Quote Originally Posted by The Federalist Engineer View Post
Henderson deserves credit but not the HC position. The 2018 team was much more than Ron Polk's false dawn in 2007, because we beat Vandy in Nashville came 1-game shy of playing for a championship. That's about as good as 1985.

But 2018 felt like a combination of luck and great southern engineering. After Ethan Small, that pitching staff was all duct tape, wire, flex-seal, clamps, prayer, and super-glue.

With Lemonis we won't have 1b'men closing games for us. We won't have a walk-on as the Saturday starter, 5 transfers in the starting 9, and we won't need to flip USM recruits at the last minute.

With Lemonis we are going to war with an elite talent level. If we could just get so lucky as the 2018 team, we would waltz to the damn NC.

By the way, I am not saying that Lemonis just turned this around on his own. Cohen, Cannizarro, and Henderson somehow kept the recruiting classes together. Cohen, back in 2011 barely had MSU recruiting on par with Kentucky. Today, we are better than everybody except Vandy and a few others. We might have achieved parity with LSU.
Very good post. Although I will say Konnor Pilkington was a potential first round talent and under Henderson he ended up a third round guy.

I think we were able to keep the classes mostly together because of what MSU baseball is. Which is a compliment to the MSU fans and our tradition. Butch Thompson took a few recruits with him that could have helped us like Jack Owen and that hurt us a little bit. Wes Johnson also took a couple to Arkansas if I remember correctly.

I think Cohen getting Chris Stratton was BIG back in the day. That was the first big Mississippi recruit we had landed since Mitch Moreland or Ed Easley back in the day.