Would the Beard story have been different?

One of the more enjoyable parts of being a sports fan is getting to play "What If?" What if Ted Williams' career had not been interrupted by military service? What if Satchel Paige had played his entire career in the major leagues? Etc.

By now we know that Chris Beard is an outstanding basketball coach. He was a graduate assistant at Incarnate Word. He was an assistant coach at Abilene Christian and North Texas. He was the HC at McMurry and the ABA Warriors. He was the HC at Angelo State, Fort Scott CC and Seminole State. He spent seven years as an assistant under Bob Knight at Texas Tech, and three years as Associate Coach under Pat Knight. To put it mildly, that is a LONG apprenticeship in coaching.

No one can accuse Beard of skipping any steps along the way. Usually when you see a coach with that sort of a resume, you assume there is something wrong, some reason why he is not able to be a head coach of a major program. Why would he be an assistant for ten years at Texas Tech without procuring a head coaching job somewhere in D1? It is not like other programs did not know about him. Obviously, I do not know the answer to those questions, and they don't matter at this point. The long and short of it is that Chasse Conque did not "pick him green" when he hired Beard. He was "fully ripe" from having hung a long time on the coaching developmental tree.

Now here comes the intriguing "What If?" question. What if Beard had landed a D1 head coaching job before becoming an assistant at Texas Tech? or at some other point along the path? What if his first D1 head coaching gig had not been a good fit and he had not been successful for whatever reason? Instead of climbing up the ladder as an assistant under the Knights, what if he had jumped from being a HC at the non-D1 levels to being one at the low D1 level?  Would that have affected how good a coach he is today? Who knows? He has been a good coach all along, but would he have been quite as good as he is now if his career path had been short-circuited? It wasn't, so we will never know; but it is interesting to speculate about it. We might have watched a classic example of the advantages of being patient and waiting for the right opportunity.