Chris Beard got arrested in December and was initially charged with domestic assault, the police report indicating he was “slapping, throwing and biting” his fiancée at their Austin home. Rodney Terry picked up the pieces of the Texas basketball program after Beard’s dismissal and led the team to a 26-8 record, two victories over Kansas in eight days and a No. 2 seed in the NCAA’s Midwest Regional.
Beard is white, gets in his players’ faces, loves to talk tough. Terry is Black, wears round glasses that add to his softer look and had his players dancing exuberantly on his behalf in Kansas City on Saturday night.
Guess which one got a full-time Power Five head coaching job Monday.
Terry has guided the Longhorns to not only a Big 12 Tournament championship but the school’s highest NCAA seed since 2008. He still wears the “interim coach” tag and apparently must prove his value now in the postseason tournament before athletic director Chris Del Conte makes him a more permanent hire.
Meanwhile, the University of Mississippi could barely wait for the SEC tournament to finish before announcing Beard as the next coach of the Rebels. No one quibbles about his ability to light up the transfer portal and build rosters in a hurry. After his fiancée recanted her original statements about Beard’s alleged attack, Austin authorities had little choice but to drop the charges against him.
I assumed he would get another coaching job. So did every other college basketball observer. But most of us figured it would take more than 24 hours after the NCAA Tournament field was announced, and that just maybe he would have to work his way back into a major conference. Ole Miss officials said they did their due diligence and realized that Beard was the right man to lead their program.
Look, there is little doubt that college basketball is hardly a squeaky clean operation these days. The giant in Mississippi’s path might not be the traditional SEC powerhouse Kentucky but this year’s No. 1 overall seed Alabama. That team’s best player, Brandon Miller, delivered a gun to the scene of a homicide, even if he said he did not realize it was in the backseat of his car when he went to pick up a teammate outside a club.
Tuscaloosa police have said they have no reason to charge Miller — the gun was not his and he was not part of the shooting — and he served no suspension this season despite at least being linked to the scene. Two Alabama fans at Bridgestone Arena this weekend wore “Killin’ Our Way Through the SEC” T-shirts to a game at the SEC tournament. It’s not like these two morons represent thousands of other Alabama fans. I’m just saying it’s a little crazy out there, and while some might think Ole Miss could have found other qualified candidates, they couldn’t wait to get Beard on their payroll.
That’s probably not as bothersome as Texas’ foot-dragging with Terry. But who knows? Maybe before the Horns play Colgate in Des Moines on Thursday night, the school will have given Terry what he deserves and removed the interim tag.
It’s just that Texas is so obsessed with big-name hires, even after multiple failures on the football and basketball front, that Terry doesn’t fit the profile. Texas likes to make a splash even if that splash is a belly flop. I can debate whether Steve Sarkisian is truly a big name or just a long one, but that’s a discussion for football season.
Terry had a decent run at Fresno State, making the NCAA or NIT in two of his last three seasons although he was a sub-.500 coach during his brief time at UTEP.
You really think that, after this season’s success, Terry and former Beard assistants at Texas can’t bring quality players to Austin?
When asked to speak about whether Terry deserves to remain as head coach, after Texas’ 76-56 destruction of Kansas Saturday, senior guard Marcus Carr said, “Watch the game we just played… or every other game we played this season.”
Said Sir’Jabari Rice, another senior guard on the squad, “If you watched our locker room just now, all the praise went to RT. With everything we went through, for us to get to this point, especially to win it, it’s not us. I mean we play the game, but all the preparation goes to RT.”
It’s a nice feel-good story at Texas coming on the heels of what was, at the very least, an embarrassing light cast by Beard’s behavior. Credit to Del Conte and the school for being quick in making Beard an ex-coach in January. We all know how domestic assault charges tend to play out when the alleged perpetrator is the husband or boyfriend who wields a considerable position of power.
Let whatever Beard does moving forward — bad or great — happen on Ole Miss’ watch. But UT must recognize that someone who may not have had the means to produce great results on its El Paso campus might chart an entirely different path in Austin. With a Big 12 tournament title and two recent wins over Kansas, frankly, it’s already begun.
If the administration wants to give that No. 2 seed a little boost in Des Moines this weekend, just produce the contract for Terry. It’s only money and no university in America has more to dispense than Texas.
