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This is why you have to have an AD that knows when to fire a coach

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jb1020

Freshman
Jun 7, 2009
1,866
87
48
I'm only 30 so I haven't seen very many coaches fired at MSU but this reminds me of when Polk finally left.

Stans finally leaves about 3 or 4 years after he should have been let go....the transition has been a complete 17ing disaster.

Polk finally leaves after way too many years of sticking around...complete 17ing disaster for about 2 years.

Croom was the only coach that i thought we let go in a fairly timely manner....we had a very competitive team in year one, bowling every year since.

hopefully we've learned our lesson and guys like Polk and Stans haven't "earned the right to leave on their own terms."
 
Seinfeld

Seinfeld

All-American
Nov 30, 2006
11,087
6,893
113
If Stans had been let go 3-4 years ago, it would have been following 3 NCAA tourneys and an NIT semi final loss over a 5 year span. In other words, it wasn't going to happen.

Everything that has affected or led up to this season has been unfortunate, but I don't know how much could have reasonably been changed.
 
H

Hanmudog

Redshirt
Apr 30, 2006
5,853
0
0
Who in the hell fires a coach after winning 24 games, the SEC tournament, and going to the NCAA tourney? That's moronic.

Stansbury was fired when he should have been fired. I don't fault Stricklin for the timing of it. It remains to be seen if we made the right hire though.
 
T

Todd4State

Redshirt
Mar 3, 2008
17,411
1
0
Polk is a College Baseball Hall of Fame Coach who has had tremendous historical success at MSU and had the field named after him. Getting rid of him would have been extremely complicated. Not to mention he had taken us to Omaha the year before in 2008. I certainly was not a big fan of Polk II, but there is no way I could advocate firing a baseball coach in the offseason after taking us to Omaha.

The mistake we made with Polk was bringing him back.

Not only that, had Polk not resigned, I'm 99% sure he would have been back the following season as bad as 2008 was. Byrne caught a lot of hell from many of our fans and former players for not hiring Raffo, and I can only imagine how much hell he would have caught for firing Polk.

On top of all of all that, what happened was going to happen no matter what with Polk- it was more of a question of when rather than if. Polk lived off of McMahon's guys for three years (left with Maholm, Papelbon, Tatum) and then had a couple of decent classes early (Rea, Easley, Moreland) but his recruiting was so archaic it was going to catch up to us and it just happened to catch up to us in 2008. There really wasn't any avoiding it unless we somehow were able to hire an assistant head coach like a Cohen that was doing the recruiting and calling most of the shots and a pitching coach like Butch managing the pitching staff properly with Polk simply as a figurehead- and as you can imagine that would be extremely complicated, awkward, and it probably wouldn't work without a ton of conflict.
 
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HD6

HD6

Sophomore
Apr 8, 2003
10,019
108
63
If Polk had been smart, he would have retired after 2007. Everyone would have had good memories, and Raffo would have been named head coach.
 
QuaoarsKing

QuaoarsKing

All-Conference
Mar 11, 2008
5,831
2,461
113
We could have fired Stansbury maybe 1 year earlier, but that's about it. Couldn't fire him after 2010, since we were possibly the first team out of the NCAAT and had been in in 2008 and 2009.
In 2011, we missed the NIT entirely, had the Hawaii fight, and lots of suspensions and Twitter/interview stupidity. Even then, without the Great Crash-and-Burn of 2012 to convince most of the remaining believers, it would have been very difficult to fire him.
 
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