I thought Allemand played a good 2nd and made a valiant effort when put at SS or 3rd. After his early season errors at short (which he was playing until Taylor returned), McLendon didn't make an error at 2nd all season. We could definitely use a more consistent effort at short, however.

Think 2-3 "above average" pitchers isn't fair unless measured on velocity alone. Long, Vinson, Kent, Schlottmann, Corey Ray, and Minter had good 2014s. Tyler Stubblefield showed clear signs of talent, though he wasn't ready to start against SEC teams. I'd bet he's even better next year. I'd agree that we lacked the guys who were ready to go deep in SEC games, but you could do a lot worse than having a lot of that group returning next season.

speaking of middle infield defense...one of the quiet or subtle regressions of the team since 2011 is defense at catcher and shortstop. Since Gonzo and Kenny J departed, the Ags have been very average and at times below average at those 2 critical defensive positions on the field

Remember the end of the movie Apollo 13 when they called the mission a successful failure? Despite not getting to land on the moon, they still got the crew home safely.

That's how I view the '14 season. Any season that ends in the post-season can't be called an unmitigated failure. Baylor had a fail of a season. So did Oklahoma, Auburn and Arizona. We were better than all of those guys.

HOWEVER, we came nowhere near reaching the level of success we should be achieving. I applaud RC for his string of post-season births...but it's time for him to bring it up a notch. We're in a pretty pedestrian pattern right now and that trend needs to be reversed ASAP.



[This message has been edited by Luke The Drifter (edited 7/6/2014 8:21p).]

Failure. No championships!

Total disappointment. And what's the deal with sawyers still being here? Unfortunately RC will be around next season, but I don't see how you keep the same staff after the mountain of mediocrity they put on the field. Hell softball and basketball made some staff changes and baseball should as well. RC should not be immune to it.

If you listen to RC's cliche riddled pre-season analysis (which is an almost verbatim from year to year), the 2014 season was a miserable failure. he always says "our goal is to win our division, win our conference, go to Omaha and win a College World Series"- since we were not even close to any of these, it must have been a miserable failure.

RC does have his cookie-cutter comments from year to year. "chip on the shoulder", "someone who can contribute right away" I hope we have success in the years to come. IMO, this year was definitely in the middle of success or failure. Woof Woof

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I applaud RC for his string of post-season births

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Tell us more.....

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You said we made the right move but history shows you don't know that. In fact we went downhill for a long time after firing RC.

Some firings are easy because there is lots of upside and little downside (Watkins) while others aren't as easy (Slocum). Your opinion doesn't get to determine if a firing was right or not, only history decides.

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It's not the firing that history proves wrong. It's the hiring. What a coach might have done had he not been fired is pure speculation. Hiring Fran proved to be wrong, not firing RC.

I don't think you can say, in hindsight, that keeping RC and letting Sumlin be OC for a few years before taking over would for sure have been a successful move. Sumlin had valuable experiences at OU & as HC at UH before coming back to Texas A&M.

It's really, really hard for a head coach, once he digs himself a hole, to dig out of it. Especially in college football and especially in Texas. RC fell behind and couldn't catch up, how much of that was due to facilities I don't know, but certainly not entirely. That's certainly not why he struggled to beat tech. Mack Brown couldn't dig himself out of a hole, despite still taking the lion's share of the top talent in state.

If a coach is to dig himself out of a hole, he has to not be too prideful about the way he's been doing things and be willing to change.

another way to look at it...

Fran went 4-8 in 2003. How many of those 8 losses would an RC coached team have flipped to W's?

certainly not the games vs. VT (Blacksburg), OU (77-0), Nebraska (Lincoln), Tech (Lubbock), and t.u.

the leaves the Mizzou game (in Columbia), the OSU game at Kyle (vs. Les Miles, Tatum Bell, and company), and the Pitt game vs. Larry Fitzgerald. Mizzou and OSU won in blowouts. Pitt beat A&M by 11.

Maybe, maybe RC would have gotten to 5-7, but more likely he posts the same record as Fran with that horrific 2003 defense

Realistically, Fran should have gone 3-9 in 2003. There's no way we should have beaten an Urban Meyer-led Utah team that season. The Utes went 10-2 that year, with wins over Cal, Oregon and BYU in the regular season and a shutout of a 9-win Southern Miss team in the Liberty Bowl.

I can't find a single 2003 loss Slocum could have flipped to a win.



But those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. – Isaiah 40:31 (NIV)

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I applaud RC for his string of post-season births
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Tell us more.....

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It's not a huge accomplishment, making it to a regional 8-straight years, but it is something. It's something Steve Smith at Baylor or Andy Lopez at Arizona or Paul Mainieri at LSU or Augie Garrido at Texas can't claim.

