When do you fire the baseball coach?
An athletic director's job isn't to do whatever it takes to make fans happy.
I’m an Ole Miss grad. I’ve been a college baseball fan since 2008 when my dad and I went to Omaha for the first time. I was blessed to be raised by an LSU fan and then attend a university that cared about baseball as much as the one that I grew up rooting for.
In 2022, we took another trip to Omaha together to watch my team play a game in what would be the postseason run that finally led to a national championship.1 It was the most incredible, Disney-ass story you could write. We were hot garbage in March, managed to win every single game we needed to in April, and due in no small part to the athletic director at our in-state rival school lobbying for us, we were the last team to make the NCAA tournament. And then we went and won it all. Don’t let the Rebs get hot.
Road to Omaha
He’d been the coach for over 20 years and only made it to Omaha once before 2022. Despite his teams’ reliably good performances in conference play, they would inevitably run into some kind of brick wall team from a middle of nowhere school that would beat them2 or fail to rise to the occasion and lose a competitive-but-winnable series in the supers. In 2022, Mike was on the hot seat. He had a talented team with a lot of guys who decided to come back for one more year and take another shot at winning it all. There was no excuse not to dominate. All he had to do was not mess it up in the postseason.
And then they sucked in conference play for an entire month. There was no rhyme or reason to the losses. Too many one run losses to count. We’d never seen a Mike Bianco team like this before. So by the end of the season, everyone was calling for his head. You can’t be bad at the postseason and also be this bad with this much talent in the regular season too. It was time. Then, of course, they went on and won it all. They made a documentary and Chase Parham wrote a book about it.
After the confetti finished raining and the parades were over, we settled down and started looking at next year. We had lost a lot of talent to the minor leagues, but the head coach, Mike Bianco, had never had a problem getting talent. Hell, until this year, he’d never had a problem putting up a completely respectable record in conference play. Everyone’s problem with Mike was what always happened in the postseason—a complete choke job. But he’d broken the curse. We were finally free. And now we were going to get down to the business of winning another natty.
Road to…Nowhere
In 2023, Ole Miss baseball went 25-29 overall and 6-24 in conference. They missed the conference tournament. They were the worst team that Ole Miss had ever seen under Mike Bianco by a country mile. No one knew why. But we were promised that it wouldn’t be like this again. Now, granted, Mississippi State had won the championship the year before and then they stunk like a skunk the next year too. Maybe it was a curse. And if it was, then at least LSU was going to be a turd in 2024.
In 2024, Ole Miss baseball went 27-29 overall and 11-19 in conference. They lost to Mississippi State after a walk-off two run homer in the bottom of the ninth in the SEC Tournament. They got swept by LSU in a series that got the Tigers eligible for the NCAA Tournament the weekend before. The fans had been vicious in their calls for Mike’s firing all year. Ole Miss baseball wasn’t a program that had two years like this in a row. The guys couldn’t play defense if their lives depended on it, and despite the pitching situation coming together around the end of the year, the bats were never what they needed to be to sustain the pitching performances.
That SEC Tournament loss happened on Tuesday. Today, everyone’s waiting to see what’s going to happen with the baseball staff. Are we firing Mike? Is he going to have to get a new staff? Are we just going to ride it out because the allegedly $5.5M buyout plus the cost of a new coach and staff is too much to pay? We don’t know, but from my casual survey of the Ole Miss Rivals message board, Mike doesn’t have many allies left.
What’s the right decision here?
I’ll get it out of the way now: I don’t think firing Mike makes sense. That buyout is stupid money to pay your baseball coach to stop coaching for you. We—and the entire NCAA membership—have potential legal settlements that are looming and I’d rather have the money in the bank.
Plenty of folks smarter than I have tried to break down the last two seasons (or three, as some people include the perplexingly-bad 2022 regular season) and figure out what on earth is going on. Last summer, we thought that the length of the postseason made it hard for Ole Miss to recruit well, and especially to recruit well out of the portal. It’s hard to keep up with text messages to teenagers when you’re in Omaha trying to win a championship. This year, they had a nice, long offseason to get their recruiting done. It didn’t help.
