The Morning Stake: June 6th

Lady Raider Basketball

Texas Tech Baseball

Texas Tech fell to Sam Houston State, 4-3 (Recap | Box Score) and it was a game whee Texas Tech could never capitalize with runners in scoring position. Head coach Tim Tadlock mentioned that the team just didn’t execute and that’s probably what Tadlock is talking about. Tadlock also mentioned off the top that SHSU pitched guys that all pitched yesterday and that’s really bad for arms and that’s something that Tadlock just doesn’t do. Regardless, this was about not taking advantage of opportunities and that was what decided the game. There was this moment where Josh Jung hit a triple and looked safe but the SHSU third baseman lifted Jung’s arm off of the bag. Tadlock said after the game that they just don’t go there in terms of criticizing umpires. Tadlock also said that he was playing to win the whole thing, winning 45 games is great and all, but Tadlock said that this season wasn’t a success and that’s where this program is right now.

I’ll just leave some of these here.

Texas Tech Football

Buy your very own Staking The Plains t-shirt at the Staking The Plains Threadless Shop. Click on that danged shirt (or the link).

This is a really good article from SI’s Andy Staples about why the coaches, especially some of the high profile coaches like Nick Saban, are not real happy with the new early signing period:

Before this recruiting cycle, coaches could watch the dominos fall through December and January and either cut loose committed players or ask them to take a grayshirt, which would require them to delay enrollment until the spring of the following year. Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh made headlines in January of ’16 for pruning his recruiting class of committed players. Alabama’s Nick Saban has made headlines in multiple years for having the grayshirt conversation with players close to National Signing Day. (Grayshirting as a practice is fine; the problem is when coaches spring the conversation on a player just before National Signing Day when the player has fewer options.)

When programs sent the FedEx envelopes containing scholarship papers in the first week of February, that’s the first time the players learned whether their scholarship offer was real. In most cases, they were. But on Dec. 18 and Dec. 19 of this year, when some players go looking for those envelopes, they’re not going to find them.

This irks some coaches for several reasons. First, coaches hate change. Second, they hate anything that makes their lives more difficult. Third, many hate anything that offers a modicum of power to the player. In this case, knowledge is power.

So yeah, players are going to know exactly if they have an offer and the players are going to know who is telling them the truth and who is not.

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