Thank you for caring about the callousness of letting Morris slide. That is wrong on so many levels, and though I get wanting to be competitive, principles and ethics matter, even in these cynical times. Maybe these things happened (probably) before Barry Switzer let football players toting guns run free, but there's never a good excuse for winking at violent tendencies.
To me, this seems like a pretty crucial year for Beard, at least in terms of telling us how good of a coach he is (or how good of a program he can build, if those two are different). That is, it seems like the theory in hiring people like Beard, or Shaka (or the 2 or 3 most recent football coaches) is sort of the Bill-Self-goes-to Kansas theory: something like "this coach has shown some success at a place with fewer resources than Texas, now he will 'level up' by combining his skill with the Texas name/resources." And while this theory doesn't seem crazy to me, in most cases (whether at Texas or other big name school), it doesn't seem to actually work out all that often. Maybe because the Texas name/resources don't actually mean as much as is presumed (at least in basketball), maybe because the number of actually-great coaches is incredibly small.
To be clear, I'm not saying that if Beard is unsuccessful this year, that means he can never have a good year at Texas. It's theoretically possible that he could build the program over time into something special, like (much as I hate to say it) Scott Drew has done at Baylor. But I think a mediocre year this year, at least to me, would indicate that Beard is not a great coach that just needed a higher-profile job to move into the top tier.
Setting aside my DV concerns for the moment, I think Beard is a very good coach who coaches a style of team I don't find aesthetically pleasing, but he's probably a top-15 or so coach in basketball. You can win a lot of games with a coach like that; I think the concern isn't that he'll be mediocre (though the definition of 'mediocre' is in the eye of the beholder here) so much that he'll be regularly a step below the elite coaches. Texas didn't shell out top-5 coaching money for top-25 results, they want the two seasons Tech had where Beard went to the Elite 8 & a whisper from a national title. Texas doesn't want to be a step below Kansas & Kentucky, and I'm not sure Beard can bridge that gap. He will have plenty of time to try, but every season which doesn't end in a top-2 conference finish and/or a deep tourney run means he has one more season like his last 3. And if he keeps piling up R32 results, Texas fans will eventually start to tune out like they did at the end of Barnes' run.
Yeah, I think R32 is "mediocre" in the sense of where Texas wants to be, if not in the overall CB landscape. Now I don't know whether such expectations are reasonable, since the number of elite programs is small, and is especially small once you get beyond programs that have been elite (at least most of the time) for the last 20 years (or more).
Here's what I think the ongoing bar for 'success' should be at Texas:
Make the NCAA tournament roughly 75% of the time.
Make the Sweet 16 in approximately 50% of their tournament appearances.
Make a Final Four run approximately 1 out of every 5 tournament appearances.
Win a National Championship once every 20-25 years.
He's 1 for 4 so far at Texas, with the obvious caveat that he still has a lot of runway to hit the other marks. My hunch is that Beard has missed his one shot at getting the fourth metric - which isn't a shot at him so much as an acknowledgement that a lot of very good coaches only get one crack at a title game (Calipari has only had two title appearances in 12 Kentucky tournament appearances) - but if he shows a willingness to adapt his approach he could get another down the road.
Yeah, on the one hand it seems like "winning a national championship every 20-25 years shouldn't be a crazy expectation, given the resources, recruiting base (to the extent that's a thing in college hoops any more). But then I think about guys like Tony Bennett at Virginia, and how even with his best team it took everything bouncing the right way to win it, and wonder if you can put any kind of reasonable expectation on winning a championship.
(But the other standards you list seem reasonable to me).
I think if we get to the point that Beard (or whoever is after him) is hitting the other three metrics, we'll probably be relatively forgiving about the fourth because said coach will have a team that contends for titles year in and year out. I agree that winning even one title is really hard and takes a lot of things lining up, the Hall of Fame has a number of coaches with 0 natties under their belts.
Remember how they claimed over the summer that they really tried hard and begged the Jimmy V officials to match up with Duke but had to settle for Illinois? As if there was no other way to play a game against Duke...
