If you could keep lemonis and use the buyout money to go get a bunch of pitchers, sign me up for that.
But you have to sell that to your boosters with the buyout money.
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I agree with your overall point, but I'm not sure we don't screw up Skenes some if we get him so not sure if we end up with 8 more wins. Certainly could. Maybe having a true Friday night starter takes the pressure off and we play better defense and all of our pitchers do better because they have better matchups and are in situations more appropriate for their talent. Or maybe having a bunch of innings extended by shit defense gets in Skenes head and he starts to look a little more like the rest of our team. Just hard to predict.
I don't think that will be a hard sell unless the boosters have a hang up with players making money. THe biggest thing is you have to provide some guarantee that you're not going to come back and ask for a $4M buyout in a year or two anyway. Have to get Lemonis to buy in on having more NIL money but less security after this contract. I would think NIL money with a lower buyout in the future would sound better than a strong likelihood of being fired next year. With that much money for NIL, you'd think he'd be confident he can win enough to keep collecting a high salary and the lower buyout would be irrelevant.
5 or 6 more SEC wins around .500 SEC record with Skenes.
But it's not like we didn't win any Friday night games either. Excluding LSU, we have gone 3-9 in Friday night games by my count. In those ten losses, we've scored 1 against Auburn , 2 against Ole Miss and Arkansas, 3 against Vandy, 3 against OSU, 4 against USCe, 4 against Arizona, 5 against UK, 7 against UT. We certainly would have won more games with Skenes pitching, but with our run support, we could have gone 10-3 instead of 3-10 (counting LSU), or it could have been more like 7-6 instead of 3-10. If we don't make Skenes worse, and our team gains some confidence from having a friday night ace, it could be a 12 or 14 game difference by the time you count game 2 or 3's we would have won because of having better pitching available. IF Foxhall makes Skenes a little less effective, and mental mistakes in the field get to him, maybe when it's all said and done we "only" win 6 more even after accounting for game 2 and 3's.
I'd bet on 8 more wins before I bet on 6 more wins. It's not like we haven't had any transfer pitchers perform fine. Just not convinced it's a certainty.
I am just talking smack here; but Skenes would have MSU ranked Top-12, challenging to a National Seed
(1) he wins more Fridays
(2) he saves the pen for other games.
(3) he gives confidence to other MSU pitchers, it's probably demoralizing when the "Ace" is getting shelled
(4) makes other pitchers more comfortable in their skin, you have a real Alpha predator, the other predators take a comfortable role
(5) he would have attracted another decent pitcher to transfer
I think Skenes wins MSU 8 more SEC games directly and indirectly. So you are 16-11 to face TAM this week.