where those respective sports were at their highest stature in program history. We fired one and Nikki McCray ain’t looking too swift.
Cohen has made 2 hires...
- Thread starter dawgstudent
- Start date
Think about it. We hired a coach from Old Dominion who had never even made the NCAA tournament to lead our top 10 program. Seriously WTF was Cohen thinking?
Anyone can see the disengagement of a few of our women’s players. I won’t call them out by name but it is pretty plain to see.
Anyone can see the disengagement of a few of our women’s players. I won’t call them out by name but it is pretty plain to see.
He’s had five hires in the big sports for us, and we’ve been pretty hyped on all of them, with the possible exception of Lemonis (who I think has done a great job so far). The one thing this has shown me is that there’s a lot more to it than hiring whoever looks good to the masses, because he’s generally done that. Most people (including me) were sold on NMP and Moorhead, but neither of those hires are looking good at this point. To Cohen’s credit, he got rid of Moorhead when he needed to. I’m not a trigger happy fan, but we were going down fast, and it was obvious. I’m happy with Leach and Lemonis, fine with Howland (but need to make a tournament in the next two years), and NMP needs to show us something by next year or she may be going the route of Moorhead
I understand that it wasn’t realistic to expect Nikki to be Vic... but being noncompetitive with this roster is totally inexcusable. It’s one thing to lose, it’s another thing to get beat down and look like you have no pulse, especially considering we had a week and a half off and this exact thing happened in our previous game.
I think he outsmarted himself on the women’s hire
Joe checked most of the boxes and most high profile people thought he was a great hire
Turns out he wasn’t
Hiring coaches is hard.
I’m not defending Cohen FYI.
Joe checked most of the boxes and most high profile people thought he was a great hire
Turns out he wasn’t
Hiring coaches is hard.
I’m not defending Cohen FYI.
Looks more and more like a sabotage job from inside. Did you see the free throw stats? Awful. Basketball players have to try hard to miss that many free throws. And Mia Taylor has taken too much of a leadership role for her talent level.
He is the type that will always do that. Overanalyzes and overthinks everything. He was that way as a baseball coach. In a lot of cases an outside hire is needed but when you can't retain the best coach with the best program on campus and you have to replace them, the straightforward simple hire is to just hire their right hand coach that helped build the winning culture you already have in place that the current players have a relationship with. But no, I assume Johnnie Harris didn't come to her interview with a 200 slide powerpoint showing Cohen her 'plan' so she didn't cut it. What's funny is that he did make an inside hire with the women's softball team and that seems to be working out great. Now I don't blame him for making an outside hire in football when Mullen left as I don't think there was anyone on Mullen's staff that was really ready or prepared to be an SEC head football coach. Its just that the hire he made wasn't prepared to be an SEC head football coach either.
Something strange is certainly going on. Its difficult to be this bad with the roster we have. I could see not meeting Top 10 expectations but we are just plain out bad. Its a total joke that we were still ranked coming into tonight's game.
Cohen bunted in the second inning of a baseball game....and now he makes decisions that impact MSU Athletics for Decades.
The bigger problem is who made the mistake of hiring Cohen and why is he being kept around. It's certainly not for his prowess as an AD.
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Cohen had a great option for WBB coach who was already paying taxes in Starkville. That makes him more responsible for making a bad hire.
Lemonis looks like a good choice, but Cohen was calling every successful college coach this side of the MS, trying to make good on his words. They all turned him down, but likely gave him the best option.
Lemonis looks like a good choice, but Cohen was calling every successful college coach this side of the MS, trying to make good on his words. They all turned him down, but likely gave him the best option.
WRONG. Slop head checked hardly any of the boxes. He brought in an offensive system that we've never been able to run in our history, with a top 10 roster that was meant to run the ball. We don't have many of those in our football history, and Cohen absolutely squandered it.
We knew these things when we hired him. Then on top of that, the guy obviously wasn't a head coach either, didn't have the discipline necessary.
Then, after the program is in shambles, Cohen doubles down on the passing offense. Leach better overachieve or Cohen is history.
Have the same fear. And, if we lose to an Ole Miss team that went 0-fer in conference play last year, that will officially be the end of it.
Stupid, lazy hire on our part. Never made any sense at all to me to hire an AD who has spent none of his career preparing to be an AD. The 2 most successful and best ADs we've ever had spent their entire career building the skills and experience to be great athletic directors. So naturally, we hired the baseball coach.
I wouldn't go that far. I'd give it next year. I know next to nothing about basketball 'systems' but I do hear a good bit that she was changing up the Xs and Os somehow. I doubt installing a new system in basketball is as drastic as football, so I would expect results in year 2.
Of course, in true fashion, all our best players will transfer then we'll be making that excuse next season.
