Retaining Beard is yet another sign of the New Ole Miss
Ole Miss is thriving in the NIL era. Retaining Chris Beard is the latest example of that.
Fewer than five days after Ole Miss Basketball’s season ended in Atlanta, after the Rebels’ fell 73-70 to Michigan State in what was just the second Sweet 16 appearance in program history, the much-maligned basketball program received a jolt of validation that arguably rivals the significance of its appearance in the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament.
On Wednesday afternoon, Ole Miss Athletics publicly announced that Chris Beard agreed to a contract extension that will keep him in Oxford for the foreseeable future. This announcement, of course, was calculated and hardly unprompted.
On Tuesday, Texas A&M head coach Buzz Williams left the Texas Cult of Scientology to accept the same role at Maryland. Williams is a career nomad who never sticks around at a program for more than five-to-seven years. It’s a smart strategy. He’s a good basketball coach and he leaves before the mob of critics ever form and ignite their torches. But the move was still seen as somewhat shocking in the college basketball world. Why is that? It’s a fascinating question to ponder.
A New Frontier
In the world of college athletics, Texas and Texas A&M are seen as the closest thing to the Saudi Public Investment Fund as anything that exists within the ecosystem, and with good reason, too. Both are massive public institutions in one of the richest states in the country, with uber-wealthy alumni bases that supply a seemingly bottomless amount of funds to ensure the success of the sports teams.
On July 1, 2021, the perpetually short-sighted NCAA introduced new bylaws that allowed athletes to profit off of their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL). Though none of the bureaucratic empty-suited morons involved in that decision making process knew at it at the time, it essentially ended one era of history and birthed another. College sports as we knew it ended that day. The anti-American farce of a concept that was amateurism was finally (legally) dead and a completely lawless economy, that previously existed as a shadowy black market, became mainstream. Everything you knew or assumed about college sports became moot that day, whether you knew it or not.
Like any other undiscovered frontier in human history, a new landscape presents great opportunity: it allows the adaptable and opportunistic to thrive and essentially forces the passive and bewildered to flounder.
There has never been a clearer line of demarcation in college athletics, and it’s signified by quality of leadership. If you have smart leaders, anyone can thrive. If you have morons in charge, your ship will sink. It’s never been more matter of fact in a constantly changing landscape that requires foresight and adaptation. History, tradition, and the nonsensical label of being a ‘blue-blood,’ have repeatedly proven to be outdated labels that can best be described as utter bullshit in this new era.
Ole Miss has tremendous leadership. It is thriving in this modern era. As we’ve covered extensively both in this space and on RebelGrove.com, Ole Miss’ collective, the Grove Collective, is the gold standard. And it’s because Ole Miss acted while most stood idly by (click the link to read how and why). The decision to act fast, form the Grove Collective (the correct way, as in not a 501C3) is still paying dividends to this day, including this development of retaining Beard.
So, in this NIL era, where money can be thrown at athletes openly, instead of in McDonald’s bags in cash in a Wal-Mart parking lot (shoutout Jeremy Pruitt), why hasn’t one of the richest schools in the country (A&M) thrived?
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Dysfunction Breeds Chaos
Williams is a Texas native. He’s made four Sweet 16s and an Elite Eight in his career. He took an ACC program with little basketball history, Virginia Tech, to the Sweet 16 before he left for A&M. Though he’s a career nomad, many figured he’d finally made his way back home in College Station, and wouldn’t leave. But he did. And it’s not just the fact that he left, it’s who he left for.
Maryland’s job was open because its coach, former Seton Hall head coach and now-Villanova head coach, Kevin Willard, left in disgust. This story did not get a ton of national media attention, but it is truly one of the wildest things I have ever seen in college sports. Willard took the Maryland gig after 13 years at Seton Hall. He got the Terps to the Round of 32 in his first year, missed the tournament last year and made the Sweet 16 this year before he left, and it wasn’t without a flare for the dramatics.
On March 17, Villanova fired head coach Kyle Neptune. Villanova is a proud basketball program. Neptune had a near impossible job: to follow Jay Wright, who won two national championships and was arguably the greatest active coach in the sport when he left. Neptune failed mightily and his firing was deserved. Villanova is an A-class basketball job. Willard’s name was immediately tied to the opening. Willard seemingly had things rolling at Maryland, you’d figure he’d dispel the rumors or leverage them into a pay raise and an NIL budget increase before announcing he loves being at Maryland? Yeah, not even close.
On the eve of the first round of the 2025 NCAA Tournament, Willard used his NCAA-mandated press conference to call his outgoing AD a cheap-ass, declare that he screwed up handling NIL and then publicly confirmed the AD was leaving to go to SMU. For context, Maryland’s AD is a guy named Damon Evans. It had been long-rumored that he was a favorite to land the SMU AD job, but nothing had been publicly reported or confirmed. His subordinate basically broke the news for him to force his hand.
