Comely was considered bad?
He had one foot out the retirement door. Mason hired him as a friend. He slashed the recruiting budget and redistributed it to himself and his assistants.
He took a program that had finished 1st or 2nd in the CCHA 5 straight years, and hadn't finished lower than 3rd in a decade, and slowly drained the talent to the point that they finished dead last the year he was fired. They hadn't missed the tourney in a decade, and he immediately missed it his first year, and missed it 5 times in 9 years. He won a national title, which bought him some time, but that was in a year where they were the last team into the field, and pulled 4 straight upsets.
I think at one time he was a good coach, and his Xs and Os were still fine, but he was done with everything else the goes along with the job. The talent began fading quickly, as did fan interest. When I arrived in 2003, hockey was as hot a ticket as basketball. You could only get partial season ticket plans. By my senior year they were begging students to show up.
Anastos was an "outside the box" hire that made no sense. He had been a head coach 25 years earlier, for 2 years, at an NAIA school, and had otherwise been a conference administrator.
The Danton Cole/Adam Nightingale thing is weird. I loved the Cole hire, and it just didn't work. But then Adam Nightingale was almost the exact same hire, and it's gone great. Cole was an MSU alum, who had D1 head coaching experience, and came over after 7 years as the head coach of the USNDP. Nightingale was an MSU alum, with no head coaching experience, who came over after 2 years as the head coach of the USNDP. It just kind of shows how coach hires are always still a bit of a crap shoot