We handed a multi million dollar business corporation to a baseball coach that didn’t come up in the admin side of things and surprise surprise his hires haven’t been great which is the one thing most expected him to know how to do based on what it takes to be a successful coach in the sec. along with that much of the rest of the things that go In to running a big athletics program have also gone down. Game days ops, marketing, etc haven’t been that great under Cohen either. This isn’t high school. You just can’t take a coach without really any real AD experience and give them the helm. It’s not going to work out.
Hiring coaches is a crap shoot no matter where you are. Even when you can get the big name, sometimes they don't work out. Meyer and Saban will probably win anywhere, but you never really know. I think people expected Chip Kelly to win at UCLA.
But Cohen has some troubling tendencies, the most serious of which is he refuses to make the obvious move.
(1)The obvious move when Mullen left was to find a successful run first spread G5 HC or P5 OC. The second obvoius move was to get a Defensive coach that could deliver a successful run first spread OC. Taking a roster built to win immediately and completely changing directions so you could roll the dice on a P5 OC with no head coaching experience beyond FCS was an unnecessary risk. If it's true that his FCS school was basically the only one offering athletic scholarships, then that is an unexcusable lack of research to hire him.
(2) Not sure what the obvious move was after Moorhead, but it wasn't offering the head coaching position to a coach that (i) had never been a head coach, (ii) had never called plays, and (iii) had basically never recruited. This was close to a fireable offense to me. He did not earn the credibility to go out and take a risk like that.
(3) He did not make the obvious move and promote Vic's right hand man. I don't have a problem with this one. That's just a hard hire to make. A lot of time the right hand man fills a role to offset the HC (e.g., Stans was player friendly to offset Williams
, so it can screw up the dynamics to go that way also. Also, going after Leach was nontraditional also, and I am happy with that hire as of now, although there is still a lot of risk to it.
The only thing I will say in his defense is if you keep swinging for the fences, you will in theory eventually hit one, and if you are willing to cut your losses early enough, that's not a terrible strategy. The only problem is make a few bad hires in a row for a sport and you have really limited who will consider your program as a head coach going forward unless you give them big time money and guarantees, which is hard for us to do while also cutting our losses when needed.
If Leach works out, then Cohen will basically be safe. If you hire a really good football coach, and a good baseball coach (this only matters at MSU), you can survive a bad basketball hire (if he makes it) and honestly as much as people have gotten into women's basketball lately, that hire doesn't move the needle much. If people are happy with two out of three for the big three, then he could hire a hobo off the street for women's basketball and be fine. It only matters now because people are iffy on him for other things.
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What has Cohen done really well as AD? I know what people are going to say...and I can point out ways every single thing has been botched. I defended him when there were very few as baseball coach. Didn't like the move as AD but gave it a chance. It's not working out.
Yep the deal with Cohen was that he was going to be able to make great hires that fit MSU, and with that would come winning, which would take care of a lot of the other things where Cohen was obviously going to be a novice. Well, it hasn't worked, he's made bad hires, and those bad hires came at a time when the right hire was so easy to make, and one of them was in the biggest revenue sport. To his credit, he fixed it quickly and then made another hire with a bigger pedigree within his 'vision' of being a passing offense. We will see if that works out, he's already wasted one peak year of MSU football. I'm not counting on it. I want to see Leach have at least 2 years of 10-2 level ball within 5 years to say Cohen has made up for what he wasted in 2018. IF that happens it will probably the repair the damage he's already caused, coupled with more baseball success. People will forget about women's basketball quickly. Honestly we just messed up there by losing that natty in 2018.
With the exception of the last baseball hire, he's run his searches well. Now the final outcome is way, way more important than the optics from a search, but he at least didn't make us running joke by trying and failing to hire 3-4 candidates before settling on someone obviously bad. Moorhead obviously didn't work out, and NMP isn't so far, and there's the Cannizaro situation. I'm fairly optimistic about Lemonis and Leach -- during Lemonis's one full season, I thought he did an excellent job managing that team. It's not easy taking over a team who went through what they did the year before, and I don't every remember having any issues with his in game management that season, which was a first for me.
I’m frustrated as hell this year given the talent, but she did inherit a seemingly decent team at her last stop and tanked in year one before getting it going in year two
I don't think people really have a clue what he's done well or done bad. We've had some good marketing things to point to (the 2020 and 2021 schedule releases, for example; the bandwagon ad after LSU although that turned out to be laughable in hindsight); not sure if it's been good overall or not. I've heard a lot of complaints about game day management, most of which seem legitimate but some of which just comes with the territory of packing an extra 40k people into a town/campus that normally only has around 45k people there. I don't know what our finances have done since he's been in charge or how that has compared to other SEC schools. It's hard to measure performance of positions like that, that are responsible for a lot of things but also have a lot of stuff out of their control. The really good and really bad jobs are usually easy to identify. Don't think Cohen belongs in either of those camps but certainly could be wrong.
Hiring coaches is a crap shoot no matter where you are. Even when you can get the big name, sometimes they don't work out. Meyer and Saban will probably win anywhere, but you never really know. I think people expected Chip Kelly to win at UCLA.
