Madison is highly respected around UK baseball. I think you have to understand the obstacles that he faced in order to appreciate what he did. One of the biggest obstacles was that UK was/is a northern school. If you traditionally look at college baseball, almost no schools north of Tennessee have excellent baseball traditions. This was largely in part, to my understanding, because of the rules of college baseball. Until 2008 there was no actual uniform start date for college baseball. Even worse, was that many northern schools couldn't even get outside to practice until after the southern schools already began playing games. Everyone plays 56 games, and southern schools often stretched those out over about 16 weeks, which allowed them to play fewer midweek games. Northern schools would start the season later and have fewer weeks to get the games in and would have to play more midweek games. So, this to some degree created a disadvantage for northern schools. In 2008 they set a uniform start date and set forth the number of practices everyone could have. This has, IMO, really helped level the playing field and has helped teams like Kentucky, Louisville, Indiana, Michigan, and even the Oregon schools to become more competitive baseball teams. Further, with the advent of turf technology the northern schools are able to practice outside more frequently.
Despite the disadvantages faced by Madison, he won a lot of games at UK, and had us one game removed from going to the College World Series in the mid-1980s. So, He proved to be a pretty solid coach. However, I will say that he probably was here a bit longer than he needed to be. Still, he is a great ambassador for Kentucky.
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