I always thought that Florida's situation was kind of interesting. They fired Andy Lopez for losing in the first round of the tournament 2 times in row and hired one of the best in the game, O'Sullivan.
Overall, the yearly results for Florida have been much better (2 coaches later), but Lopez went on to win a championship in 2012 at Arizona, and a team he helped put together is headed to the finals this season. Some of the media is a little fed up with that "under-performing" as well. This article reads like a lot of Texags posts.
http://www.onlygators.com/06/20/2016/florida-baseball-on-the-edge-of-another-college-world-series-failure/We constantly hear that being in Texas, it should be easier for us to make the CWS than so many other schools because of recruits and facilities. But no team from Texas has won the CWS in 11 years now. Only one school (also Texas) has even made the final series. Garrido was "re-assigned" and we've passed up Rice. If it was as simple as existing, Garrido and Graham would still be the biggest deals in the game.
I've said before that what A&M athletics needs is donors who are willing to give while at the same time, letting a competent athletic director do his job. I don't think we've had that in my lifetime. Sumlin hasn't had a single team anyone could have pretended was going to win a national championship, and he got a giant raise. Kennedy's teams were bad against a bad SEC basketball conference for four years, and Woodward went public saying he was getting a raise and extension before the team even played in the postseason. And people want to fire Childress, who may be the only one of those coaches that has put together a team that people thought even had a team
capable of being mentioned in a national title run.
And he got an extension in 2013, at which point he was 2nd or 3rd to last in terms of salary among SEC coaches. When your fan base is as focused as we are on football, and giving that coach and his assistants over 6 million per year, the coach that comes up a game short of Omaha after a good regular season (making somewhere around 400k) really isn't going to be on the radar.
Anyway, Johnson missed the NCAA tournament (in its current form) 4 out of 6 seasons. Making the tournament didn't used to be a "sure thing" until Childress got here, with the previous longest streak of making the tournament being 4 years. Now it's sitting at 10 straight years. In the 10 seasons before Childress, the Aggies won the conference or tournament twice. Under Childress, the Aggies have won 6 titles.
The goal IS a national championship, but the program has been elevated under Childress. It wasn't that long ago that making the tournament wasn't as "boring" as it is now. And despite falling short, a lot of the teams have won in-season titles and a lot of games along the way, all the while playing great competition (SEC winning or in the final series the past 8 seasons, a stronger Big 12 before 2012). The new basketball deal doesn't make the new AD look very cutthroat, and following the past 2 baseball seasons, I can't imagine there are multiple programs in the entire nation that would be considering cutting Childress loose at this point in time.
In the meantime, it's the easiest thing in the world to log onto the internet and type out "I demand excellence, you accept mediocrity" and "Winning is better than losing". It's likely to accomplish as much as it has during every preceding season.
