NU Coaching Candidates (D1Baseball.com)
- Thread starter Alum-Ni
- Start date
Sjuts said Jeff Christy as Pitching coach. A catcher coaching the pitchers...Hmmm very interesting.
All I said was... "you could go and get a Will Bolt."
When everyone was ready to fire Erstad during the NW series.
The only thing I thought was obvious, was Childress's buyout was too rich.
We would have been paying Childress and the Aggies new head coach's salaries. I know some thought this may have been a wise investment, I just could not see it.
Now, when Kyle Peterson mentioned the possibility of hiring Pat Casey...
That's when I started thinking, why not?!?! Dream B1G.
But who knows if any contact was ever made.
Heck, Oregon St just hired their new coach just earlier, leaving interim head coach Pat Yeskie looking for work today.
So yes, there are plenty of other good coaches out there.
But I stuck with the possibility of Bolt mainly because I do believe he is a big up-and-coming coaching commodity. If we didn't make a run for him now, we probably would not have had a second chance. And if Bolt would have become successful elsewhere... you all know the complaining that would be going on here for years
To me, that alone, makes the Bolt hire worth it.
Imagine if Bolt played at KU or Washington State instead of Nebraska, people would be outraged. Moos struck out on Childress and I guess he couldn't do any better than Bolt. Looks like another 7 years of me pretending Nebraska doesn't have a baseball program.
Per Kendall Rogers (https://d1baseball.com/coaching-buzz/nebraskahiresbolt/), NU did inquire about Pat Casey
Not sure anybody would have called it that at the time. Nobody knew how well it was going to turn out. He exceeded everybody's expectations. Plus there are different standards for non-Power 5 schools. Nobody would have called it a homerun hire for a Power 5 school.
I'm not going to go quite that far-he deserves a chance, and I feel a little better about this one than I did when Erstad was hired, but the point about if Bolt played elsewhere is important. One of the big reasons some people like this is because he played here. Nobody would even think about this as a homerun hire if he hadn't played here. Hiring a former player as a coach is nice, if like in the case of Frost he was already a hot coaching prospect, but the fact he was a former player alone should mean very little.
I think Bolt can do more in 8 years than 1 regular season B1G title and a 2-8 record in regionals, but he wasn't my first choice either. I wasn't planning on following too closely next season if Erstad wasn't going to replace Mike Kirby, but I'll be watching now.
