After 17 seasons coaching Cincinnati Bearcats baseball, this will be Brian Cleary’s last. In a statement released by UC today, Whit Babcock has elected to part ways with the head coach after the Bearcats host the Notre Dame Fighting Irish this weekend. The full statement picked up from Lance McAlister’s blog is at the end of this entry.
Brian Cleary was Cincinnati baseball’s winningest head coach. But based on his 434-528-1 record, it was clearly by way of longevity alone that he’s at the top of that list. Cleary was praised, and rightfully so, for running a clean program and doing all of the little things right. Players looked up to him and he was well respected around campus. But a 45% win rate isn’t going to cut it even if UC baseball isn’t a major revenue sport and Whit Babcock made that blatantly obvious today.
The timing of this move is interesting. For years, Cleary had been hamstrung by having less-than-the-maximum amount of scholarships to give out and a limited budget. As a result he was forced to accept more walk ons and was unable to recruit nationally like other programs. Now that Cincinnati is fully funding the sport it would have been interesting to see if Cleary could have elevated the UC baseball with a full deck of cards at his disposal. But with him now being shown the door, I guess we’ll never find out.
UC’s full statement below:
CINCINNATI – Brian Cleary has been relieved of his duties as the head baseball coach at the University of Cincinnati, director of athletics Whit Babcock announced Thursday. A national search for a successor will begin immediately.
Cleary will coach the team this weekend as the Bearcats close out the 2013 season against Notre Dame at Marge Schott Stadium.
“Coach Cleary has been a great representative on many fronts for many years. He has been a tremendous ambassador for the University and the athletic department, however, we feel it is time to take the program in a new direction,” said Babcock. “It is never an easy decision to make a change, especially for a coach with the character and integrity of Coach Cleary, but in the end I felt that the program has not achieved at the level on the field we expect.”
This season, Cleary is 22-31 (.415) overall and 4-17 (.190) in the BIG EAST Conference, with a seventeen-year career record of 434-528-1 (.451) and a team grade point average of 3.2 this spring.