New Southeast men's basketball coach Rick Ray's tenure at Mississippi State a complicated tale

Rick Ray spent three tumultuous seasons in his first head coaching gig at Mississippi State.

The 44-year-old's squads never won more than 14 games in a season and finished at or near the bottom of the Southeastern Conference each year before he was fired in March with two years remaining on his contract.

But Ray's 37-60 record as a head coach doesn't tell the complete story of the new Southeast Missouri State men's basketball coach's brief stint leading the Bulldogs.

Ray didn't prove that he was capable of winning basketball games, but those who followed the team believed that his opportunity to show that was cut short.

"It was just one of those situations where I wanted to see what would happen, see how things played out, and he didn't get that chance," ESPN.com senior writer and reporter Andy Katz said in a phone interview Saturday.

When Ray took over the program after Rick Stansbury "retired" following a 21-12 season that ended with a first-round loss in the NIT, it was with the expectation to turn around a program that had been plagued with off-court issues, including a fight in the stands at a tournament in Hawaii between teammates Renardo Sidney and Elgin Bailey and players criticizing coaches on Twitter.

Stansbury announced his retirement after 14 seasons and said he planned to remain at the university and work in some capacity, but it was believed that had he not retired he would not have been retained as the men's basketball coach. He eventually joined Billy Kennedy's staff at Texas A&M a year ago.

"I don't know if anybody could've really turned it around, which I think is part of the reason why they had such a hard time filling that job," Clarion-Ledger columnist Hugh Kellenberger said in a phone interview Friday. "There were several people that quite publicly turned them down and they ended up with Rick."

Murray State coach Steve Prohm reportedly turned down the position in 2012, although Stricklin said at the time that Ray was the only one offered.

"That was the big thing is that I think Scott Stricklin, Mississippi State's athletic director, just wanted to run a clean program and wanted a roster and a team that the fans could be proud of," Kellenberger added. "That they would work hard, they would compete every night, that win or lose I think everybody expected that this was going to be a rebuilding project. I don't think anybody really pledged an expectation of how many games they wanted to win, they just wanted to have a product that fans could at least say, 'These guys are representing us well,' in a way that they hadn't been able to do in the last few years of Rick Stansbury -- even if they were winning more. I think initially that's what it was just, 'Clean this thing up and figure out how to start over.'"

Starting over may have been an understatement. The Bulldogs' five starters departed after exhausting their eligibility or choosing to leave for the NBA.

Freshman Rodney Hood decided to transfer to Duke while freshman Deville Smith, who played his final collegiate season at UT Martin last year, left for UNLV.

Ray dismissed two players for "repeated violations of team rules," in September of his first season.

Injuries and suspensions left the team with just six scholarship players at times throughout his inaugural season at the helm and the Bulldogs went 10-22 and 4-14 in the SEC.

"It was just really like chaos from the word 'go,'" Kellenberger said. "It may have been six or seven guys that he had healthy for most of the season. They were not able to practice. They were having to use coaches just to be able to practice."

Year 2 was similar -- another dismissal for team rules violations, another choosing to leave after he was cleared from injury and told he could not redshirt -- and ended with a 14-19 record, but MSU was just 3-15 in conference. The Bulldogs had 13-game losing streaks in each of Ray's first two seasons.

MSU was 13-19 and 6-12 in the SEC in what was Ray's final season there. Seven of the 12 SEC losses were by six points or less.

"After the SEC tournament, Mississippi State lost its first game, went one-and-out in Nashville, I wrote a column that kind of said that Rick Ray deserved one more year because everything else was going so well," Kellenberger said. "Kids were going to class, they were recruiting at a decent, OK-level, but mainly that this guy just cleaned up a mess, give him one more year to see if he can figure out a way to win games while also running the program the way that you want it to be run."

Ray, who did not want to discuss his past at MSU for this story, was fired 10 days after the season concluded with a 74-68 loss to Auburn in the conference tournament.

The news, which came on Saturday, March 21, came as a surprise to Kellenberger based on the timing. Two weeks prior Ray told the Clarion-Ledger he "never had any situation at all from the administration that they are displeased with where we are at this point in time. I know everybody wants to be more on the fast track. I'm sure the administration wants the same thing, but I think those guys believe in me."

Stricklin spoke with the media the day of Ray's firing and explained that he contemplated the decision throughout the final two weeks of the season but wanted to take a step back after the season was over to try to mull it over without letting his emotions get involved.

