There is a chance this won't be very popular, but quite frankly I've reached a point where that has become irrelevant.
This started out as a long winded rant born out of the frustration of the performance of this Okahoma baseball program these past two seasons. About half way through I realized it wasn't coming off the way I had intended or at least hoped for, so I have chosen to make it more of an open forum after adding a few of my own thoughts. This site, and really SB Nation in general, is about giving the fans a forum to allow their opinion to be heard so my alteration to my original idea is in that spirit.
We may not necessarily agree on the level of tradition this OU baseball program has achieved in its history, but in my opinion it is fairly significant and thus the standard of winning and reaching the postseason on a regular basis I believe is a reasonable expectation.
Okay, first. We can argue back and forth whether or not living up to expectations and using that to judge a head coach's performance is fair or not. However, in the world we live in, fair or unfair that's the standard any coach at this level is judged by. So is it fair to use this teams consecutive disappointing seasons, based on preseason expectations, as a strike against Sunny Golloway? In my opinion, that is fair.
Now, is he solely responsible? No, of course not but as the head coach of any Division I athletic program that responsibility comes with the job. And anyone who takes that kind of position is well aware of that fact beforehand. More specifically though, it's not just that the team these last two years has failed to live up to expectations but how they've failed to do so. Talent is not the problem, anyone who has watched this team the last two years can tell you that.
Being outside the program, I can only speculate as to what may or may not be going on internally within this program. Much like some of you I'm sure, I have heard talk about some not so positive things but those are taken second hand. That said, I know what my eyes tell me when I watch this team play and far too often it seems as if something is just off with them.
Second, and this is one that I'll just never be able to let go and quite frankly don't think I should ever have to. At what point did it become acceptable for any athletic program at the University of Oklahoma to lose on a consistent basis to our two main rivals, Oklahoma State and Texas?
Going back through past schedules once Golloway was promoted to head coach, by my count his record against those two teams is a less than impressive:
11 - 16 vs. OSU & 4 - 17 vs. Texas
Let that sink in for a minute. To make it even worse, Oklahoma has lost the last 14 consecutive series against Texas which you don't have to be a genius to figure out that Golloway (who became the head coach May 2005) has never, NEVER, even won a series against the hated Longhorns.
I ask you, is there any other athletic program at the University of Oklahoma where the head coach could be that remarkably unsuccessful against your biggest rival and be allowed to keep their job? I'm just absolutely baffled by this and how there seems to be not heat on Golloway for this?!?
I can fully appreciate that baseball is not the same as football at Oklahoma (duh), so to make the comparison isn't exactly apples to apples. But it's worth mentioning that an OU football coach wouldn't have anywhere near the leash Golloway has had with respect to his atrocious record against Texas.
Again, is that single statistic reason enough alone to fire the guy? Probably not, but I stress the word probably there because that's a big pill for any OU fan to swallow.
Maybe I'm wrong, but to me it really seems like this OU baseball program has achieved all it ever will with Sunny Golloway at the helm. I can't imagine the goal of the fans and the goal of the OU administration are all that dissimilar, right? So why do the fans seem to be so fed up with things as they currently stand and, at least from the outside, the OU admins do not? There doesn't even seem to be any talk about Golloway being on the proverbial "hot seat" and maybe that's just due to the lack of real coverage of college baseball.
I don't know about the rest of you out there, but I'm at a loss at this point.
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