Over The Pylon

Word broke this morning that a team meeting had been called by the BSU football staff for before this afternoon’s practice. I kept that under my hat for the day waiting to see what (if anything) would come from it. My worst fear would be having to put a post up a la Brady Hoke’s final days that a team meeting ends up with a coaching search being opened up. That didn’t happen today, despite the Twittervese being all aflitter with flight plans, “done deal” messageboard posts, and people spreading doom and gloom that Coach Pete Lembo had his bags packed and his UHaul loaded up ready to boogaloo on out of the 765. Lembo’s  message to the team was simple: “Nothing has changed” and it’s business as usual around the football program.

Regardless of whomever may be sniffing around Muncie or talking to Lembo or his agents, as of this moment Pete Lembo is still the coach of the Fighting Football Cardinals and fans and supporters would do well to remember that. As I told Tom Davis of the Ft. Wayne News Sentinel on Twitter this afternoon after he was asking people who the next coach should be, let’s wait until the body is cold before we go out looking for a new daddy. Mommy hasn’t pulled the plug on the current one and collected the life insurance so let’s all take a deep breath.

The Star Press ran a story that confirms from an unnamed source that Wake AD Ron Wellman was in Muncie today. Reading between the lines of the Star Press report says that someone at the airport let it slip that the Wake AD was flying in town and needed a rental car. I have two thoughts on this report:

1. If A Few Good Men taught us anything, it’s that ground crews at airports are wont to maybe be viewed as something they are not. Remember the two airmen that cost Jack Nicholson his full bird colonel-ship and nearly got Danny Kaffee’s skull loved in a not so pleasant way? I’m just saying, airmen have been used as part of trickeration before.
2. I have rented cars from the Muncie airport before. I was not impressed. I can only hope that Ron Wellman at least got bumped up to mid-size. It’s hard to have negotiation talks in a Prius. And besides, everyone knows Pete isn’t a nancy boy liberal driving around in an electric rice rocket.

Coaching searches bring out the absolute worst in everyone. We have one columnist tweeting about seeing Lembo’s wife buying pickles at Meijer, people confirming what rental car company an AD used, everyone using unnamed sources, all of us wanting to be right, some of us at the expense of being first, and all the while forgetting that there is a group of players, fans, parents, and staff members sort of caught in the middle. So let’s all try to keep a level head about this, shall we? We’ll know soon enough if CPL is staying or going. Probably when he rolls down McKinley Avenue like this:

Filed under: BallStateFootball, Coaches |