I can't tell you if I'll be running this blog in 20 years. If I do, it's because I'll be having fun with it, made a name for myself, and will have accomplished a lot. I may have seen it all by that time but I'll still be writing away. But what if ... in 20 years, I kind of suck at this? What if I'm still holding my own, but other bigger and better MAC blogs come by, some of them doing videoblogging, and some of them are younger and attractive?
I'm not saying that's the case with Bob Lindsay, but maybe that's how the Kent State brass see it.
If you don't follow women's basketball, you've already stopped reading, but maybe you're slightly curious and don't know the key details of this man, and why it's such a big deal: Lindsay is the most accomplished coach in MAC women's basketball history — the Charlie Coles of MAC coaches, if you will. His 418 overall wins rank in the top 50 all time among Division I coaches. His 260 MAC wins is 120 more than anybody else. (Curt Miller is at 135, so you know.) Lindsay's teams have fallen below .500 three times in 23 seasons: his first year in 1989-90, 2007-08, and this past season where he went 6-21. And he was fired after such a season.
In a "what have you done for me lately" culture, it doesn't really matter that Lindsay won MAC Coach of the Year twice and led the Golden Flashes to four MAC tournament titles in an eight-year span. His last appearance was 2002 ... coincidentally the first year of Curt Miller's career at Bowling Green. But even since then, KSU enjoyed four 20-win seasons, two more with 19 wins and three WNIT appearances. The firing, on the surface, seems like one done by a video game-controlled athletic director.
Or maybe it does matter that he owned the MAC for nearly a decade. That's what they were used to and they don't have that now. Right now they have a 6-21 team that's EXTREMELY young and oddly small in numbers: just 10 people on the roster, six of them freshmen, the rest juniors. And I think it's very fair to say that the team improved very much as the season went on. Granted they started with a 1-10 mark in nonconference play, then finished 5-11 after that. So it's hard not to do much better than that.
So what was it? Was Lindsay mailing it in? Was second-year athletic director Joel Nielsen looking for an opportunistic time to fire him and bring in new blood? All we have is speculation.And another vacancy on the sidebar. And many, many freshmen on Kent State, ready to contemplate their basketball futures.