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.
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.
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...