Thank you for caring about the callousness of letting Morris slide. That is wrong on so many levels, and though I get wanting to be competitive, principles and ethics matter, even in these cynical times. Maybe these things happened (probably) before Barry Switzer let football players toting guns run free, but there's never a good excuse for winking at violent tendencies.
To me, this seems like a pretty crucial year for Beard, at least in terms of telling us how good of a coach he is (or how good of a program he can build, if those two are different). That is, it seems like the theory in hiring people like Beard, or Shaka (or the 2 or 3 most recent football coaches) is sort of the Bill-Self-goes-to Kansas theory: something like "this coach has shown some success at a place with fewer resources than Texas, now he will 'level up' by combining his skill with the Texas name/resources." And while this theory doesn't seem crazy to me, in most cases (whether at Texas or other big name school), it doesn't seem to actually work out all that often. Maybe because the Texas name/resources don't actually mean as much as is presumed (at least in basketball), maybe because the number of actually-great coaches is incredibly small.
To be clear, I'm not saying that if Beard is unsuccessful this year, that means he can never have a good year at Texas. It's theoretically possible that he could build the program over time into something special, like (much as I hate to say it) Scott Drew has done at Baylor. But I think a mediocre year this year, at least to me, would indicate that Beard is not a great coach that just needed a higher-profile job to move into the top tier.
Setting aside my DV concerns for the moment, I think Beard is a very good coach who coaches a style of team I don't find aesthetically pleasing, but he's probably a top-15 or so coach in basketball. You can win a lot of games with a coach like that; I think the concern isn't that he'll be mediocre (though the definition of 'mediocre' is in the eye of the beholder here) so much that he'll be regularly a step below the elite coaches. Texas didn't shell out top-5 coaching money for top-25 results, they want the two seasons Tech had where Beard went to the Elite 8 & a whisper from a national title. Texas doesn't want to be a step below Kansas & Kentucky, and I'm not sure Beard can bridge that gap. He will have plenty of time to try, but every season which doesn't end in a top-2 conference finish and/or a deep tourney run means he has one more season like his last 3. And if he keeps piling up R32 results, Texas fans will eventually start to tune out like they did at the end of Barnes' run.
Yeah, I think R32 is "mediocre" in the sense of where Texas wants to be, if not in the overall CB landscape. Now I don't know whether such expectations are reasonable, since the number of elite programs is small, and is especially small once you get beyond programs that have been elite (at least most of the time) for the last 20 years (or more).
Here's what I think the ongoing bar for 'success' should be at Texas:
Make the NCAA tournament roughly 75% of the time.
Make the Sweet 16 in approximately 50% of their tournament appearances.
Make a Final Four run approximately 1 out of every 5 tournament appearances.
Win a National Championship once every 20-25 years.
He's 1 for 4 so far at Texas, with the obvious caveat that he still has a lot of runway to hit the other marks. My hunch is that Beard has missed his one shot at getting the fourth metric - which isn't a shot at him so much as an acknowledgement that a lot of very good coaches only get one crack at a title game (Calipari has only had two title appearances in 12 Kentucky tournament appearances) - but if he shows a willingness to adapt his approach he could get another down the road.
Yeah, on the one hand it seems like "winning a national championship every 20-25 years shouldn't be a crazy expectation, given the resources, recruiting base (to the extent that's a thing in college hoops any more). But then I think about guys like Tony Bennett at Virginia, and how even with his best team it took everything bouncing the right way to win it, and wonder if you can put any kind of reasonable expectation on winning a championship.
(But the other standards you list seem reasonable to me).
I think if we get to the point that Beard (or whoever is after him) is hitting the other three metrics, we'll probably be relatively forgiving about the fourth because said coach will have a team that contends for titles year in and year out. I agree that winning even one title is really hard and takes a lot of things lining up, the Hall of Fame has a number of coaches with 0 natties under their belts.
Remember how they claimed over the summer that they really tried hard and begged the Jimmy V officials to match up with Duke but had to settle for Illinois? As if there was no other way to play a game against Duke...
Ahh yes, the classic throwing yourself into your friend while yelling "hold me back" at the guy you don't really want to fight