AUSage

Glad to see Spud Dud gone. Wouldn't mind seeing Prime as our next coach. He would fix the recruiting issues immediately.

I don't blame her either...sounds like the MSU AD didn't handle things very well. I did read her complete bio and she appears to be an ace recruiter. If so, that will certainly be an improvement over the last eight years. My concern with her is the ability to run an entire program and handle in-game tactical coaching. When I watch coaches like Pearl, Staley, VanDerveer, Auriemma, etc., they have incredible instincts for which players should be on the floor and how tactics should change based on what's working. Our previous coach simply stood on the sidelines with a thousand yard stare wondering why her plan wasn't working. It's a skill that has to be learned as a head coach and she will be moving up the learning curve on Auburn's dime. I'll be rooting for her success, but I would have preferred we hired an experienced head coach.

All true, but I think Powell was severely limited by having to play out of his natural position. He seemed to display excellent court instincts and could have been an extremely good shooting guard with someone effective playing point. I just thought he had tremendous potential that Pearl would have tapped and Barnes will likely waste. Wish Powell the best either way.

Having Justin Powell transfer away from Auburn is a net negative for us (as most of you have acknowledged), having him transfer to TN to play for Barnes is a net negative for him. I live in KY and scuttlebutt among the Big Blue faithful is that the kid's dream all along was to play for UK. Calipari did not recruit him from high school and apparently doesn't want him now. Hope things work out for him. Loved watching him play for us.

Wow. We languish through way too many years of tedious mediocrity and then decide to improve things by hiring a new coach with ZERO head coaching experience. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, but I'm extremely unimpressed and see more of the same coming for women's basketball. And to be clear, Vic Schaefer turned MSU into a nationally competitive program, not Johnnie Harris. If she was such a key catalyst in the MSU ascension, why was she not hired as his replacement? The MSU AD probably knew her as well as anyone and she had the blessing of Schaefer for the job, yet they hired someone else. I suspect she is a fantastic assistant who nobody thinks is ready to be a head coach...except Allen Green. The true beauty of most sports, however, is that there is an objective measure of success that's visible for everyone (excluding gymnastics, ice skating and the like) to see. I hope Ms. Harris returns AU Women's Basketball to national relevance, wins the SEC and thumbs her nose at people like me. However, I'll believe it when I see it.