So You Bought a Beard

Is your wife aware of this development

Texas made what is maybe the least surprising move ever, hiring the coach many Texas fans have been salivating after for the better part of a presidential term (no, the other one) in Chris Beard. Many Texas fans are overjoyed, many Tech fans are upset as hell, and many millions of dollars have been promised. Overall a pretty good day for the 40 Acres, no?

THEN WHY IS EVERYBODY ON THE INTERNET YELLING AT ME

Just kidding, I know why.

I’m not as high on this hire as most burnt orange faithful, and a fair number of people are upset at my Beard comments & tweets. Some of it I think is a misreading of me focusing on the downsides/risk as me hating Beard, and some of it is me being grumpy & tweeting through it where I was my own enemy. (Never tweet. Never, ever tweet.) I don’t hate this hire as much as some believe, and I’ll own my part in not clarifying.

I’ve put off writing this post for a couple of days, for two reasons:

1. It became pretty evident people wanted to celebrate and I was being a wet blanket (aka read the room, BWG)

2. I had to spend time internalizing what exactly I don’t like about this hire (spoiler: it’s mostly not about him at all)

I’m going to break this into a few pieces because there’s more to this than I think I was conscious of at first, and it requires some specificity to untangle the jumble in my brain. It’s going to start with Beard (upside & downside) before going into some of the externalities that bother me. Let’s get into it.

Chris Beard, the Upside

Wait, hang on.

But First, a Disclaimer

I’m probably going to belabor some obvious points throughout this article because I want to do my best to be explicit in my view, starting with: none of this is about wanting to retain Shaka. I called for him to be let go over a year ago, and after the ACU loss I said I didn’t think he had a path back, so nothing in this article is arguing that Shaka Smart deserved another year. He did not, he made his bed. Chris Beard would not be here if Shaka won more games, and that responsibility ultimately falls upon Shaka Smart. (This is, as they say in the business, ‘foreshadowing’.)

Chris Beard, the Upside

I spent most of the last piece exploring the risk/downside of Beard because it seemed to me like everyone else had the upside covered, sometimes to the point of hyperbole. On a completely unrelated note, here’s a paragraph from Kirk Bohls’ latest article:

I’m amazed there wasn’t a Wooden or Coach K reference sandwiched in there for good measure.

Since I didn’t really talk up the positives of a Beard hire, let’s go ahead and get into those.

The Title Game

Here is the list of coaches who made a Final Four in their first three seasons at a high-major program:

1987 - Rick Pitino - Providence (Pitino has been in seven Final Fours!)

1989 - Steve Fisher* - Michigan

1991 - Roy Williams - Kansas

1992 - Bob Huggins - Cincinnati (I always have to look this spelling up)

1998 - Tubby Smith - Kentucky (1st season at UK, previous 2 were at Georgia)

2002 - Mike Davis - Indiana

2005 - Bruce Weber - Illinois

2007 - John Thompson III - Georgetown

2007 - Thad Matta - Ohio State

2010 - Brad Stevens - Butler

2014 - Kevin Ollie - UConn

2019 - Chris Beard - Texas Tech

*He was named head coach when the tourney started because Michigan Man is a sacred institution, so this is more Bill Frieder’s appearance. He made other Final Fours on his own later.

That’s a pretty exclusive list, and there are some big names in the fold. There are four or so Hall of Fame coaches in that list, which should be heartening to Texas fans. Making a national championship game is rare, there are a lot of very good college coaches who never make it to the final game. Any coach who makes it to that game should tout it until they’re out of breath because it’s a feat. There’s no caveat to this, you take that accolade to your grave if you’re Chris Beard because you earned it.

The Defense

Chris Beard and Mark Adams have put together very good defenses for most of their Texas Tech tenure, the first season being less so than the other four. They’ve built a no-middle defense that actively tries to deny paint touches and drives, and most years this defense has been extremely effective. It’s not often that a Beard/Adams defense gets lit up; most of the time they’re frustrating the other team, and if they can get an elite rim protector in the mix they can really lock down opponents. Baylor adopted this defense and it’s one of the reasons they’re in the national title game; it must be a pretty effective defense if it can convince Scott Drew to abandon his 1-3-1 zone security blanket defense and go to the no-middle style.

The Transfer Portal

One of the college basketball market inefficiencies the last few seasons has been the variance in which teams take advantage of the transfer portal. There are good reasons to supplement a program with transfers; they’ve been in the college game for a season or more so you have better data on how they’ll play compared to a high school player’s AAU tape, they’ve spent time in a college S&C program so they’re probably stronger than a high school player, and if they wash out it tends to be a shorter window where the program has to back-fill. (One of our esteemed readers regularly comments here that the downside is transfers are generally expected to start so them washing out can be a bigger hole to fill, which is also correct.) There are few high-major coaches who plumb the transfer portal depths more thoroughly than Chris Beard, and it has brought him players like Tariq Owens, Matt Mooney, and Matt McClung. He is active in this realm and it pays off more often than not, so his teams tend to be experienced even if they’re new together. Beard is also starting to bring in top-50 high school recruits to Tech, so talent acquisition has been one of his strengths in his Tech tenure.