"At the end of the day, it was a gut feeling on my part," Stricklin told media that day. "I wanted really badly to believe that Rick Ray was going to take us where we want to be. You're talking about a program, I think of our 10 sports that's competed this semester, seven of them are ranked in the top 25 of the country or closer, maybe in the top 35. Obviously, we had a football program that spent five weeks at No. 1 in the country. So we have a lot of examples of what success looks like. My gut told me that we were not going to be able to get to the level we wanted to get to under our current direction."

Stricklin, who declined an interview for this story, announced Ben Howland as Ray's replacement just two days later -- a remarkably short amount of time to fill any vacancy.

It is believed by many, including Kellenberger, that Ray likely would have remained at MSU for a fourth season had Stricklin not already had Howland lined up for the job. Kellenberger said he thinks Stricklin was able to use Adidas, the Bulldogs' apparel provider who has past ties to Howland from UCLA, to work on drawing Howland to the job. CBS Sports national columnist Gary Parrish has made the same assertion.

"Even though publicly they're saying that it wasn't scripted, I think it was all scripted," Katz said. "I don't think there's any way they fire Rick Ray and then are going to go through some search because Mississippi State is not an easy job. You need someone who's willing to take a chance on it and Ben obviously has a good track record in terms of what he accomplished at UCLA."

Howland led the Bruins to seven NCAA tournament appearances during his tenure from 2004-13. UCLA had three straight Final Four appearances from 2006-08, including reaching the championship game in 2006, and won the Pac-10 regular-season title four times.

He has an overall coaching record of 401-206 during his 19-year career that included stops at Northern Arizona and Pittsburgh.

"It's like there's two different issues here," Katz said. "Yes, Ben Howland is a great hire, but the manner in which Rick Ray was not given an opportunity to succeed was not fair. It's a case where the AD, Scott Stricklin, made that hire of Rick Ray, so he should see it through. Now everyone loves the fact that Howland's there -- yes that's great -- but when you make decisions you need to see them through and Scott bailed way too quickly on it."

Ray said at the press conference announcing he was the Redhawks new coach that "I laid down a foundation and I didn't get a chance to complete my task" at MSU.

Ray, the only finalist for the job that had head coaching experience, inherits a squad at Southeast that went 13-17 last season and 7-9 in the Ohio Valley Conference. Dickey Nutt was fired on March 23 after six seasons.

"I think that's the thing with Rick Ray -- I think he's a good fit at Southeast Missouri because I think he's that level of coach," Kellenberger said. "I think he's a mid-major coach. He's a guy that he can get mid-major players and he can coach them up a little bit and compete. In the SEC I just don't think he was ever able to recruit the athletes necessary in order to really have a chance of winning successfully at Mississippi State. And that was ultimately what was the major problem -- it was hard to figure out how he was going to win more basketball games."

While Ray hadn't had the talent-laden roster necessary in the SEC, he had secured commitments from three-star recruit Darius Hicks and four-star recruit D'Marcus Hicks prior to his firing.

Howland, who has the name recognition that the MSU fanbase craved, landed five-star prospect Malik Newman over Kentucky, Kansas, LSU, North Carolina State and Ole Miss this week. The McDonald's All-American from Jackson, Mississippi, who is rated the No. 1 shooting guard in the country by ESPN, signed with the Bulldogs on Friday.

"You look at Mississippi State as it relates to the SEC or whatever the case is -- I don't know what they do from a basketball standpoint, I really don't, but I think at the end of the day I'm not taking too much stock in what his record is," Southeast athletic director Mark Alnutt said following Ray's introductory press conference on April 13. "What I'm bringing in is what I feel he can bring to the table to continue to elevate our program, which I'm excited about."

Ray's sub-par coaching record has been a point of contention within the Southeast fanbase, and it's difficult to for anyone to know exactly how much MSU's well-documented off the court issues affected what happened on the court.

Some, like Katz and Kellenberger, believe Ray was denied a reasonable opportunity to build a winning team. For others, the bottom line is simply too titled toward the loss column and too little progress was made for anything else to matter.

"Whether or not it ends up being a better situation we'll have to wait and see, but I'm glad that Southeast Missouri was willing to give him a quick opportunity to get back to being a head coach because he didn't do anything wrong," Katz said. "He was just building a program."