Author: Dan Wolken / Source: USA TODAY
SportsPulse: Texas Tech vs. Michigan State? USA TODAY Sports’ Scott Gleeson details how each team can reach the national title game and who ultimately will come out on top. USA TODAY
MINNEAPOLIS — As natural as it might be to attach words like “breakthrough” or “life-changing” to a coach when they make a Final Four for the first time, it’s rarely true.
Just think about 46-year old Chris Beard, whose coaching résumé sounds more like a Robert Earl Keen tour through Texas music halls than a path to competing against Tom Izzo for national titles. You want to talk about the kind of breakthrough that matters? How about going from a Division II job at Angelo State to making $260,000 at Arkansas-Little Rock, then getting a million-dollar rise to coach at Texas Tech. That’ll really change your life.
But it’s fair to say this about Beard, whose debut news conference here dripped with charming stories about how he’d come to the Final Four years earlier trying to crash on someone else’s hotel room floor and movie-theater bonding with assistant Mark Adams years ago at the late showing of “Sex and the City”: He’s now a legitimate coaching star.
And as with all new coaching stars, Beard’s emergence has started a growing conversation across college athletics about what someone who has built a nouveau powerhouse out of the West Texas dust might be capable of at a place like UCLA or Arkansas, whose jobs are open right now, or perhaps even his alma mater Texas someday down the road.
But as much as there’s wide agreement that Beard is one heck of a basketball coach who could probably win anywhere, there will also be a fundamental question if and when he decides he wants to try something else: Is a bigger stage really suited for the kind of program that suits him?
At a blue blood, the expected path to success requires collecting McDonald’s All-Americans, coddling egos and placating handlers whose only motivation is protecting their players’ NBA ambitions.
At Texas Tech under Beard, the formula has been about stitching together a roster of overlooked recruits and well-traveled transfers, a reflection of the journey he’s taken himself.
“I tell the guys to never forget where they come from and be you,” Beard said. “I’m proud of it. I wouldn’t trade my path for anything.”
In short four years as a Division I head coach, Beard’s formula of attracting basketball nomads and getting them to buy into a dogged defensive mentality has produced undeniable results. At Arkansas-Little Rock, he completely remade the roster in one summer, went 30-5 and knocked off Purdue in an NCAA tournament upset. This year, his rotation at Texas Tech includes three transfers, a former junior college player a guard he plucked out of Italy and a future NBA lottery pick who was ranked in the 300s coming out of high school.
At some point, that’s not a fluke. It’s merely who you are as a coach.
“I mean, it’s not arrogance. It’s just the truth: We’re really good at coaching one-year guys,” Beard said. “(John Calipari) at Kentucky is pretty good at it too, it…
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