Hank Stebbins

And right now, the Loons are in a position where they need to start thinking about that, and they have no-- they, they have no one that is definitively going to be in charge long-term to set the direction for the team.

I, I have written before that I think that Hank Stebbins would be a good pick for that.

I think that he's got the experience that they need.

Someone asked me whether I thought that the sort of bad decisions that have been made in the past by Loons leader- leadership, or what I consider maybe to be the wrong decisions made, i- if that sort of should be disqualifying for Stebbins.

I, I, I don't think you can necessarily look at a guy who wasn't in charge and then tag him with decisions that went wrong when he wasn't in charge.

It, it's a little bit like you look at the decisions Derek Falvey made when he was the Twins general manager or Twins president of baseball operations or whatever his technical title was, and th- they had sort of a similar situation in which Falvey left on the eve of the season and they hired his right-hand man, Jeremy Zoll, to be the, be the general manager of the Twins.

Yes, Zoll and Falvey obviously worked together, but Zoll is different than Falvey and might have his own ways of looking at things, and I think if you look at this season with the Twins, they did do things differently, and I think the same would be true for Hank Stebbins and Khaled El-Ahmad.

Obviously, they worked together.

We can add former coach Eric Ramsey if you want to give him any of the blame.

Hank Stebbins, who's now interim CSO, seems hard to maybe put a lot on him.

Adrian Heath, we had that as an option, as well as the England national team for singing Wonderwall on U.S. soil and sort of ruining that for us.

You know, I like that one a lot.

Clearly, this team tactically, the finishing, the performances are not there at the moment.

And clearly, there's a talent gap, but not this big of a talent gap.

Is Cameron Knowles going to make it through this season? And does interim CSO Hank Stebbins even have the authority? Does he have...

It in him to as an interim CSO to relieve Cameron Knowles of his duties anytime soon.

It's good that you know that about yourself, Dan.

But he did put out this piece this week writing that restoring stability for Minnesota United should start with a permanent CSO job for Hank Stebbins.

So he basically is arguing that Stebbins is actually really well positioned to take over for this team, right? He has soccer experience.

He was a college coach.

Right.

And so having someone empowered in that position to make this upcoming winter transfer window a success is integral for the team.

So for those reasons, he argues, the team should not wait any further and should be removing the interim tag for Hank Stebbins.

Right.

But here's hoping that he can at least get in there and the loons can see what they have in him before the winter comes around.

The other thing, the thing that I wrote about in the middle of the week was interim, I think they're calling him interim sporting director, Hank Stebbins.

I kept calling him interim chief soccer officer.

And the difference between sporting director and chief soccer officer, you can ask me that question and I don't know the difference.

It's not the Dunning-Kruger effect.

It's the opposite of that where if somebody is just a little bit smarter than you, you can't tell the difference between them being a little bit smarter than you and a million times smarter than you.

That's where Hank Stebbins is analytically compared to me.

He's either he's he's way smarter than me analytically.

We'll get to it in a little bit.

But I did want to start by talking about Hank Stebbins meeting with the media again, this time after the summer transfer window closed.

And so a few things that just caught my ear.

He said, we kept the core group of guys

Um, I was talking to Andy Greeter before the game started.

He said that after the official press conference with Hank, he mentioned the Looney Bin podcast.

Who did? Hank Stebbins.

No, he didn't.

They got to figure out a way.

Let's see, what else? We got to meet with Hank Stebbins, the interim chief soccer officer, last week.

I wanted to sort of go through that a little bit and just talk about some of the things that he said.

First of all, I just feel kind of bad for the guy.

So I kind of feel bad for him, but I'm happy for him that he's in the job.

I want to read one quote he had, and it was very sweet.

It's hard not to like Hank Stebbins.

He said, I got two things I've always wanted within one week, and that's great, right? I wanted to be a sporting director.