The upside for Beard is that when he has everything clicking, he can compete for Big 12 titles and make deep tourney runs. If you’re an optimist or even a ‘benefit of the doubt’ person by nature, Chris Beard gives you a lot of reason to be hopeful for the future. His ceiling is about as high as one can be without hiring a Hall of Fame coach.

Chris Beard, the Downside

I went through some of these already in the last post so I’m not going to rehash it all, but there are some pieces I want to talk through.

About That Coaching List

The sample size for analogues to Beard is already pretty small, and pruning it down means there’s more variance inherent in comparing/projecting Beard based upon it. That said, there are some names that should probably be removed:

Rick Pitino - He made the Final Four with Providence and bolted for the NBA, and frankly projecting anything based upon a guy who bounces between college and pro and college and pro and college and Greece as he does is sketchy. There are also the sanctions that seem to follow him everywhere he goes, so if you want to make the Pitino/Beard comparison you’re going to have to deal with that angle as well.

Bob Huggins - Yes, he made the Final Four at Cincinnati…which was just into the Great Midwest conference at the time. It’s not exactly a high-major conference, even when they moved to Conference USA that was closer in stature to the Mountain West than the ACC.

Mike Davis, Steve Fisher, Kevin Ollie, Brad Stevens, and Roy Williams were all long-time assistants who didn’t have any head coaching experience prior to taking over where they hit paydirt. If we’re trying to get as close to apples-to-apples as possible they’re probably out, but I wouldn’t argue if you wanted to keep them in.

That leaves us with the following list:

• Thad Matta - first 5 years (OSU): Ineligible, R32, 2nd place, NIT Champ, R64 - 2 conference titles

• Tubby Smith - first 5 years (2 UGA, 3 UK): S16, R64, Natty, E8, R32 - 2 conference titles (both UK)

• John Thompson III - first 5 years (Georgetown): NIT Quarters, S16, F4, R32, NIT 1st round - 2 conference titles

• Bruce Weber - first 5 years (Illinois): S16, 2nd place, R32, R64, Nothing - 2 conference titles

• Chris Beard - first 5 years (Tech): Nothing, E8, 2nd place, COVID (est. 10-seed), R32 - 1 conference title(tied)

The four non-Beard entries in this list had an average of 2 conference titles and 1 Final Four or better run per coach in their first 5 years. They combined to miss the NCAA tournament a total of 4* times in 20 combined seasons, so 1 in every 5 seasons on this list. (I’m not counting the ineligible season against Matta, which would make it 5.)

Beard has a 7-year deal, so let’s look at the next 7 years at the same school for those coaches:

• Thad Matta: S16, S16, F4, E8, R64, R32, NIT 2nd Round (resigned 1 year later) - 3 conference titles

• Tubby Smith: S16, S16, E8, R32, E8, R32, R32(“resigned”) - 3 conference titles

• JTIII: R64, R64, R32, R64, NIT 2nd round, R32, Nothing (fired 1 year later) - 1 conference title(tied)

• Bruce Weber: Nothing, R64, Nothing, R32, Nothing(fired) - no conference titles

The four entries had an average of 1.75 conference titles per coach and one F4+ run in their 26 total years. They combined to miss the NCAA tournament a total of 7 times in 26 combined seasons, so a touch more than 1 in every 4 seasons (0.269, if you’re curious). In other words, on average they did worse than they started. There are limits to how applicable this data is to Texas - Tubby ditching out from Kentucky for being insane about their demands on results is more extreme than Texas fans would be in that run, and Thad Matta resigned for health reasons rather than performance ones - but at the very least this is a pretty reasonable “past results do not guarantee future performance” argument, and is a counterpoint to the idea that Beard is guaranteed to make a F4 run in his first three years at Texas.

(He might!)

(He might not!)

I hope for all of our sakes Beard is more Tubby Smith than Bruce Weber, but I can’t shake this feeling that Texas hired a coach who added a couple of pieces to another coach’s core to make their crowning achievement. Which, hey, it’s good he was able to do that, that’s part of being a high-level coach. In the two years since that core graduated though, the results have been a couple of steps down. Let’s talk about that.

