Mississippi State baseball hot board: Top candidates to replace Chris Lemonis
Mississippi State stunned the college baseball world on Monday with its firing of head coach Chris Lemonis. Who will replace him?
Top candidates to replace Chris Lemonis
- Thread starter PeteNakos
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College baseball world is the SEC and maybe ACC, Big 12. I doubt anyone but sports writers were stunned.
The writing was on the wall. Waiting would have only delayed the inevitable.
May not be a good target, but Lane Burroughs has been really good at LA Tech, and has led them to 3-4 (I can’t remember) tournament appearances there.
Are we thinking Selmon goes to the well again? A short search, then a lazy OU hire would be par for the course with this guy. I really hope he does not do that.
We will all just wait on Bert Stare, thanks***Mississippi State baseball hot board: Top candidates to replace Chris Lemonis
Mississippi State stunned the college baseball world on Monday with its firing of head coach Chris Lemonis. Who will replace him?www.on3.com
If he does that he should be fired on the spot
On the other hand, I would hate to overlook a slam dunk just because he came from Oklahoma. I understand your sentiment and I feel the same way. If he hired an Oklahoma coach, he'd better be heads and shoulders above anything else we could have attracted.
Like I said on another thread. If he does that the fan base will be more piss off at him than they would if he did not fire Lemonis.
No offense Pete, but I'll wait on SixPack Magazine and @Drebin to weigh in.
We're about to find out how elite baseball is at State. Our last hire was Lemonis, someone few likely heard of, who wasn't remotely our first choice. But he got us a Natty, a couple of CWS appearances and a recent regional. Is that enough to lure our top choices or do we find that our guy is in Rustin or Hattiesburg? Maybe we go the Cannizaro route and hire a top asst without the baggage.
Tens of people were stunned, Pete.Mississippi State baseball hot board: Top candidates to replace Chris Lemonis
Mississippi State stunned the college baseball world on Monday with its firing of head coach Chris Lemonis. Who will replace him?
I think it's safe to say with our facilities and fan support if we can't land a big time hire this time, that doesn't bode well for the next decade or two.
The potential here is pretty close to elite. This will be a big hire for Selmon.
Cannizaro was an asst for 1 (ONE) year at LSU after being a scout for about 6. That's it, that was his experience
Agreed. If the OU guy is just him, then I am all for it. I am just playing my advocate, I guess.
There’s not an Oklahoma assistant that would be an acceptable hire, IMO. Oklahoma’s head coach would get some eye rolls from our fan base, but also you are talking about a guy who coached his team to a runner up finish in Omaha, which is nothing to sneeze at (we will ignore who he lost to in the finals).
They were also a host last year and won the Big 12.
We’ll never know how Cannizzaro would have turned out at this level. For some reason Cohen fell in love with him but he never should have been hired for this job based on his resume. The fact that he never even sniffed a job like State tells me it wouldn’t have ended well regardless of his extracurricular activities.
I remember Mainieri being shocked he offered Cannizaro the job and basically saying so publicly. But the baseball part isn't what got him, and thankfully Cann laid an absolutely rock solid foundation for the next guy.
2 realistic options how I see it, Cohen wanted an inexperienced guy to give him an opportunity to still exert control and meddle or he saw a lot of potential and was in a unique position to provide guidance where needed to help a young guy get on his feet.
Having to make a hire in November played a big role in that search.
I think Cannizzaro was an excellent hire. Obviously it didn't work out long term.
Cohen catches a lot of flack around here, but he did a good job hiring coaches.
We didn't have to make a hire in November. The right answer was Henderson as interim coach and make the hire in June. But Cohen 17ed it up. His record hiring coaches was a few big hits, and several incredible busts.
I can't speak to his resume, but my FIL is a big Tulane booster and he was sad when we hired Cannizaro because they all thought he would be the next Tulane coach. I remember the buzz after the hire was that he was a superstar coach in the making and State snatched him up first.
I think you're missing the right reason. Hiring somebody without the resume would have let Cohen beat his chest about how smart he was and how he identified talent.
