The Daily Sports Roundup

My friend Dave occasionally forwards me comments from the "Call The Sports Editor" feature of the Tulsa World. Usually, they are silly. Sometimes they go well beyond silly:

ORU also needs change
If people are calling for a change in baseball coaches at OSU, how about ORU? The Golden Eagles will never return to national prominence with Sunny Golloway as head coach. ORU has so-called winning streaks against the bottom feeders of Division I baseball and long losing streaks against decent D-I teams. These are the issues ORU should be addressing.

More and more
We not only need coaching changes in OSU baseball, we need a coaching change in OSU wrestling. John Smith isn't a wrestling coach.

Cowboys going nowhere
I agree 100 percent with the caller who said OSU needs to get a new baseball coach. OSU has struggled for the past several years. The program has continued to be stagnant and Tom Holliday has basically run out of excuses. I don't know how much longer Terry Don Phillips is going to let it last over there, but they need to make a change and try to get that thing turned around because it is going nowhere.

Hmm... Sunny Golloway is well respected among those who know college baseball as running a great baseball program despite being at a school that is not in a competitive conference and competes with two perennial major conference baseball contenders in its own small state! ORU should consider itself very lucky that a major West Coast or Southern program hasn't snatched up Golloway. Several years ago, he brought an ORU team down to Cougar Field to face a UH team ranked in the Top 20, and I was really impressed with how well coached they were.

As OSU wrestling goes.... wow. I've not heard anyone say that about John Smith before. Kind of shocking, if you know much about college wrestling. I don't, and it's still kind of shocking.

As for Tom Holliday.... well, I don't like the guy at a personal level, and I don't like the way he whines around NCAA tourney time about RPIs and such when he loads his schedule with weak opponents. Clearly, the program has not been as successful under him, while it was a powerhouse under Gary Ward. But Gary Ward also competed in the Big Eight, where the only real challenger in college baseball was Oklahoma, and they weren't much of a challenger. The Big 12 is a much tougher baseball conference, with teams that are perennial powerhouses and are better situated geographically than OSU (Texas, Texas A&M, and more recently even Baylor and Texas Tech) for baseball. Throw in the financial commitment made by Nebraska to baseball in recent years, and it's not an easy conference these days. So it may not be fair to blame Holliday for the program's troubles -- it may just be that the competition has gotten much better. Of course, if Holliday scheduled tougher opponents prior to the start of conference play, he might better prepare his team for those tough Texas opponents. I don't like the man personally, but that's my only real critique of his approach to the baseball program, especially since I've never seen one of his teams personally.

[Posted at 21:26 CST on 05/02/02] [Link]