Tigerfan7169 said:
It'll be a circus, if/when the decide to let him go. He's made the same classless statements towards LSU to recruits, namely Ryan Perriloux. Unfortunatley, the double standard is par for the course. Once MS. State gets enough of losing, (which will take 2-3 more years than the average SEC school, save KY and Vandy), his true colors will come out. MS. State will then be labeled as a racist institution and face what Bama dealt with a few years ago.
The sad fact is that Mississippi State didn't really hire Croom because of his qualifications. They hired him because they thought his roots and, more importantly, his race could garner them enough top recruits to level the playing field with higher-tier SEC programs such as Alabama, UT, barn, LSU, etc. That might make sense to someone desperate to be competitive, but what it really reveals is, at best, a very cynical and patronizing view of race relations and, at worst, out-and-out racial pandering.
Is MSU taking the top recruits away from Bama, UT, LSU, etc. (or even Ole Miss, for that matter)? No. MSU is still a backwater, bottom-tier SEC program in the middle of nowhere with no tradition to speak of. Most Africian-American kids are smarter than the MSU folks think: they'll go to college where they'll find opportunities (both educationally and athletically), the most TV exposure, and best chance to win and be coached and prepared to possibly play on Sundays, regardless of the race of the head coach. That's what's happening. Now if Croom or another African-American head coach was at Bama, Georgia, or UT, it might tip the scales favorably in his direction a little, but certainly not at MSU.
As MSU discovers that Croom won't be able to deliver top 10 recruiting classes to Starkville as they'd hoped, what are they stuck with? A mess. A coaching staff of malcontents hell-bent on weeding out the "bad apples", but producing no suitable fruit to replace them with. A head coach they won't be able to fire without raising a national firestorm unless they replace him with another African-American coach which (sadly, in today's college football) significantly reduces the pool of candidates. Croom was hired for the wrong reasons, and MSU will pay the price, literally and figuratively. If Croom can't deliever top African-American recruits to Starkville, imagine how many will want to come once they fire him!
Say what you want, but Jackie Sherrill had stumbled onto the only winning formula for State: stock up on juco recruits, snag a couple of top in-state kids, and be willing to take on "project" players of sizable talent but questionable character. He made it work for several years. The problem with that strategy is, with two-year juco kids and questionable characters, you're only a couple of poor recruiting classes away from being a terrible team. Croom seems philosophically opposed to doing it Jackie's way, and that will be part of his undoing. Can you win in Starkville without cutting corners? I really doubt it.
