unfortunately, i believe the minority on this issue one is you Mr. Gayton
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And we will continue to lose and they will win. But hey, morality Olympics!!!! Those pretend gold medals will look great right beside all our other pretend trophies. Go win. No one gives a shit what you do on the way there. Or at least that is how winners think. Then again, we are not winners. So maybe we do not think like that.
I like when we have a coach that is a likeable guy, but I like winning more. We don't pay coaches to be good dudes. Reminds me an awful lot of the Presidential races....any time someone says, "but he just doesn't seem like a nice guy", I'm sorry but most of the best leaders the world has ever seen weren't great dudes. Sometimes it takes being not a great dude to make some of the decisions it takes to win the damn war.
How much are the talking heads talking about Beard and Kiffin's past right now? Ole Miss fans and AD have the mindset of "we aren't marrying the guy, we are just hiring the best guy to win games"....and that's exactly what is happening. Meanwhile we have a likeable plump little bucket sitter destroying our baseball program and a likeable AD unwilling to fire his ass....but at least they're likeable, right?
We are in the most competitive conference in amateur athletics, and half of our fan base acts like we are Mississippi College or Belhaven. And we wonder why we can't overcome our financial issues.....we couldn't win if we had A&M's money bc we are too nice.
Ole Miss is a bunch of pricks. But they know it, own it, and are the pricks sitting in the Top 16 in pretty much every sport. Not saying it's right, just saying it's facts.
The premise that winning and character/values are mutually exclusive is false.
I totally agree
To OP I'll add my 2 cents that I'm sure most will disagree.
While NIL and portal changed things short term I don't think the model for MSU to compete is any different than it used to be. We never were top in recruiting or getting top coaches in our history and still had pockets of success - Jackie and Mullen eras. So what is our formula?
1. Get smart, good respectable coaches. Leach was part of it but he was stubborn but he was close if he would have just adapted his O.
2. Get top talent in Miss. It may not be ranked high in nation but it will win games. And get the kids that want to be here. Yeah pay to play but we need some Bulldog True Maroon leaders in the locker room. We can all name some True Bulldogs that even today would stick it out for their school and still get paid.
3. Get smart on scheduling - like get some easy wins like OM does every year and put them all up front so we are 3-0 to build some excitement even if it is false like OM does. A month of positivity matters.
4. Invest in PR efforts, media, etc. Highlight our school, Starkville, etc. instead of our fans running it down all the time. We have some good stories to tell that make MSU a great place to be. I see it all the time from parents and kids of other schools that end up at MSU. MSU is doing a lot of stuff right. We are our own worst enemies.