A retrospective with future endeavors
25 years.
The sunset of a legendary career. The dawn of a new era.
It’s hard to properly understand what Ed Servais has meant to the Creighton program. Some derisively categorize his style as old-school, some praise it for the laser-focus focus on fundamentals, and some don’t care much for the program to even register an opinion. Regardless, Servais has always coached up guys to play ball. He’s maximized talent from his assistant ranks and leaned on them to recruit dudes who are willing to put their head down and travel through the gates of hell knowing the payoff is the salvation of being a better ballplayer. It’s a tall order to ask an 18-to-20 year old guy to marry themselves to an unsexy brand of ball because that’s the way it should be. If you polled former players of the program you’ll get a healthy split of opinions on Servais, half believing the strenuous structure and order to be a greatly effective way to coach, half thinking it was borderline psychotic in his demand for perfection.
You could see the cracks of the latter slipping into public view this past season. In non-conference games the Bluejays played relaxed, free, loose. You could visually see them enjoying the game they love so dearly. Their laborious off-season routines paralleling their success. Then, when the calendar flipped to the BIG EAST slate, you could see it tighten up. That demand for perfection permeating their entire being. The joy seemingly gone, the light dimmed, and the desperate strain to play his game left a lifeless husk blowing in the wind.
All of this to say: when ServaisBall worked, it really worked. If the team bought in, they played some dynamite baseball. When his assistants were able to recruit studs, they shined in the program, and lived (and are living) long lives in professional baseball. When former Jay Nicky Lopez was asked about Servais after a Gold Glove caliber season, he said in an interview with The Athletic, “I just remember going into minor-league baseball after I got drafted, and they didn’t have to tell me anything. Coach Servais had taught me the proper way of doing things. I owe a lot to him.”
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Charles Schwab Field sits a cut-off man’s throw away from the CHI Health Center Arena. One of these buildings can fill up with an ocean of electric blue t-shirts for a meaningless game against Coe College while the other can have their staff wait until mid-May to clean the bird shit off of premium ballpark seats. The success of one men’s athletic program hasn’t given itself to the success of another, perhaps the major-league level ballpark proving to be too intimidating to welcome a private jesuit school crowd. Too lifeless. Too sterile. Too roomy. Maybe the fans feel too much fatigue cheering for one program to immediately turn and feel that same passion for another in such quick succession.
The fans who are all-in on the club are far and few between but they absolutely adore the program. If you find one in the wild, they’ll talk your ear off about ballplayers past, about the 2012 team that absolutely sucked in the regular season but still got into a regional after dominating the MVC tournament, or the 2019 team that had so much swagger it didn’t seem like Servais was in the dugout at all. It is baseball in the crown jewel of the college level; Omahans are, at their core, baseball people. To recruit and retain baseball fans in this town should be easy. All you have to do is give them a program that wins and wins big.
To imagine a mid-June day with that ballpark filled to the brim with Bluejay fans should be all the athletic department needs to make a big swing and full-ass themselves into the program. This is where a dreamer’s vision can come to life. If not now, as your coach of 25 years is set to depart, then when?
Marcus Blossom has the opportunity of a lifetime.
Well, I guess they’ve been here before
Connor Gandossy (Assistant - Creighton)
This one’s easy, but it’s going to be a tough sell. No head coaching experience, but knows the program and recruiting footprint. He’s a player’s coach, and if he doesn’t get a look here, he’ll secure a head job elsewhere. He’s annually on D1 Baseball’s Sexy Assistant Lists. Might be a little too status-quo, but a safe pick for Blossom.
Rich Wallace (Head Coach - UCF)
He’s undefeated as a head coach at Creighton but this ain’t happening.
Spencer Allen (Milwaukee Brewers)
This would be funny! After stints at Illinois and Northwestern after being an assistant with the Jays, he’s found himself a nice little niche as a field coordinator for the Brewers organization. It would be a helluva callback as he was sort of the first guy to have the “successor” tag slapped on him all those years ago. Two assistants later, he could finally fulfill that dream, but probably not.