But Cohen has some troubling tendencies, the most serious of which is he refuses to make the obvious move.
(1)The obvious move when Mullen left was to find a successful run first spread G5 HC or P5 OC. The second obvoius move was to get a Defensive coach that could deliver a successful run first spread OC. Taking a roster built to win immediately and completely changing directions so you could roll the dice on a P5 OC with no head coaching experience beyond FCS was an unnecessary risk. If it's true that his FCS school was basically the only one offering athletic scholarships, then that is an unexcusable lack of research to hire him.
(2) Not sure what the obvious move was after Moorhead, but it wasn't offering the head coaching position to a coach that (i) had never been a head coach, (ii) had never called plays, and (iii) had basically never recruited. This was close to a fireable offense to me. He did not earn the credibility to go out and take a risk like that.
(3) He did not make the obvious move and promote Vic's right hand man. I don't have a problem with this one. That's just a hard hire to make. A lot of time the right hand man fills a role to offset the HC (e.g., Stans was player friendly to offset Williams
Also, going after Leach was nontraditional also, and I am happy with that hire as of now, although there is still a lot of risk to it.
The only thing I will say in his defense is if you keep swinging for the fences, you will in theory eventually hit one, and if you are willing to cut your losses early enough, that's not a terrible strategy. The only problem is make a few bad hires in a row for a sport and you have really limited who will consider your program as a head coach going forward unless you give them big time money and guarantees, which is hard for us to do while also cutting our losses when needed.
If Leach works out, then Cohen will basically be safe. If you hire a really good football coach, and a good baseball coach (this only matters at MSU), you can survive a bad basketball hire (if he makes it) and honestly as much as people have gotten into women's basketball lately, that hire doesn't move the needle much. If people are happy with two out of three for the big three, then he could hire a hobo off the street for women's basketball and be fine. It only matters now because people are iffy on him for other things.
(1) I really don't think there was an "obvious" hire when Mullen left. Yes, we could have probably found someone that ran a system closer to what Mullen did but I can't point to any individual and say duh, that's who you should have hired.
(2) With the post-Moorhead hire, I feel really good about Leach. The real risk with him is going to an offensive system that is very foreign to what we have ever done before. But if you can win at places like TT and WSU, then that is a true indicator that you should be able to also win at State. I'm also seeing good signs from Leach on the recruiting trail which was not supposed to be his strong suit. I believe Leach will win here its just a matter of seeing at what level.
(3) Really disagree with you on this one as this is the one I have the most problem with. Mullen had a good program but by no means an elite one. So not hiring someone off of his staff I didn't see as a big deal. But our WBB program was elite, if there was EVER a hire to try and continue something already built it would have been to hire Vic's right hand coach and try to keep it going. Even baseball has never been at the top level our WBB program was the last several years under Schaefer. WHY would you not want to give an opportunity to keep that going rather than bringing in a whole new staff? This one WAS the obvious move that he blew it on. Even if Harris had not worked out it would STILL have been the right move to have given it a chance because of what had already been established here that Harris had a big hand in.
If Cannizaro had been the only misfire I could've lived with it, especially considering it really didn't do much to hurt our program other than USM beating our brains in that weekend and the initial PR hit we took. We miraculously survived that debacle and went to Omaha two straight years.
But Moorhead flopped so badly and McCray appears to be on her way to doing the same, so it really makes you wonder about the Cannizaro thing in hindsight. Because Cohen is clearly missing something with these hires for there to have been so many flops in such a short period of time.
Well Vic's resume was far worse that McRae's at least she Won as a head coach.... VIc had one winning season in second in a much lesser conference. Vic was an assistant on a NC team.. so was McRae. So you just never know how things shake out in situations.
There definitely wasn't an obvious candidate. There was an obvious approach.
Also agree about Leach. I'd give Cohen a much higher grade than this if he hadn't tried to hire Joe Judge first. And I think Joe Judge is great. I just don't think you roll the dice on somebody with no playcalling and basically no college experience.
Trying to come up with examples of where this has or has not worked out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holly_Warlick - worked out pretty well. Obviously program declined but she stretched it out. Didn't crash and burn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Guthridge - Relatively quick decline but was bailed out by a tournament run his last year to make it overall pretty good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Ollie - Can't remember how he turned out. Don't feel like chasing down his real record.
But otherwise having trouble coming up with examples. Pitino was not replaced by an assistant. Lute Olsen was not replaced by an assistant. I guess there aren't a whole lot of coaches that are really successful and leave on a high note.
I was really thinking it would have happened more often and promoting the long term assistant would be a pretty mixed bag. But really too few examples to think of off hand. Guess I should be looking at some of these successful coaches at their prior stops. Guess that would give more examples.
Very few on this board maybe but a large amount of normal people new Cohen was doing good in baseball.
This board? Not so much.
This board? Not so much.
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