Think about that for a second: Many of you reading out there likely have bosses. What if you had a public press conference in which you basically said “yeah, my boss is a moron that screwed us, oh and by the way, he’s leaving the company soon.” — it’s truly one of the wildest things I have ever seen in college athletics. I can’t believe this did not become more of a national story. If you don’t believe me, watch the video above.
Anyway, the point of me mentioning that is this: Buzz Williams just left Texas A&M to take THAT job. Williams just took a gig with no athletic director (so, no boss until a new boss that didn’t hire you is in place), very clear NIL dysfunction and a desperate admin. Why would he do that? Buzz is not dumb. I have a theory: Texas A&M AD Trev Alberts is arguably the dumbest human being in major college athletics, who keeps inexplicably falling upward into better jobs — much like Ross Bjork. I don’t get this whole empty-suit AD thing. Maybe I am just dumb, but it seemingly never works out well — and is spreading his toxic stupidity into one of the largest athletic brands in the country. You think I am being too hard on the guy? Read this story about what he did to Nebraska-Omaha’s athletics department before falling upward into the Nebraska AD job, and then get back to me.
Make no mistake about it: Williams left to get away from Alberts. Last summer, Texas A&M made the national title series in college baseball against Tennessee. The Aggies lost that series to Tennessee. Head coach Jim Schlossnagle then left College Station to become the head coach at Texas, a bitter rival. You think Schlossnagle left because he felt under-supported or that the money was lacking (at A&M of all places!) ?. Of course not. He left because he realized his boss was a moron.
And while I am speculating here, I have to figure Williams and Schlossnagle left the cash cow that is Texas A&M because they realized that money without organization and infrastructure is fairly worthless. A&M might have more money than anyone in this ecosystem. But without the proper organizations in place, without the proper infrastructure to deliver that money to elite-level athletes in an ethical and responsible way, then what good is the money?
Multiple sources told Rippee Writes and RebelGrove (predominantly Chase Parham) on Wednesday that Texas A&M could not provide Beard with a definite number regarding an NIL budget for the 2025-26 season, and that it was a significant factor in Beard’s decision.
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When I interviewed Walker Jones (a man who deserves a statue along with William Liston, Matt McDonald, David Nutt, Carter, Glenn Boyce, Denson Hollis and many others) about 18 months ago when reporting on the story about how the Grove Collective was founded, Jones explained that this collective (a new term at the time), could help Ole Miss fight a resources battle. Jones likened it to his time spent at Under Armour, when the company was in its infancy while fighting behemoths like Adidas and Nike for market share. He said that Ole Miss needed to be “organized, disciplined, and make one dollar spend like three.” He truly believed Ole Miss could alter the power structure in college sports by being more organized than anyone else.
Well, as it turns out he was 100 percent correct, and Wednesday’s development of keeping Beard is a prime example of that. Why did Beard choose to stay at Ole Miss? It’s a job with zero history, zero NBA presence and has been historically (and accurately) regarded as the worst job in the SEC.
Beard stayed because the New Ole Miss is not the Old Ole Miss. The idea that Ole Miss is still a bad basketball job is an outdated and uninformed narrative parroted by the schmucks I used to call colleagues who are more concerned about the media buffet than actually digging into a subject. Ole Miss Basketball pays its coach a top-15 salary. Its assistant coach pool is borderline top-10, its NIL is in the top half of the league and its facilities are A+. Historically speaking, Ole Miss is a tough basketball job. But again, history went out the window that summer day in which the NCAA legalized NIL — by what objective measure is Ole Miss a bad or “tough” basketball job now? It’s not. But it will take a half decade for the national media to catch up because of a lack of intelligence and motivation.
A multi-faceted validation
Ole Miss keeping Chris Beard and fending off Texas A&M is a massive validation for the basketball program. It’s proof of concept and proof of financials that you can win big at Ole Miss, that Ole Miss will support you and that this is no longer a doormat job. Beard is an elite coach, who would have never ended up at Ole Miss in the first place if not for issues in his personal life (I have written extensively about this, so spare me the self-righteous email about me glossing over it). The fact that he stayed, and that he does not view this job as a stepping stone on his rehabilitation tour, but rather a place he can build and win at, is a massive validation for a historically-maligned program.
It’s also proof of a much larger theme: The Ole Miss Rebels are thriving in modern college athletics because of their leadership.
Carter, Boyce, Jones, Hollis, the list goes on-and-on. The NIL era has beamed an intense spotlight on leadership. It has weeded out bad leaders. If a school has smart people and good leaders in charge, it can thrive. If it has incompetent people running the show, it will wither.
This is the New Ole Miss: thriving in a new frontier.
HYDR
Great read