Is Chris Beard the NCAA Coach of the Year?
Andy Katz from NCAA.com has released his mid-season awards, and Coach Beard and Texas Tech show up on the list twice.
First, Katz has Beard in the running for Coach of the Year with the likes of Bob Huggins from West Virginia and Purdue’s Matt Painter. Katz's write up of Beard is pretty succinct. "OK, so who had the Red Raiders winning at Kansas and being 14-2 overall, 3-1 in the Big 12? Crickets. Thought so," he wrote.
It's a solid argument, and generally one that wins someone Coach of the Year. Exceeding expectations is exactly the kind of thing that you want on a coaches resume, especially with things like this: "Only Texas Tech coach to ever win at Allen Fieldhouse," which is also on the resume of 2018 Chris Beard.
Along similar lines, Katz has the Texas Tech basketball team as one of his surprises of the first half of the season, along with Ohio State, Auburn and NC State.
If Texas Tech can repeat its first half, then you will see every national writer plugging Chris Beard for some type of coaching award -- Big 12 Coach of the year, National Coach of the year, something.
Of course, it's much easier to jump to a 14-2 record with non-conference being the bulk of the schedule as opposed to the Big 12 making up the remainder, which Katz calls the deepest conference when talking about who might win the regular season Big 12 title. "Stay tuned. Oh, and there are zero bad teams in this league," he said. "Most balanced conference by far."