re: For those who keep repeating that Micah Gibbs "works for free," you're wrong

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He interviewed for MSU in early Oct without PM's knowledge (10/6 is when I first heard about it).

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Reading the Advocate's reportage on Andy being a candidate in Starkville in late October and early November seems to confirm this. Some of Paul's quotes are really interesting. If Paul is to be believed, he didn't know Andy was a candidate until two days before Cannizaro was named the head coach.

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Mainieri said in the same article you mentioned about the plan to use Gibbs to replace Cannizaro eventually,

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My question is with such a small sample of Gibbs' abilities as a coach, why did Mainieri think Gibbs was the heir apparent to Cannizaro when Cannizaro had already been coaching for years and had been mentioned for HC jobs?

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that he has wanted to separate the hitting coach and the recruiting coordinator for a while

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I understand that, but has our issues been with recruiting or hitting? Or do we have issues with both. PM is made a big change splitting the two jobs first held by Javi then by Andy, so he had to do it for a reason. Did he not like our recruiting? Dis he not like our hitting?
Was it one or the other or both?

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But Mainieri's logic to separate the recruiting coordinator from the hitting coach makes sense to me

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Makes sense too if you had unlimited slots for coaches, but in college you do not. Can you afford to have a volunteer assistant in year one as your hitting coach while one of your paid guys travels?

I don't know, but then PM must have felt Andy and Javi couldn't do both well. But then we hear the hitting coach is over rated so why couldn't you do both?

JMHO, but when you lose coaches like Will Davis and Andy Cannizaro and replace them with relative rookies you have to lose a lot. Remember both guys left to be head coaches, and their replacements are far from it.

Here is what was reported on November 3 of last year.

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“(Cohen) called me about Andy this morning,” Mainieri said. “It was the first I’d heard from him about it. It sounds like if John gets the (athletic director’s) job, then Andy is going to be a strong candidate for him. You could probably even say a probable candidate. But you know how things are. Something could happen at the last second.”

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Interesting, yes? Not sure why AC would be secretive about it, unless Cohen getting the AD job was still up in the air. AC was pretty upfront with his pursuit of the Tulane job.

Apparently, Mainieri does value experience for Mississippi State's job, though.

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“I think it’s not often where a coach (with) two and a half years of college assistant coaching experience gets a head coaching job in the SEC,” Mainieri said. “It’s a big bite. Especially there, it’s a pretty pressurized situation. But if anybody can handle it, at that experience level, I think it would be Andy. He’s a very talented guy. If it works out, I wish him well.”

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Very funny in light of Mainieri's repsonse to Cannizaro leaving.

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LSURussian

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I think the decision was driven by Mainieri's desire to keep a sense of continuity considering that Cannizarro's announcement came the day before the Purple and Gold World Series began at the conclusion of the fall practice period.

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He has shown with Dunn and Canizzarro that in the immediate past with respect to coaching hires continuity seemed to be of no concern compared to hiring the absolute best candidate. The results the fruit of that mindset bore is readily evident by even casual observers.

Which makes a divergence in this previous process or modus operandi to be somewhat curious. Past results being the biggest indicator of future performance.

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A new hitting coach would not even have seen the team practice together facing live pitching until spring practice began in January.

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LSU's staff with Cain and Gibbs-neither of whom would have left the staff had a hire based on competency and best available for the position been made-are already invested heavily into sabermetric and video self scouting. To use that as an excuse why the hire may have been made is flimsier than a skyscraper built on a foundation of a few packs of Hoyle playing cards. There's video of these kids in practice and game situations against a huge amount of our opponents and our own kids.

I.E.-it's just that: an excuse that doesn't hold up under even the slightest bit of critical thinking.

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I was also told by several people that the team's experienced returning players lobbied for Gibbs to be named the hitting coach. That may have influenced Mainieri's decision.

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What fruit that lobbying hath wrought...if in fact it MAY have influenced as you say.

All in all though your post is a bit of a tea leaf reading exercise. A poor one at that in my opinion. You have said before you're a member of the coaches committee (I may be wrong about that and if so I'm sorry for 'misremembering'), and you supported abject failures on this staff in the past.

Ones I know-for a fact-played favorites with Top 10 round draft picks who were disallowed the same training and supplemental instruction other drafted players received.

Your support of this hire is a bit tainted for me based on that, and it makes your post seem filled with rationalizations and justifications for a very large, readily apparent mistake that was made.

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when Cannizaro had already been coaching for years

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What? Cannizaro's only coaching experience was when Mainieri hired him only two years before he left for Miss St.

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Can you afford to have a volunteer assistant

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The "volunteer" is in name only. That was my point in starting this thread. PM can pay the "volunteer" coach whatever he's willing to pay via the LSU baseball camps. Will Davis was "volunteer" coach for something like 5 years. He didn't work for free in any of those years.

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It wasn't. That was something that was well known into the summer.

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The public record is this, though.

State announces a national search for its AD on Sept. 26.

On Oct. 12, sources indicated that Cohen would be the fourth in a series of in-house promotions to State's AD position.

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Your support of this hire

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You obviously did not read this thread, or even the first sentence of my post that started this thread.

ETA: "I was disappointed that Coach Mainieri decided to name Gibbs as hitting coach last fall..."

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Are we really going to assume that they sat on their hands and didn't talk to anyone?

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I don't know. I can only go by what AC said.

If he had already talked to Cohen, he could have at least said something like "I had heard rumors that I might be considered for the Miss St opening" without actually saying he had already talked with Cohen about it.

Or now that he's no longer on the LSU payroll, he could hint that the job opening was already being discussed with him prior to Cohen's call to Mainieri.

I have not read anything to that effect.

His quote in the article I linked sure seems like it was news to him. But maybe he's a liar and/or a really good actor.

I wonder what a Public Records request would show on that front. Maybe it went down that way, but I'd be surprised.

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I think it's a safe, even fair assumption to think that AC was in contact with MSU prior to that conversation. As far as why both schools went along with this timeline, we can speculate (again, this can't be proven)... State, being a public school, has to follow certain hiring guidelines once a position is open. And the AD position didn't open until, like you mentioned, early fall even though it was obviously a position that needed filling months before. This meant that MSU was limited in what they technically can do/say. As for LSU, again, it could be to help mask the Gibbs "promotion" behind being handcuffed by a short timeline.

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There's a lot of Occam's Razor conflicts there....