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(Photo by Morgan Engel/Getty Images)
It was an eventful week in college baseball.
Tennessee beat Texas A&M in the College World Series finals, winning the final two games of the series. And fresh off his team’s Game 3 loss Monday night in Omaha, Aggies coach Jim Schlossnagle firmly dismissed rumors linking him to the newly vacant Texas job.
But a day later, Texas hired Schlossnagle and brought his entire coaching staff with him. Soon after, several of A&M’s top players entered the transfer portal, including All-American outfielder Jace LaViolette and third baseman Gavin Grahovac, the SEC Freshman of the Year.
In less than 40 hours, Schlossnagle went from coaching A&M in Game 3 to being an embarrassing photographer with Hook ‘Em, the Texas mascot, after his introductory press conference. In the meantime, he poured a barrel or two of crude oil on the Texas-Texas A&M rivalry and shook up the sports landscape. Anyone who still had doubts about the unforgiving nature of college baseball in 2024 has had their beliefs heavily discredited in the process.
There’s a lot to unpack here. To help you consider the implications, let’s consider a few important questions.
What does this mean for Texas?
In Schlossnagle, the Longhorns landed one of the most successful coaches of the 21st century. Athletic director Chris Del Conte landed his white whale and, by all accounts, one of his closest friends.
Schlossnagle, named Baseball America’s 2016 Coach of the Year, is 946-455 in 23 seasons at the helm of A&M, TCU and UNLV. He has led his teams to Omaha seven times, including two of the last three seasons at A&M. He’s probably the best coach Texas could hire as it prepares to officially enter the SEC next week.
Schlossnagle also said multiple times Wednesday that his decision to accept the job had a lot to do with his relationship with Del Conte and his strong alignment with the administration. Schlossnagle and Del Conte worked together at TCU for seven years until Del Conte left in late 2016 to take over at Texas. It was a successful relationship that led the Horned Frogs to four trips to Omaha. If that’s what the right roster can produce, Texas should feel pretty good.
The Longhorns are already very good – they have the third most national titles in college baseball history and have been to Omaha three times in the last seven seasons – but haven’t won a championship since 2005. Texas’ goal is still to win the title. College World Series. This hire will clearly be judged by this standard.
What does this mean for Texas A&M?
This is a blow. The Aggies just lost the coach who led them to the best season in program history to their archrival. It’s hard for me to understand how it got to this point.
The Aggies pushed back against my assertion that they fumbled here, asking me what they could have done differently. This argument is valid. Texas A&M structured Schlossnagle’s contract to protect against this scenario, creating a buyout twice as large for Texas schools as for any out-of-state school. The university committed $80 million to renovating Blue Bell Park, built in 2012. It created a robust name, image and likeness (NIL) program for its players. A&M’s staff was one of the highest paid in college baseball, costing more than $2 million per year.
It’s not A&M’s fault that Schlossnagle and Del Conte are so close. Nor is it A&M’s fault that its own administration changed direction this year. Ohio State hired Ross Bjork as its athletic director. Trev Albert came in from Nebraska to replace him.
And yet, A&M just lost a star coach to its biggest rival. This can’t happen. Something went wrong here, although you have to go back to the beginning and question the original hire. Schlossnagle’s relationship with Del Conte is not new, nor was it a secret within the industry. There have been rumors of the two reuniting for a long time. Texas A&M must have thought it could make Schlossnagle comfortable enough in College Station to make it the last job he would take, as he said it would. But perhaps he should have interpreted the situation better. Or maybe it’s a matter of hindsight and there’s no fault in College Station. I don’t know. What I do know is that, as of Tuesday, no SEC coach had left for another conference job since John Cohen left Kentucky for Mississippi State, his alma mater, in 2008.
What about Schlossnagle’s press conference on Monday evening?
Let me start by saying I wasn’t in the interview room in Omaha because I was still on the field talking to the Tennessee players and coaches. When I got there, I made a joke to a co-worker about working in Texas. That’s when I heard about what had happened a few minutes earlier.
