Quote Originally Posted by Bulldog1 View Post
We've got to reel in an elite coach to right the ship. Hopefully we do.
We need more than an elite coach- we need an elite staff.

I think most of this falls on Cohen to be honest and it comes down to we have been taking way too many shortcuts to try to stay at a high level and while some of those shortcuts worked short term it's all coming back to roost now.

1. Bringing in way too many JUCO's and having a coach that evaluated them poorly. We need to get back to recruiting mostly high school players and we need to start to try to develop our own players rather than rely on JUCO coaches to develop them for us. The thing about it is there is zero reason for us to have to rely on them so heavily. Here's an example- Tim Tadlock is a former JUCO coach so you would think that he would be fairly sympathetic to JUCO players. He currently has six on his entire roster- one who started out at TCU. MSU has six in our current class alone. And unless Vansau and MacNamee are cut I fully expect them back next year and then you add in the JUCO pitchers assuming no one is cut in the offseason which I admit is a stretch but stay with me here- and we're talking about around 10 JUCO players out of 35 on the entire roster. When 25-30% of your team is JUCO players that's not good. We need someone that will find a guy like a Brent Rooker, a Hunter Renfroe, or a player with a comparable build and develop them over a period of 3-4 years.

2. We didn't realize that Wes Johnson was accelerating his program too quickly and it cost us a lot of arms. Velocity is a good quality to have but it much be done correctly. We need to go back to that type of program but instead of rushing through it we need to do it properly because what we are doing right now is limiting the ceiling of our pitchers. And that's not that good either.

3. We took a chance on Cann and unfortunately that blew up in our face. Not a lot anyone could do about it. Had we used Henderson as an interim last year though, we could have done a more proper search and gotten a much safer and qualified head coach which is essentially what we are trying to do now. Hindsight is 20/20.

4. We need to have better balance in our classes. I think some of that is from taking too many JUCO's that don't work out. When that happens, you have to play freshmen. We need to start trying to stack classes of about 15 high school players that get through the draft and process as necessary. If it works out you have every position covered with a veteran player and only the most talented younger players start. What we're doing is essentially the same thing that Jackie did with football. We simply can not afford to have a class with literally no high school pitchers in it like we did with our current group of freshmen. And the class before had almost no position players other than a catcher.

5. We need to hire the best baseball S&C guy. It seems to me like he gets his ass in gear after we have a losing season. And I'm pretty sure having a poor S&C program was a factor in our pitchers getting hurt as well. This is the main reason why we look "small". Because it's sure not a height issue.