Head Coaches That Are Good
Edwin Thompson (Georgetown)
It won’t happen, right? No way, right? What Thompson has done at Georgetown is something of a miracle. They practically didn’t have a team in 2021 and just made it to the BIG EAST championship game. He’s built a program with power and speed. Good weekend rotation guys. Also his name is Edwin so it’d be a Edwin for Edwin sort of deal.
Andy Sawyers (SEMO)
Sawyer has catapulted SEMO into relevancy by winning three of the last four OVC tournaments. He’s probably going to get some high-major looks after his sustained success, but he knows the region he’d be recruiting in if he were to come to Creighton. Like Thompson, he’s a builder, but he might get a lot more cash thrown his way with all the conference shuffling. He’s also at the point in his career where a “coach in waiting” tag might be a slap in the face.
Bryan Peters (LBSU)
Long Beach State just let go of Peters after giving him the interim tag for the season. The Dirtbags finished 10-20 in conference play this season, which is not great, but Peters has a great track record of getting guys to hang dong. In his four seasons as an assistant his teams smacked 145 big ones at Long Beach. As a coach at D2 Nova Southern, his teams mashed 97 dingers in a single season in 2017, then got the squad to hit for average the next year, ending the season with a .313 batting average. Dude knows offense. The west coast recruiting footprint might be an interesting twist to Creighton.
Nathan Choate (Wazzu)
This dude is west coast through-and-through, but with the dissolution of the PAC12, he might want to look for a new home after his first year as the head guy in Pullman. He’s bounced around quite a bit as an assistant (5 schools in 10 years) but that’s pretty much the norm these days. As a head coach at Loyola Marymount, he led the Lions to a 21-6 conference record, winning the regular season, before taking the job at Washington State. He’d be a great get and has ties to longtime former Jayhawk coach Ritch Prince.
Assistants That Wanna Be The Man But Are Probably Too Expensive And They’re Already Doing Fine
Drew Dickinson (Assistant - Virginia)
Dickinson has spent the last five years coaching up one of the best pitching staffs in college baseball. In the past four years, UVA’s team ERA has been an astounding 3.81 with 2,100+ K’s to boot. He spent eight years at Illinois, so he knows the midwest recruiting footprint well. Having an opportunity to learn under Creighton alum Brian O’Connor has likely been a pleasurable experience too, and he might appreciate a season under the watchful eye of Ed Servais.
Rich Dorman (Assistant - Oregon State)
Similar to Choate, Dorman is an assistant with a school that’s soon to be left without a “Power X” conference attached to it. Dorman spent eight years in the Mariners organization.. including a handful of years coaching in A-ball. With Oregon State he’s coached four All-American pitchers, led the PAC12 in strikeouts and fewest extra base hits, and helped Connor Hjerpe along to his title as ‘National Pitcher of the Year’ in 2022. With West Coast and Arizona ties, Dorman could change the entire DNA of the Bluejays by offering them a footprint in the western timezone.
Scott Brown (Associate Head Coach - Vanderbilt)
This would be a ‘Back The Brinks Truck Up’ sort of move for the athletic department, but there’s a neat little catch with this one: Brown began his D1 coaching career with St. John’s back in the mid-2000’s. His pitching staffs were absolutely electric back then, with several top-10 finishes in staff ERA. He’s been at Vanderbilt since 2012 and would likely succeed Tim Corbin whenever he decides to step down. If he wants to split before then, well, Creighton would be a great landing spot. There’s probably no way under the sun this happens.
Fun
Danny Woodrow
Hell yeah
Dave Gerber
Fuck yeah
Jake Holton
Oh baby now we’re cookin
Joey Bowens
That’s a name
Glen Sisk
Yes! Yes!!!
Scott Servais
Yeah!!!!!
