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Could Lane Kiffin run our baseball program as a side hustle and do better than current results?

Me and Paul

Starting Ole Miss Quarterback
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Sep 21, 2015
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Full disclosure: I'm not the biggest baseball fan and don't keep up with it as much as most. Obviously, this is a joke, but I'm not 100% sure that it's not correct.

Over Bianco's quarter century, the overall narrative would be: 1) awesome program manager, 2) knows the right way to use limited resources, 3) slow to adopt analytics, 4) has a tendency to get tight in big situations which carries over to his teams.

His title probably would force one to scratch the last one out, but that was there for a long time.

Over the course of the last two years, I think you have to start questioning 1 and 2.

This is my evidence:

When given the opportunity to go out and get a 3rd paid assistant and with the resources to get a top recruiter or pitching coach or anything he wanted, Bianco opted to just give the current volunteer a raise. Bianco did a great job of bringing in coaching talent early in his career, but no one is knocking down our doors to hire our assistants since Godwin left.

Kiffin on the other hand has been amassing a huge amount of coaching talent that are willing to work for nothing or very little while they help our program. Kiffin has taken over the coaching rehab clinic from Saban.

After building a program with less scholarships than almost all of his competition, Bianco now has one of the largest NIL budgets in college baseball and can't get a win on Friday nights and struggles to manufacture runs.

Kiffin has shown the ability to work the portal, understand the value of players, avoid overpaying to "fill a spot"/keep someone, and get the most out of his NIL budget. He was on the forefront of using the transfer portal.

Bianco stuck with bunts much longer than most and is hesitant to use the shift.

Kiffin is known for his use of analytics. In a sport like baseball where there are more games and more decisions/opportunities to optimize, Kiffin's approach should produce better results than even in football.

In terms of being tight and it impacting performance - I'm not sure there could be a more chill guy when it comes to baseball.

Like I said above, obviously, this is not serious, but, if I were Keith Carter, and I decided to keep Bianco, I would ask that he spend some time with Kiffin and implement some of his philosophies into the baseball program.
 
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