I think Ray gets too much of a bad rap. It's easy to be an armchair AD after the fact.
- Yes, he did do a lot of good things outside of coaching hirings: made USC 1 of about a dozen Athletics Departments around the country that actually operated in the black for most of his career, kept Dawn Staley from taking Ohio State job etc.
- Coaching hires: Looking at the "major sports" because the hires for the other sports have been pretty good....
Baseball: Holbrook - absolutely the right hire on the day he was hired. Made perfect sense and other places wanted him as well. It didn't work out as well as fans had hoped, but it was still absolutely the right hire. That happens sometimes. See Tom Herman at Texas. After that, Sullivan was going to be USC's next coach as soon as the season ended. Unfortunately for USC, UF got hot, won the CWS and UF admins come out of nowhere and say, we'll build you a new stadium if you stay. Tough break. That's not on Ray. So then plan B was Kingston. Not terrible and not great either. Good coach and recruiter, but never really understood SC and the importance of being part of the community here. Had some good years but couldn't get over the hump. Maineiri - I don't think anybody thought this would have been a disaster and most thought, at the very least, he'd get us back in position to host regionals. Seemed like a very good hire. Turned out tragically bad. But in my opinion, 2 out of 3 of the baseball hires seemed like no-brainers that just didn't work with some bad luck in between with the Sully situation.
Football: Yeah, nobody was excited about Muschamp, although he looked pretty good his first couple of years. Everyone knows how we ended up there though. Kirby was our guy and there was a handshake deal in place. Ray's biggest goof here was taking Kirby at his word and Kirby's agent told UGA what was happening and UGA fires a coach that was averaging 9.5 wins per year to get their guy. In retrospect, yeah Ray was naive in taking Kirby at his word. Beamer: thought this was a great outside the box hire. He has done some decent things and is coming off a down year. To be honest, USC will never have another Spurrier and for most of the last 100+ years, USC football has been mediocre or just plain crap, so this isn't just a Ray Tanner thing.
In reality, there are lots of "misses" by ADs. Tennessee is still looking for the next Pat Summit in women's basketball even though they made some hires that made sense. Kentucky has made some bad calls with men's basketball head coaches. Shoot, even Alabama fans are salty with their football coach. Very few can replace a legend/generational coach such as USC had to do with Tanner in baseball and Spurrier in football. USC will soon face the same problem with women's basketball whenever Staley retires. You can make a good hire, but they will likely never sniff another Final Four when she's gone.
