Quote Originally Posted by DeviousDawg View Post
I think Cohen has realized that the key to being a perennial power house in College Baseball is recruiting at an elite level annually, and I believe that, along with personality fit, were the first two boxes on his checklist during the coaching search. Yes, seems like a silly thing to say, because obviously recruiting is important in all sports, but I believe it is more important in baseball than football and basketball. In football and basketball, the coach is behind almost every play, he is the engineer, the puppeteer. However, in Baseball, the coach just sets a lineup, and for the most part, the boys play. Also, the seasons are longer, upsets don't matter as much, and the law of averages takes over. Better players=better team=better chance to win it all.
With baseball recruiting it's a lot more complicated because you are also competing against MLB and they can offer millions of dollars to your recruits legally. Could you imagine Dan recruiting against Hugh Freeze's hookers AND the NFL?

I agree with you because Vanderbilt was one of the worst programs in the SEC before Corbin. Yes- they have the endowment but Corbin still has to evaluate the right players and get them to come to campus. Florida has a similar set-up. O'Sullivan was a pitching coach in the Twins system and his top two assistants are former scouts/pro coaches. Tony Vitiello was a great recruiter for Arkansas before he became the head coach at Tennessee and we had Wes Johnson who is an innovative pitching coach. Cannizaro helped put together LSU's team last year as well.

Cohen is very in tune with trends in college baseball. See our 2013 team which was built to take advantage of the dead ball era in college and the success we had that year. It was equal in terms of success of a lot of the SEC teams I mentioned above.


And as I mentioned the other day we've never really had that elite type of recruiting going on in baseball where it was top 10 class after top 10 class year after year since the 1980's and we're just now getting back to that.