The last few months, the hypothesis has shifted to a combination of two things:
Player development has been abysmal
We’re not getting enough out of high school kids and are overly-reliant on the portal
The first factor leads pretty directly into the second. You get the kids in from high school but they don’t develop, so you need to get older guys in who have developed to fill the holes. That’s expensive, and it leads to a lack of team culture and cohesion.3 It’s simply not sustainable for a school that’s already got sizable NIL commitments in other sports to lay out for multiple position players and pitchers each year. Baseball teams seem to benefit the most from a solid core of guys that are recruited from high school and a few big fish to plug holes from the portal.
So we need to solve the player development bit, because I don’t think we have the second problem without the first. Is firing the head coach going to help with player development? Personally, I don’t think so. I think we might need to be talking about a staff shakeup, because the defense has gotten worse year-over-year, and the bats were lukewarm at best. The pitching was shaky both years to start, but did work out in the end.4 I can’t tell you what’s changed with the batting and defensive development, but I think that’s where the biggest problems are. I’ve heard nothing but good things about Mike’s staff, but something does seem to need to change.
The other thing I think is important to note is that if you fire the head coach, you’re going to lose guys to the portal. A new head coach might bring you some guys out of the portal, but you can count on the fact that you will lose guys when the coach gets fired. That’s just compounding the portal problem we already have. And there’s also the gamble you take when you fire any coach that the new guy might not be any better. Florida football has fired a few coaches in a row now and they’re just paying more money for the same record. Auburn football has paid a small country’s GDP in buyouts to coaches this decade and haven’t seen a return on that since they fired Gus Malzahn.
Wrapping up
Mike Bianco and Ole Miss baseball stole home in 2022. They probably shouldn’t have made the tournament, but they did, and they capitalized on the opportunity they were given. Since then, the program’s been the embodiment of hitting a ground ball to short.5
I don’t think firing Mike this week is the way to go. I think expectations for next year should be 15 or 16 conference wins, which should get us into the tournament comfortably and at least in the conversation to host. Those expectations need to be communicated to Mike, and Mike needs to communicate them to the fans. I think everyone benefits from knowing that the AD has set a standard for performance, and that the coach knows what it is and knows the consequences for failing to reach it. That gives the AD a year to line up the buyout money from donors and to find out what kind of financial obligations are going to result from the House case settlement.
Mike needs to share his plans to fix the player development issue with the AD in that same conversation. There is no excuse for our defense to have been this bad this year. I’m not a baseball coach, so I’m not going to be a font of specificity on ideas for how to do this, but it’s also not my job to know.
Keith Carter, as the athletic director, needs approach this decision with a long-term vision. He should not let the emotions of donors and fans influence his decision. He should not let the fact that we lost our last five games of the season to teams we really hate to lose to affect the decision he makes about this. Just because those losses might have loosened some pursestrings doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly a good idea. An athletic director should be a bulwark against fan insanity, not a servant of it.
I want this team to be good again. My dad is an LSU fan, my uncle is a State fan, and I want nothing more than to be able to talk trash about baseball to them, but I can’t. I need this school to field a good baseball team next year.
They lost, and it was their only loss of the entire postseason, and the team I’ve gone to watch in Omaha has never won a game that I’ve attended, but I’m definitely not a curse. And me not being a curse is definitely not the reason I didn’t stay for the game happening the next day too.
I hate Tennessee Tech.
Quote from Ole Miss player Will Furniss after the last game: “Wasn’t a great season but it was good with people we had,” Furniss said. “We’ve all had our disagreements with each other and everything and didn’t end the way we wanted, but I wouldn’t trade (the time with teammates) for anything.” (Emphasis mine)
Mike is also our pitching coach.
They’ve also literally done that so many times in the last two season it makes me sick to think about.