Quote Originally Posted by Todd4State View Post
That's definitely part of it. A big part of it for sure. It doesn't really come down to just one thing but several things and what it comes down to is what is best for Mississippi State baseball? I guarantee you that if MSU thought firing Chris was best it would be done. See Cann. There is definitely a core group of MSU baseball fans that will show up no matter what. At the same time if MSU loses enough or becomes stagnant attendance will drop.

The buyout is part of the financials and also what the realistic market for the next coach would be and how much we pay them would be? A huge buyout plus the negative perception in the coaching industry of firing a coach two years off of winning a National Championship would have probably caused us to end up with a mid major coach at best. The reality is our fans expect us to at least go after the best in the business and had we fired Chris I think that would have limited our pool severely which would have potentially caused us to have to look for another new coach in the next few years. Because of how we handled our coaches now we have the potential to realistically make an offer to a guy like a Tony Vitello- not saying that we would get him but we could make a serious offer. We want to beat LSU? Well- hire better people if the people in place aren't able to do it. Resources are not an issue for us. The program doesn't have to be built to increase fan support- that's in place too. Those two things will still be in place if Lemonis goes 24-30 next year too.

It's also about being wise with our money too. We could have afforded to buy out Lemonis if we just absolutely wanted too. But for us to have the coach we expect to have it would have cost us more than waiting a year because of Lemonis's buyout plus we would have had to overpay because we essentially proved that we're impatient. Coaches would have been like "why didn't they just hire a new pitching coach?"
Todd, I think it's more than "why didn't we fire the PC", our offense and defense was below standards. You said it wasn't a discipline problem and the team didn't quit. I saw several times kids not going all out. We had problems and it showed. There is no sugar coating the situation the last two years, bottom line, shouldn't have happened and I bet Lemonis knows this as he seemed to be more involved the last few weeks of the season. But looking at what is happening today, we should be better but I'm not sure how much better and what it will take to win the fans back to Lemonis side. It's gonna be an uphill battle for him and everyone knows this.