The Aggie success this year has been driving Hornets fans crazy and, what few of them are left, have been crying for Sears' head pretty much all season.
Their fan site has never been quite as active as ours, but it's all but died over the course of this season. Maybe this will invigorate them a little bit.
Overall record of 20-35 and an abysmal season this year. Overall, I really don't think he was a good coach. The Hornets should be excited about getting a new coach. You never know when you might land one that can really turn a program around... we're great examples of that.
What do you sell if you're promoting Sac State? I don’t see how anyone can build a consistent program there. I don’t see how they recruit freshmen who have other options and transfers don’t stay long enough to have any consistency. I’m always amazed if we lose to them; It’s like the world turned upside down.
But they have a much wider pool to recruit from, more practical majors like Business Mgmt, and California is a huge state. High school players love a chance to start right away, so he can market that.
I wonder if Orr likes Sac State assistant coach Paul Wulff.
Sac Bee writer Davidson listed 3 possible replacements tonight, and Wulff wasn't on the list.
They went 7-4 last season, 6-2 in the Big Sky and knocking on the door of the playoffs. This year they fell to 2-8, 0-7, and one of those victories was over NAIA St. Francis of Illinois which finished the season 4-7. Two teams that Sac beat last year, the Ags and Incarnate word, made the FCS playoffs this year. Hornets were moving in the wrong direction.
Davidson lists three possibilities, all with CSUS or other local ties. Osterhout at ARC, Troy Taylor, the OC at Utah, and Angus McClure, ass't head coach at Nevada. Hard to imagine anyone leaving a coordinator job in the Pac 12 or ass't head coach spot in the MWC to take the job at Sac. Hornet faithful love McClure, but again, why leave his current job for this?
I always want to beat Sac State, but I do hope they can become successful as well. I think it’s good for all of us if all three CA Big Sky teams can manage to be relevant at the same time. Improves local interest and maybe squeezes the flow of talented recruits heading north. I was privately concerned how much longer their program could stay viable with so many player and fan defections, but hopefully they can get the cart on the rails.
McClure would be crazy to leave Nevada for CSUS. He could probably get a job in the sunbelt today if he really wanted. If he weren't an alumni, Sac State would have no chance of landing him.
I'd be shocked if Troy Taylor goes anywhere below P5. He has an impressive resume at the lower levels, played for P5 Cal, and did a great job as a color analyst too. Though Troy does have ties to our region, I think it is a downgrade for him.
Nobody on here has mentioned Tim Plough as a possible replacement. Wouldn’t be surprised if he leaves UCD after the playoffs to take the NAU HC job. But Sac State would be enticing as well.
The idea that Sac being good along with Davis is good for Davis is appealing because we hate to wish anyone ill. However the facts are that we compete with them in the same market. Not for players except in rare occasions, but for radio tv and print coverage, miniscual as coverage of what are still deemed “small college sports” is. Add that to the Bee’s seeming adoption of them as the local school makes them an impediment to us getting press coverage. In this case we are competing for slices from a relatively fixed size pie.
Probably not simple.
But at the end of the day I think this town is too small for the two of us, They moved to the Big Sky to get some space from us, but we followed them there. I bet they weren’t happy about that and they shouldn’t have been. Competing head to head with us is pretty hard for them in the long run.
In the changing world of print media, our observations on the Bee's coverage are as much the result of a shrinking business as they are a deliberate choice of the paper itself. I am sure they would love to put out large editions covering every sport down to youth baseball, etc., but readership is down, costs of paper, ink and labor are up. Space and money are limited. Decisions are made in the business office as much as in the editor's.
Still the Chron can cover several pro and college teams, or it used to.
We all recall the “negativity bias” from Psch 1 days, but you must admit the Bee has taken it to new lows because it sells papers: “if it bleeds, it leads” is the old motto. This is a main reason why the Bee does not report a lot regarding UC Davis; too much good news! But when the pepper spray incident came along the Bee could not get enough of it. Rumor had it that the Bee thought it deserved a Pulitzer for running Katehi out of town. And yes, the Chron still unabashedly covers all the BA colleges sports and carries all their athletic websites in the sports section. Chron finds no problem covering both Cal and Stanford equally either; and mostly always positively.
Like the Aggies have done with Hawkins, so should the Hornets with Angus McClure. McClure will turn that program into a winner with all his recruiting, alumni and business connections. It would turn this rivalry back into something very exciting.
I’ve got the impression through the years, maybe wrongly, that to the Bee Sac State is the more local team and we’re from out of town. They don’t cover either team well but I think Sac gets more or equal coverage even when they are less newsworthy.
Regarding news coverage, I dumped the Bee about a year ago. Their home delivery cost was higher then what I was willing to pay for the level of news I was getting. The Daily Democrat (we call it the daily disappointment) actually has been doing a good job covering Aggie Sports. Last fall they were covering the Hornets on about an equal level with the Aggies. I dropped the editor a note telling him they really should be covering local sports, and let the Bee cover regional. He agreed with me partially, then about 4 months went by and the Hornets have essentially disappeared from their sports coverage.
Yes. The Bee has several young writers that are either sac state students or alums. Lots intern over the summer and have produced great content for the news section. The Bee’s sports staff has to be less than 5 writers though.
I just wonder if McClure would take the cut in pay and position to return to Sac at this point in his career. It would be like UCD thinking Chris Peterson would leave Washington to return to Davis. I'm not sure we would ever have been able to hire Hawkins if his career had not hit a couple of bumps in Boulder and Montreal...Throw in that I, admittedly with some bias, think that UCD has to be generally more attractive than Sac. Larger campus, more visilbility, more support across the board, etc.