Duke Baseball: Welcome to Duke Coach Corey Muscara

My overwhelming emotion is just sadness. I see college sports through Duke blue colored glasses, so that is what I care about. A week ago, Duke baseball was at a high not seen in 60 years. Hosting a Super Regional, the favorite to go to Omaha, with a beloved coach and players who seemed to bleed Duke blue. And in less than a week, all that is gone. I’m just sad.
 
sagegrouse said:
I also wonder if Josh Jordan of LSU and long-time Duke assistant is slated to return to Duke. LSU is in the CWS. Not a peep have I heard about a coaching search. Hmmmm...
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I think Jordan is likely, and part of the reason there's not been much in the way of news. (Like we ever get coaching news during a search anyway.)

Unfortunately, LSU is the last team up, as they don't play their first game until tomorrow night. The quicker they lose, the faster we may know something. (I'd be pulling for them to lose anyway. ;) )
 
CameronBornAndBred said:
I think Jordan is likely, and part of the reason there's not been much in the way of news. (Like we ever get coaching news during a search anyway.)

Unfortunately, LSU is the last team up, as they don't play their first game until tomorrow night. The quicker they lose, the faster we may know something. (I'd be pulling for them to lose anyway. ;) )
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We lose Lucas early but have to wait on Jordan?
 
jb75 said:
We lose Lucas early but have to wait on Jordan?
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My guess is that Duke didn't have to allow Lucas to not complete his contract. LSU and or Jordan may see it differently. Also, Jai was facing potentially a longer stretch of being involved in still coaching with Duke.

If he's the guy that Nina really wants, he's worth waiting for.
 
CameronBornAndBred said:
I think the posts claiming that this is the end of Duke baseball, or at least is a setback for the next 5 years are living in the past. If this were pre-NIL, I'd agree with you, but the fact is that a competitive team can be bought in the offseason, regardless of the sport. We've already seen this as teams have fired their coach because the season was a disaster, hired a new guy, hired a bunch of new players, and voila, they are deep in the post-season. I actually hope that Duke not only doesn't do that, but doesn't have to do that and our new coach is someone that inspires our guys to return, as well. I'd like to see us be competitive in the NIL department so that we're enticing, but at the same time not throwing cash carelessly.

Also, remember, we and a few other teams just got beat by a group of guys that weren't making anywhere near the $ of the teams they left in the dust.

Duke baseball will be fine. It's a bump in the road, not an unclimbable mountain.
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It may not be a mountain but it’s much more than a bump in the road. They’ve lost the best coach in the history of Duke baseball!! All of their best players have hit the portal. Pollard was obviously the glue that held all of this together. I’m not saying the next guy can’t be successful but it’s going to take time because they’ve lost so much talent. It’s going to be harder to recruit as the new guy won’t have the track record of success that Pollard had. The biggest issue imo are the baseball facilities. I know they’ve redone the field and dugouts and phase 1 of the renovations look fantastic. I was at game 3 against MS and Coombs was down right embarrassing. It reminded me of Wallace Wade pre renovations: tents everywhere, a makeshift concourse and freaking port-a-johns!! They will do some things this offseason but not enough, at least that’s the plan at this point. Things are moving much slower than expected and I think that was a contributing factor in Pollard leaving. I sure hope Duke can find a way to accelerate the stadium renovations as well as the new clubhouse. I hope that I’m wrong but it’s hard to envision a scenario in which the new coach gets the support he needs when the best coach in Duke baseball history could not.
 
DoubleBlue said:
Never fear, DBR will ring out the absolute best case and the absolute worst case, and the actual result will be somewhere in the middle. The average mind will sift through these hypothetical extremes and quickly rule them out. Casting them into words is the folly of the few and the disdain of the many. Get a grip. Why do I bother.
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Huh?
 
As bad as our football team was before Cutcliffe, baseball was worse before Pollard. If I predicted 13 years ago that our coach would be as successful as he was, I’d have also guessed he’d depart much sooner than he did. Now he moves on for thoroughly understandable reasons, leaving a program ready for its next phase. The challenges noted are serious indeed—even troubling—but there’s no doubt in my mind that we’re better off for his tenure here, and so my feelings are of gratitude and respect.

As a sidebar, it’s interesting to consider an alternate universe in which the DBAP sojourn never happened. Would Coombs have progressed sooner by necessity, or would the program have withered? I think it can be argued that the prior years of neglect made the DBAP years necessary, even as the split focus on two facilities slowed the pace of change at home.
 
I think that all it takes is one big sugar daddy to make a lot of this happen. They built a pretty nice softball facility from scratch. The cost of adding on to historic Jack Coombs Field should be a fraction of that. My memory of the space is a bit rusty and I think they are likely a bit constrained by where the stadium is located since they can't move the road down the left field line, public policy building is in the outfield, and Cameron and the basketball practice facility are nearby but I don't think you need this generation's Julian Abele to figure it out.

I remain the crazy old guy who thinks that "student-athletes" still care about academics. And I know that to compete we need to be recruiting players who truly do have at least a remote shot of going pro. But one would think that preferred admission to Duke and possibly a discount off tuition to one of the top universities in the world would be a somewhat compelling recruiting pitch to at least a few pretty good players.
 
AGDukesky said:
Good. I want them to get hammered proving that Duke had no business being in the World Series in the first place (at least that is the closest I can get to a potential silver lining…)
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That was established for the entire ACC when the 9th place ACC team lost a road Super Regional to the 10th place ACC team. (The 10th place team will be eliminated Sunday by AZ.) Duke got an unusually good Regional draw with the last 4 in (OkLast) and UGA team that was overseeded by ESPN hype. Murray State also got lucky by mostly needing to beat ACC and SEC teams to get to Omaha.

The fact that Murray State's coach rebuilt that program so rapidly from absolutely nothing with sub-Coombs facilities warrants his inclusion on Duke's top 10 list for Pollard replacements. The new coach has a similar job. Picking a top 10 and the right fit is up to Nina King.

Pollard did a good job turning this team around from a 4-5 start.
 
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