The Last Two Years & Those Market Inefficiencies

One of the things I liked about following Shaka (who, again, earned his exit) was seeing the evolution of the team’s tactics over the years. He made a number of course corrections, from changing the offensive system and what shots it prioritized to changing the defense to better match the talent on hand. It didn’t work all the time, but there was logic to the changes and it is a primary reason why I stuck with the experiment as long as I did. I say that to say I do not see the same things from Beard at Tech. His offense, such as it is an offense in that it attempts to put the ball through the hoop, isn’t markedly different than it was 5 years ago. If anything, it is less coherent than the original motion-y offense he used his first couple of years at Tech; it may have changed in that it devolved, which isn’t exactly filling me with excitement. The defense hasn’t changed much, which is fine as long as it continues to produce elite results, but the thing about market inefficiencies is that they don’t stay inefficient forever. The no-middle defense is not a new defense, but it wasn’t being used a ton until a few years ago. Teams have now seen it and started adapting their offenses to attack it more effectively; given how little tactical evolution Beard has displayed to date, what is he going to do when the no-middle is less than elite in its results? The last two years provide a potential clue, Tech has gone 18-17 in the Big 12 and has been consistently outmatched by Kansas & Baylor, going 0-8 against those two programs. You may want to respond that so has everybody else and you would be largely correct, but isn’t the goal of this hire to not be consistently outmatched by the class of the conference?

This potentially goes double if Mark Adams doesn’t follow Beard to Texas. Adams is considered the defensive mastermind on the staff, if he gets the Tech job will Beard be able to keep up this level of defense? It’s possible, but not a given. I may be over-thinking things, but until I see Chris Beard come up with a second trick I’m having visions of Chip Kelly’s struggles once everybody else got used to super-fast tempo offenses.

The other market inefficiency of the transfer portal is less of a concern to me; perhaps Beard won’t be the market leader in unearthing gems, but there will be enough players in it each year that it may counteract the loss in marginal gains. Plus, I covered my concerns around his roster retention issues in the last piece.

The Externalities

There are some issues around this hire I do not like that have nothing to do with Chris Beard himself and should not be reflected upon him when I talk about my view on the hire, which I will cover here. The first is that this coaching search looked nothing like a search and more like the boosters getting what they wanted for the last four years; they gave Royal Ivey a Rooney Rule checkmark 15-minute interview and…that’s it? That kind of tunnel vision makes sense when you’re going after Nick Saban, but Chris Beard is not him. I just talked about appreciating someone dealing with failures by investigating their process and making course corrections, and this coaching “search” displays zero signs of that sort of analysis. Texas fans spent the last few years complaining about having a coach who “doesn’t recruit shooters”, “can’t run offense”, & “doesn’t play exciting basketball” and their favorite target to replace Shaka Smart was…uhh, noted offensive savant Chris Beard. If you’re unhappy with the current guy, fine, but why replace him with someone who has similar gameplay issues? Why not try something different this time around? We’re in Year 21 of Texas being run by a defense-first coach whose grasp of advanced offensive basketball execution is sketchy at best and we just signed up for 7 more years of the same; it’s a specific kind of madness that triples down two decades in. Would Royal Ivey have been better? Maybe, maybe not, but it would at least be an interesting new angle to try. I swear, there is a big chunk of Texas fans who care about winning more than sports and they let their desire for Winzzz Over Everything blind them to the functional/specific ways to make it more likely to happen. Texas fans would have bypassed a Mark Few and Roy Williams assistant using this method because they’ve been laser-locked on Lubbock for nearly a half-decade.

Further, if you’re in the “money is no object to Texas” camp, why not make a run at Calipari? Most of us (myself included) were skeptical at the notion Calipari was interested in Texas, but I’ve heard from several people in the last few days that it was a legitimate option. If all you care about is winning and money really is no object, $9m/year to Calipari who has 6 Final Fours and a title to his name should be an easy call. Did anybody kick the tires on that guy in one of their many refractory periods between Chris Beard fever dreams? It doesn’t sound like it. Y’all can’t even go big correctly.

So yea, a chunk of my grumpiness the last few days has been about the process of hiring a new coach, which seemed less like a process and more like a law signed 4 years ago that kicked in the moment Shaka Smart got on a plane. Texas just handed over roughly the same amount of guaranteed money to Beard they did to Shaka without any appearance of seriously considering alternatives, it’s maddening.

In Summary

At the end of the day, I think Chris Beard is a good coach whose reputation is probably a bit overheated. My guess on the most likely outcome of a 7-year Texas tenure would involve Beard sitting in the chaotic middle of the Big 12 (where the difference between 3rd & 6th is 1-2 games) with a record somewhere around 10-8 most years. He’ll take Texas to the tourney 5 or 6 times, making the second round more often than not with maybe a Sweet 16 or two if the matchups work out in Texas’ favor. It’s not a bad outcome, a lot of programs would be very happy with that. Is that what Texas is paying $5m+ per year for though? I have my doubts; if it isn’t, we’re going to be back to the same spot we were with Shaka Smart and the last few years of Barnes. I would like to be wrong about this, but time appears to be a flat circle in Texas basketball.

You may now resume yelling at me on your social media platform of choice.

Please remember to check out Pretend We’re Football and/or our Twitter account. The next podcast recording will be out in a couple of days and likely about a lot of this same material. My next post will come out…I don’t know when. Also, I have a Patreon if you want to tip me for the right to yell at me some more.