re: Beth staying [on] [off]

quote:

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I wish you guys could go to the elite softball tournaments. 100 teams and zero from Louisiana. We produce some local talent but we have to convince out of state players to come here. Our softball program overachieves, they just aren’t national champion quality. Fire Beth and we could become Nebraska football.

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I agree with this completely. Most of the people calling for Torina to be let go have very unrealistic expectations about the potential of this program. They think there are inherent advantages LSU has that just don’t exist in reality. Louisiana is not a hotbed for talent, as you mentioned. There is a lot of talent in Texas, but the emergence of Oklahoma, Oklahoma St, Texas, and, now, A&M make it much harder to pull talent from there. People talk about resources, but Torina is only the 5th highest paid coach in the conference and that likely will soon drop to 6th. They also like to compare conference records to a time when Alabama was the only other school in the conference that took softball seriously instead of now when 6 teams are in the Top 12, 7 in the Top 15, and 12 of the 13 are in the Top 30.

The program has stagnated under Torina, so it’s reasonable to re-evaluate, but the program isn’t nearly as bad as many make it out to be. In many ways she’s a victim of her own success. LSU was the 5th best program in the conference when she took over behind Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. In her early years she took LSU to heights the program had never before reached and surpassed Tennessee and Georgia. Since then, Tennessee has re-emerged and Arkansas has found new success, but that only returns LSU to where they were when Torina arrived. Can they do better? Perhaps if they are willing to pay top dollar for one of only a few realistically available coaches, but even there there would be no guarantees. The question is whether it’s worth running the program at a massive financial loss to do so. It’s a huge gamble and the program could very likely end up even worse.