because he was injured. Pitched a lot more than that in 2023 when he was healthy. And then he was a 3rd round pick after 2024. So, you’re saying we can’t get impact arms, and you’re essentially using an injury against the staff when they bring in an elite talent who was drafted in 3rd round. Not really following the logic.
1) Which year did Larry hit .213 / .775 in conference play?
2) .775 OPS isn’t bad at all for SEC only stats, especially for a middle infielder.
Stephen, Dohm, and Davis were all very good players. Simmons was a quality bullpen arm. Ligon was serviceable. That’s 3 guys who excelled when healthy and 2 who were solid contributors. 5 guys…..a lot more than “1 guy in 4 years”.
Its a difficult ask to try and get a Fri/Sat SEC starter in the portal every year. Nobody does that. And if you even find yourself needing to do that more often than once every 2-3 years, then it likely means you had big misses from your high school recruits.
Kind of speaks to what I’ve been saying….the talent hasn’t been the problem. Regardless of other 9 draftees, Stephen and Lo as our front end rotation guys should have been enough almost by itself to get us a host site.
This is a wild hill to die on. But if you think those guys helped us, go for it. Anyone can pull their conference stats. They are not good