Not a huge deal...but it can't be completely discounted, either.




But those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint. – Isaiah 40:31 (NIV)

I was joking about "births." I think you meant berths.

D'oh!!!

In a 10 year span, I would expect that 2014 would be about the 7th best season for this program. This year's team may have slightly over-achieved. Therefore, my problem is with talent (recruiting/evaluation/development), and not with the performance of the product on the field.

That question comes up every time our consecutive post season streak is brought up. Or every time a Omaha regular is mentioned, someone says "oh but they missed the post season 3 years ago"

all right, take your pick from the last 4 years:

A&M
2011 - Omaha
2012 - regional
2013 - regional
2014 - regional

Rice
2011 - regional
2012 - regional
2013 - SR
2014 - regional

t.u.
2011 - Omaha
2012 - missed
2013 - missed
2014 - Omaha

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it's not easy picking among those three is it?

as a college baseball fan, it's terrible when your team misses the postseason. A big part of what makes following your team fun are the:

regional projections
host projections
bubble watch
conference championship race
division race
tracking the various conference tournament results and regional scores

but when your team is awful (like the 2013 longhorn team) and finished by the end of April...you don't get any of that enjoyment. It's like a lost season

There's no two ways about it at this point. MJ had more success than RC. MJ had at least 3 team as good or better than RC's best team. MJ got within 1 game of Omaha at least 5 times before they had supers. In the next 5 years RC would have to get 2 national seeds and get to Omaha twice - or something similar - to pass MJ. Yes, MJ faded at the end, but that program was a beast (that laid a few untimely eggs) from '87 - '99.

They did miss regionals in 1990 and 1994, but that stuff happens when your entire team gets drafted.

Hop - great question and one I've thought about for years.
W - great real life example you posted

I prefer the up and down team if that up and down team can win one national championship in a ten year period.

No real fan minds a rebuilding year as long as it's being done with talent. Of course, it's always easier after a championship...as in 2006 or 2010 UNC basketball.

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I prefer the up and down team if that up and down team can win one national championship in a ten year period.

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I just love comments like this, because it is so easy for programs to win a National Championship in a ten year period

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They did miss regionals in 1990 and 1994, but that stuff happens when your entire team gets drafted.

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That was when the field was 48 teams. Both of those teams would have made the 64 team field. Conversely, the 2014 & likely the 2013 teams wouldn't have made the 48 team field. Something to keep in mind when the "well RC has taken us to the post season X years in a row and MJ didn't do that" line comes up.

The 1990 team definitely would have made the field of 64, but I'm not as certain about the '94 team. Regardless, MJ had a very good run to start his tenure, no doubt about it.

The '94 team was 6-12 in conference (18 games - ridiculous). 31-22 overall. Started conference 0-6 against t.u. and Rice. The SWC tourney was at Olsen that year, and A&M didn't qualify

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I just love comments like this, because it is so easy for programs to win a National Championship in a ten year period

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David,

I was just stating my preference to a question. Without a NC then I would want more frequesnt highs and less lows. But I still prefer a team that makes the CWS twice in 10 years and misses the postseason completely twice in 10 years to a team that makes a regional all 10 years, but never makes the CWS.

I'm the same way in football. In a 10 year period, I would rather have a couple of 11-2 seasons as well as a couple of 5-7 seasons with the other 6 seasons being 9-4, then I would have every season be 9-4.

The 1994 team had too bad of a conference record to make a 64 team playoff.

True. The 94 team would have been left out.

The '94 season was bizarre. I knew we would have trouble because our entire starting rotation was taken in the first round (actually thinking one of the guys was a "sandwich" round pick). The weird thing was the no one hit in 1994. I don't have the numbers, but it seems like Brian Thomas fell from right around .400 in 1993 to under .300 in 1994. A lot of guys had big offensive slides that season. I was expecting pitching problems, but our hitting was terrible.

BT (Brian Thomas) was drafted in '93 and went to the minors.

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BT (Brian Thomas) was drafted in '93 and went to the minors.

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I don't have anything going back that far. My memory of the '94 season, and it's been 20+ years, is that we had a lot of returning position players from the '93 team but all of their stats tanked in '94. BT is the one name I remembered having an awful '94. Maybe it was a bad '92 and he recovered in '93?

'94 was quite dysfunctional. I remember watching us get beat 100-0 by Southern Cal in the Continental/Dominoes Classic. We lost pitchers Granger, Wunsch, Nix and Moore (I believe) from the '93 squad. By the time the '94 season ended, the incredible 1993 regional at Olsen seemed like it was 50 years in the past.