This wasn’t a good idea for Schlossnagle, who is usually one of the most polished interviews in the game. A question about working in Texas was fair, and he should have been prepared for it, even just moments after having lost the national championship.
This is also an easy question to answer: “This is not the time to ask that question. I’m still digesting the defeat and I want to help my players do the same. We’ll have plenty of time to talk about the future later.”
Would this have improved the situation? Maybe, maybe not. But I know those kinds of responses wouldn’t attract national attention like Schlossnagle’s response did.
Ultimately, focusing on what he said on the podium is a mistake. Words matter and coaches should not lose their cool when faced with journalists who are doing their best in embarrassing situations. But if he had given a better answer that night, would it really have made anyone in College Station feel better or less betrayed by what happened Tuesday? I highly doubt it.
Is timing important?
There has been much discussion about exactly when this was all being worked out. Multiple reports, primarily out of College Station, indicate the deal was done before the start of the NCAA tournament. On Wednesday, Schlossnagle and Del Conte repeatedly said they had not discussed the job until Tuesday.
There may be some truth to both statements. I don’t really see how either matters, except that one version of events suggests that Texas shackled Pierce for weeks, which isn’t great. But if Schlossnagle really did coach in the NCAA tournament with the intention of leaving at the end of the season, he did an incredible job of not getting distracted. A&M didn’t lose a game in the tournament until Game 2 of the CWS championship series. He overcame significant injuries to All-American outfielder Braden Montgomery and No. 2 starter Shane Sdao. I don’t know what more he or his team could have done to win the national championship.
If that’s the principle of it all, I understand. But this is a results-driven business and the results have been exceptional, until Tennessee came back in the sixth inning on Sunday.
Are all Aggies transferring?
You can feel it like that.
At least 10 A&M players entered the transfer portal Wednesday, including five who were in the starting lineup Monday night. And while simply entering the portal doesn’t guarantee a player will transfer, the players who entered Wednesday are going to be in high demand. LaViolette (LSU) and Grahovac (Arizona State) were both initially committed elsewhere. They changed their minds after coaching changes led A&M to hire assistant coaches who had worked at the schools they had originally committed to. These assistants are now in Texas.
But there was also a group of Aggies — mostly pitchers — who reaffirmed their commitment to A&M on Wednesday. I’m not sure what to think of this locker room separation, but it’s quite interesting.
What does this situation say about college baseball?
For the neutral fan, it was all very entertaining.
It’s a great offseason story that comes with the added spice of a rivalry between two massive programs. Schlossnagle has long been a prominent figure in the sport and made national headlines Monday with his comments. The transfer portal angle only serves to supercharge things. And the money involved is huge. Texas paid just under $3 million to buy Schlossnagle out of his contract, by far the largest figure in college baseball history. All the elements come together for an explosive story.
I know it has also made a lot of people uncomfortable. The situation has brought the business side of things to the forefront. For those who prefer to view college baseball as a quaint sport, isolated from the mediocrity of big-money college sports like football and basketball, this is a rude awakening.
College baseball has come a long way in the last ten years, let alone the last twenty or thirty years. In a way, it is an undeniable success. ESPN reported an average of 3.34 million viewers for Game 3 of the championship series. Schools across the country have broken attendance records this spring. In every way, attention to the sport is greater than ever.
But not all aspects of the game’s growth are so gleeful in the headlines. Growing the game also means more money is being invested in it, and with more money comes more cruelty and fewer of the values that college sports have embraced (mostly hypocritically) for a century.
College baseball didn’t need its own Lincoln Riley moment to become a big one. But boy, did I get it. And now that we’re here, it’s going to be hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube.
I think that’s quite a good thing. Baseball’s appeal has long been based on nostalgia. That’s all well and good, but a little honesty about where the sport is going is also refreshing. Money, not loyalty, is now the currency. The sooner everyone recognizes this, the sooner we can get to a point where things can be better regulated and understood, rather than talked about in hushed tones or hushed up.