Quote Originally Posted by tcdog70 View Post
To assume that if He stayed He would have continued to have our program go down has no basis.
Normally that would be true enough. Coaches with any length of a career in one place will have peaks and valleys. The problem with Stans was not that he had a downward trend in results, it was that he had a downward trend in players' respect for the coaching staff. For much of Stansubry's career, Stansbury managed to recruit players that were higher character than the baseball or football players. But the character of his players trended steadily downward and that was a real problem for him by the time he left. As far as I know, Ware, Thomas, and Sword have kept entirely out of trouble since they've been here, so maybe he could have turned it around with them. But he also would have been bringing Gray, who had some red flags to say the least. And there would have been upper classmen on the team that possibly Stansbury wouldn't have been in a good position to discipline. Maybe those players would have been a bad influence on the freshmen, maybe not. Certainly Stewart and Varnado never seemed to be brought down by their teammates, but there are a lot more examples of players that were. It just would have been tough for Stansbury (or any coach in his position) to change the culture with players that he brought in and when he had allowed the culture to degenerate to the place it had.

There's no arguing that Stansbury did a lot for MSU and State fans on the whole should be very appreciative of Stansbury, but what Stricklin did was certainly not awful. It wasn't a no-brainer decision either way. If Stansbury had stayed another year, that would have been fine with me. I certainly think it was a mistake to fire him without having a better grasp on what the replacement options were. But he wasn't entitled to another year.