Who Replaces Gene?

[shox1989]

The budget differences between Kstate, Ku and WSU are going to get wider. The Big 12 just sent $22 million checks to Kstate and Ku. Those checks alone would fund WSU's entire athletic budget. And the article says the checks are going to grow to $40 million annually in the later years of the TV contract.

If they are getting checks that big, I think they should have to share some of that with taxpayers or by reducing tuition for students.

http://espn.go.com/college-sports/story/_/id/9329322/big-12-conference-distributes-198-million-10-schools

[shockmonster]

How many baseball coaches/people in the baseball community in Wichita really support Gene? I can't answer this for sure but I know some baseball people who absolutely are Gene detractors and would never send a player his way. It didn't use to be this way. We pretty much got whoever we wanted in the Wichita area. Over time, Gene may still have a cult like following who can see little or no wrong (at least they look the other way), but he has the opposite (people who have nothing good to say about him) too. Some others on here may be able to expand on this.

[shox1989]

I came across this little tidbit of information from a December 2012 Omaha newspaper article when I was googling to try and find more WSU athletic budget information.

Among public Division I programs without football teams, only UNO and Wichita State were subsidized less than 50 percent, according to research by USA Today. In the Summit League, only North Dakota State (at 47.9 percent) receives a smaller subsidy than does UNO, and five of the eight public institutions subsidized their athletic programs between 76 and 89 percent.


So while big time football programs get $22 million checks from their conferences, WSU and UNO are the ONLY division 1 public schools without football that don't have the state taxpayers subsidize 50% or more of their athletic budgets (and UNO at 49% is barely below 50%).

http://www.omaha.com/article/2012122...712239937/1001

[BenWSU]

Some others on here may be able to expand on this.

Often wonder if the Ben Christiansen-Anthony Molina incident was the start of the downward spiral of people's perception of the coaches

[vancedave56]

OU fiasco.

[Downtown Shocker Brown]

If you want to see Top stadiums, start at Alex Box Stadium, then also check Ole Miss.

[pinstripers]

OU fiasco.

10,000 girlfriends

[martymoose]

Apparently Gene has been contacted by an SEC school already. I don't follow SEC baseball at all...who's looking for a new coach?

[SPEShockAlum]

Apparently Gene has been contacted by an SEC school already. I don't follow SEC baseball at all...who's looking for a new coach?

He is a Mizzou boy, after all.

[CharlieHog]

Todd Butler, Arkansas Associate HC

From your keyboard to the Shox AD's eyes, brother.

[boyshocker]

10,000 girlfriends

Stalking

[SPEShockAlum]

Here are some guys that I would look at who are outside the WSU tree (in no particular order):

Mike Anderson, ex-Nebraska
Dave Serrano, Tennessee

I have heard Serrano is not happy in Knoxville and he was wildly successful at Irvine.

Ok, I know I've chopped this up, but here goes...

If Mike Anderson receives so much as an interview with Wichita State, I will not renew my season tickets. Any success that he had at Nebraska came as a result of Dave Van Horn's recruiting and CWS success in the early 2000s. There is a reason he could not get guys like Conor Gillaspie and the other Nebraska kids we currently roster to commit there. You want a bigger a-hole than Gene? You've found him in Mike Anderson.

I'm certainly not a fan of Anderson, but am hesitant on Serrano. Do we want a guy who is always on the move and looking for the next best thing? After an 8-year stint at Fullerton as pitching coach under George Horton, he has been to Irvine, back to Fullerton and now maybe looking to leave Tennessee (who knows...?). That is three (3) stops in 10 years... no thank you.

[Cdizzle]

I'm certainly not a fan of Anderson, but am hesitant on Serrano. Do we want a guy who is always on the move and looking for the next best thing? After an 8-year stint at Fullerton as pitching coach under George Horton, he has been to Irvine, back to Fullerton and now maybe looking to leave Tennessee (who knows...?). That is three (3) stops in 10 years... no thank you.

That's the door you open when you get rid of a legend who has been loyal to the university for 35 years. Suddenly you're worried about people looking for the next best thing. I don't think I'm going to like the way this cookie crumbles.

[ShockTalk]

That's the door you open when you get rid of a legend who has been loyal to the university for 35 years. Suddenly you're worried about people looking for the next best thing. I don't think I'm going to like the way this cookie crumbles.

If you're worried about people looking for the next big thing, that means the program is on an upward trend. Additional work for the AD to keep that person happy or find the next upward trending coach? Yup. It is apparently the path chosen over continuing with the status quo of highly paid, underperformance over the last 5 years at the very basic of levels, the MVC.

[WSUwatcher]

Excellent point, diz, which is why I think finding someone connected to Wichita may make sense. It carries no guarantee -- Randy Smithson would have coached Shocker basketball forever, but it soon became apparent that he was in over his head, and that's the other key thing: you need someone who can run the program at a high level.

1. Run a clean, academically sound program at a high level of play. (The academic aspect is important here, too. I remember being in Austin once -- I don't recall whether it was during Gustafson or Garrido -- when the paper made a big deal of having nine guys on the academic honor roll. For Gene & Co., that would have been an off semester, even back in the days when they were a dominant team.)

2. Having started down that path of success, settle into the community, stick around, and keep doing the same thing for a long time.

Those are the two key things WSU would like a coach to do. Unfortunately, lots of the people who can do #1 won't also do #2.