Querstion for you guys...

[OleMissAintHereAgain]

Taking a break from the recruiting hoopla, I have a question. With the success of the football team this season and the basketball season pretty much in the crapper, does it put more pressure on Cohen to have a successful season?

My answer is it does and here's why...it has been a long time since we have been good in football and terrible in basketball. Our fans are looking for something to cheer for and usually this time of year it has been basketball. Well as we all know, that is out the window this year. I have had a lot of people asking about baseball season already and that usually doesn't start til mid February at the earliest. Cohen definitely needs to show some drastic improvement over the last couple of years. I.E. 32-35 wins with some kind of postseason. I know we are still young and I am the biggest believer in Cohen but the pressure is beginning to mount within the fanbase to be successful in baseball again from what I am hearing.

Thoughts?</p>

 

[Todd4State]

I believe I've said this before in past years, and I still believe it to this day- there is no excuse for a coach to have three straight losing seasons. Not at a SEC school, and I don't care which SEC school we're talking about. That applies to Cohen as well.

Reason being- the SEC, like it is in football, is the top baseball conference in the country. That in and of itself should make any SEC school attractive to good players. When you have good players like that, you should be at an advantage over your non-conference compeition for the most part- roughly 26 out of 56 games. As you know, anything can happen in baseball, so let's say a team goes 20-6 non-conference. Well, that means an 8-22 conference record- which is only one win better than us last year in SEC play- gets you to a .500 season. As you can see, you can have a fairly bad team and still get a winning record. It's not that hard to accomplish a winning season in baseball, and I'll even go so far as to say it's not that hard to make a regional.

So, I do agree with you that Cohen needs to win this year. I don't think he needs to do anything spectacular like go to Omaha, but I think people need to see progress in the form of wins. I don't think there is a magic number of wins, but I think even 29 would be enough for the time being.

I would be willing to bet that Cohen knows this as well. That's a big reason why you are seeing a much easier non-conference slate this year, and also why we are playing fewer non-conference games when the SEC schedule starts- to try to give us as much of an advantage to win games as possible. After the first four weeks of the season, we will be almost halfway done with the season in terms of games played.

Now, my personal opinion is that if I was the AD and we had a losing record, I would probably fire him. Since I'm not the AD, what I think would happen if they have another losing season is that changes on the coaching staff would be made, and then he would get one more year. Regardless, if and when that happens, whoever takes over will be taking over a team with some pretty good looking players in terms of talent, so either way, we will be OK unless we make some horrible coaching hire or bring Polk back.

Of interest- I was at the ABCA (American Baseball Coaches of America) convention yesterday in Nashville, and I was talking to someone who found out I went to MSU. The guy I was talking to knew Mike Bradford, who is CT Bradford's Dad, and he was talking about what a great player he is. It has been awhile since I have heard things like that about MSU players. Plus, I missed all of the recruiting hoopla.