Let's not forget that after making an atrocious hire in Moorhead because he thought we needed to change directions, he was ready to offer an SEC head coaching job to a NFL special teams coordinator that had never called plays and had just barely done some recruiting in college. We were only saved from that by the NYG's being even more arrogant in thinking they could identify head coaching talent in somebody that hadn't had a job to prepare them for it. And I'm a Joe Judge fan and hope that he gets back on path that lets him have another shot at being a head coach. But good gosh the ego you have to have to think that based on an interview and some references that you can successfully identify somebody as ready to be a head coach when they've never even called plays.
I disagree that he "17ed it up" by not making Henderson interim. Cannizzaro had the recruiting train rolling. I don't think you can hold his moral failings against John Cohen. Maybe you can say Cohen should have seen that coming and count Cannizzaro as a bad hire. I disagree.
But what other busts did Cohen have? Joe Moorhead was not a good hire. Nikki McCray-Penson (RIP) did not turn out well. That's 3 bad outcomes.
Cohen hired by my count 16 head coaches. (I actually looked this up the other night because I was curious.) I'm going to consider 14 of those, excluding cross country for reasons I'll get into.*
Baseball: Andy Cannizzaro and Chris Lemonis. I will say 1 for 2 in making good hires (though I made feelings known on Cannizzaro already)
Football: Joe Moorhead and Mike Leach. 1 for 2 again
Women's Basketball: Nikki McCray-Penson and Sam Purcell. 1 for 2 again
The above 6 hires you can quibble with. I could make a case for any of the busts that they weren't really busts, and you could make a case against any of the 3 hires that I count as successful. The rest, I think, are more straightforward.
Men's Basketball: Chris Jans. Objectively a great hire 1-0
Softball: Samantha Ricketts. She took the team to the super regionals for the first time in school history. 1-0
Soccer: Tom Anagnost. James Armstrong. Anagnost led the team to the NCAAs for the first time in school history in his second season. James Armstrong had the first two winning seasons in the SEC in school history. He won the SEC championship, which we'd obviously never done. He earned a 1 seed in the tournament and made the sweet 16. 2-0
Volleyball: Julie Darty. Had the best season in school history in 2021. First ever national ranking, first ever NCAA tournament, and finished a game behind Kentucky for the conference title. 1-0
No hires in men's or women's tennis.
Track: Chris Woods. I don't really know enough about track and field to comment. But it seems like we've been pretty successful, and he's still here after nearly 6 seasons, so I don't think he's a bust. 1-0
Men's golf: Similarly, I don't really follow golf, but I see that he's consistently made the tournament, which they weren't doing before, and it looks like he won an NCAA regional for the first time ever. 1-0
Women's golf: Charlie Ewing. First SEC championship in school history. Made NCAAs every year. 1-0
So out of these 8 hires, 5 are or were possibly the best coach in school history (at the time), one more is easily the best coach on campus of the big 4, and 2 are maybe just OK. So overall that's 11 good and 3 bad. Really 7 great, 4 OK and 3 bad. And one of the OK ones won a national championship.
*Cross Country- He hired Patrick McGregor, and he served as head coach for 2 years. I have no idea if he was any good, if he was fired, if he left for a better job, any of that. Then he gave the job to the track and field coach. If you think one or both of these guys was a huge bust, then OK.
People don’t just suddenly start sexting from the dugout during gsmes without exhibiting red flag behavior for years. People in the college baseball community would have had some knowledge of this & was likely at least part of the reason his Alma mater Tulane didn’t hire him. I remember a few months before he was fired there was a video posted of him shooting hoops with Blair Shafer. People were commenting how cool it was. I was thinking that is one creepy dude.
You may be right. I don't recall a whisper of it during the coaching search process, which you always seem to hear at least veiled references to.
Either way, the on-field results worked out quite nicely, so I don't think anything was 17ed up by that hire. I still included him in the 3 bad outcomes.
We’ve done really well not landing a big time hire.
The only thing it would mean is most fans who think we can get anyone we want are just dumb.