Ray was an excellent coach and won National Championships once he learned not to be such a hard arse with his players ... Chad needs to learn to be a bit more of a hard arse at times, but he's learning.

Chad also had to get his arse out of the 3rd base box and into the dugout ... which he did last season and it showed with good results.

My bet is that Chad may well end-up winning more National Championships at SC than did Ray ... and he'll win more SEC Championships as well.

He's a naturally better coach than Ray ... he just hasn't developed instincts that Ray had thanks to Ray's years of coaching experience prior to coming to SC.

Ray would tell you the same thing.

But again, this year is going to tell us a lot about Chad. Chad's first couple of clubs suffered unreal injury bugs. Last year he took us to the Supers. This year's team is loaded and, knock on wood, healthy.

On paper at least, this is probably the best pitching staff I can ever remember us having and we've had some good ones. But we've got the sticks and the gloves this year as well.

Time will tell but this team has Omaha written all over it ... they are really impressive. Big, fast and strong and I think very well coached. It's the in-game instinctual calls that will make or break us this year ... Chad has to make the right calls at the right times. Ray became uncanny at doing that from about 2002 until he took the AD gig ... but it took him 15 years to get there.