Chris Beard is a very good basketball coach and I am sure he is at Texas Tech intending to shoot for a national championship. However, he may need to keep an objective evaluator handy, because he is going to be in for a tough job. He is the coach at a football school in a football state, but he competes in a conference where there are schools from states where basketball is king. Furthermore, TTech has not had a ton of success in their history. They have been as far as the Sweet Sixteen five times, but three of those were 1976 or before. Two Sweet Sixteens in the last 40 years is not exactly a howling record of accomplishment. Nothing approaching a Final Four. Recruiting to Lubbock, Texas is not going to be a piece of cake, either.
Tubby Smith's last year at TTU produced 19 wins and a 9-9 conference record. Six rotation holdovers from that squad were available for Beard, yet Tech only got to 6-12 in conference. The Big 12 is just a brutal place to have to coach basketball.
Beard has shown he can do a lot with a little, and that is what he will have to do at Tech, because he is not likely to rake in talent like they can in Kansas, nor will he have the bottomless pit of money available like they have in Austin. His proven ability to identify hidden talent will stand him in good stead.
Consistently being in the top half of the Big 12 would be a considerable accomplishment for any coach. I think Beard may be able to do that, and along the road he might break some new ground of accomplishment in Lubbock. But he is competing against men named Self and Huggins and Drew and Dixon, etc. That is some tough company. Oklahoma State has already won 20 games this year, with a new head coach, and their RPI is 35, and yet they are only fifth in the Big 12. You can do awfully well in that conference and still be well down the list.
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