This is 100% correct. Cohen and him had a couple issues on assistants but we would've worked through that. Cohen and Mississippi State had nothing to do with why Vic ultimately left. But it was good cover.
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I personally don't consider it wasted money any time we spend on a sport that we can be consistently nationally relevant in. Outside of baseball we have never really had a 2nd sport where we could be nationally relevant until Vic brought us that in WBB. Looks like that is likely going away though. But we can spend until we are blue in the face and hire 50 additional recruiting people but we will still never be able to gain that kind of national relevance in football or men's BB. In those 2 sports there are just too many already established elite programs with much more history and much larger fanbases that are 'all in' to allow us to compete at a national level except maybe once in a blue moon where everything sort of lines up for us like in 2014. And all the NCAA rules currently in place (like the glut of football scholarships allowed) are helpful in keeping programs with their 'have' or 'have not' status in those sports because that's the way the PTB want it. So if Vic were still here keeping our WBB at the very top I would be fine with spending whatever but if we are headed back toward mediocrity then I really don't care if we spend much of anything on it.
If we spend an extra 500K on football every year and it means we win an average of 1 more game per year than we would have if we did not spend that money I would rather do that than win a national championship in (insert irrelevant sport).we currently pay Mason Smith about 35K a year. That’s not going to cut it. We may never be nationally relevant in football but we need to do everything possible to catch lightning in a bottle once or twice more than we could have. I would like to see us win a conference title in football before I die. Women’s basketball is something I will be proud of when we are good but it’s not worth taking money away from sports that matter to me. JMHO.
Absolutely, can't believe fans are so willing to just throw away a program we were competing for national championships in. For football we play for a nice bowl destination and in men's BB we play for a ticket to the NCAA tournament. That's it, nothing more nothing less and I don't really see that changing much no matter what we do.
Bull. There comes a point to where you get diminishing returns on having money. We aren’t there yet, but the big time schools are there. We will eventually start making up ground on them because there is only so many things you can do when you update everything and hire all of you off field people. If we put an extra couple of million a year into football on top of the natural growth we get from sec contract money each year we would make up some ground. We will never make up enough ground to turn into an elite program but we can get closer with more money.
Most people don’t care about watching a sport where 90 % of intramural teams in the Sanderson center could Beat the national champion in a pickup game. That’s why our elite team still costed our school money. People don’t pay to watch mediocre athletes, even if those mediocre athletes are a lot better than the athletes they are competing against.
I don't know the exact numbers but I would assume baseball cost us money as well. If it doesn't its only because the NCAA doesn't allow hardly any baseball scholarships so we have a lot of players footing their own bill to play. But I will agree I only care about WBB if its something we can compete in nationally. If we are going to be run of the mill then I could not care less about it. I still don't see us making much headway in football because its going to be so hard just to break into the top half of the SEC and stay there. We can make ground up nationally but when you are still in the back half of your own conference I'm not sure what good that does you.
I posted an article in this thread on the first page that shows the only 2 sports that make us money are baseball and football. Men’s basketball could if they were good so we need to continue to invest in that. I just believe we need to invest everything we can into the sports that the most people care about and the most people care about are sports that make the school money. Going off and spending an extra million dollars to bribe our old coach back to a sport that loses money when they play in multiple national championships in a few years time is just not smart or fair to the fans who have made their voice heard with their pocket books that these sports are what they truly care about.
Irritating part is I bet we could have hired Johnnie Harris as HC for less money than what we are paying NMP and still would have probably gotten much better results.
We need a bulldog fan contingent to go sell their soul to the devil and it could happen. I?m a practicing Catholic so that?s a firm no from me. But we probably have many modern secular humanists that don?t even believe in god, these boys just need to make the deal, take one for the team.
By the way, we got closer than KPs return in Atlanta. We once had Cam Newton ringing a cowbell and verbally committed.
Me too. That moment in the Georgia Dome was the happiest Ive ever been as a Dawg- and 23 years later I realize that was the pinnacle for me as a State fan. I'll never forget us running out of the tunnel before kickoff. It was better than in 91 when we won the SEC basketball title in Starkville over LSU
We may can get a level above where we are. We can get to the point to where we are paying our best off the field recruiter more than 35K a year. We can get to where we are at least hiring half the off the field staff as the blue bloods. That won’t make us Alabama but it could make us have Auburn success one day. Maybe not. I don’t care about women’s basketball and neither does anyone else. That’s why they lose money. Wanting to pay top dollar for a women’s basketball coach is insane. Maybe pouring as much money as we can into football won’t give us one single extra win than we otherwise would doing it the current way. I would rather die trying than to just accept our place in the basement in the sport that this state and our fanbase lives and breathes. So would most everyone else judging by how much gets donated to football.