Well this is surprising, at the very least in its immediacy.
Chris Beard has been fired.
If you want more primary source material, here’s Beard’s attorney’s letter to UT this morning and here’s UT’s response to that attorney, whose name is Perry Minton. Summarized and PARAPHRASED, Minton’s letter says, Chris Beard did nothing wrong and Chris Del Conte said he believes Beard was innocent, and UT’s letter says, Chris Del Conte said he was innocent until proven guilty in the legal sense, Beard’s fiancée didn’t redact all the allegations (i.e., either Beard still bit her or she for some reason bit herself), and the fact you and Beard don’t think he did anything wrong is actually pretty good confirmation that we need to fire him.
In sum:
Don’t (allegedly) bite people!
Look. We wish Chris Beard and his fiancée the absolute best. We mean that earnestly. Violence happened, both parties are in distress, we don’t wish that upon anyone.
But at the same time, if a guy gets the police called on him after getting in a physical altercation with his fiancée and then his attorney comes in saying, “Well, he didn’t do anything wrong,” yes, you have to fire him. Take some responsibility, man.
There’s a lot of speculating that can be done and reading between the lines that can be done, but we’ll only go this deep: It’s highly unlikely that UT was unfair to Beard. Firing Beard opens them up to a potential lengthy, painful legal process. Firing Beard makes them restart the search process for a coach of the second-biggest-money sport at the school and play out the remainder of a once-promising season with an interim guy at the helm. Firing Beard undoubtedly draws them some loud heat from certain figures to whom they’re financially beholden. Every reason under the sun points towards UT hoping this would work out for Beard. The fact they fired him indicates they really didn’t like the facts of the case, and/or didn’t like Beard’s behind-the-scenes reaction these last four weeks.
Our best guess is this:
Texas didn’t want to fire Chris Beard.
Chris Beard made Texas fire him.
Does TCU Eat Cake?
A way people frequently describe TCU is, “It’s like SMU, but with F-150’s instead BMW’s.” I’ve always interpreted this to mean that guys who graduated from TCU wear a lot of Carhartt while they go to their finance jobs in Dallas, and that girls who graduated from TCU are more into pop country—relatively—than they’re into Taylor Swift.
None of this is bad. It’s fine to drive an F-150, it’s fine to wear Carhartt in white-collar life, it’s fine to listen to pop country (and on the SMU side, it’s fine to drive a BMW and be obnoxiously basic). At the same time, though…we aren’t supposed to like cake eaters. That’s a pretty basic rule around here, and by “here,” I mean, “Earth.” TCU, our sources indicate, is a cake eater school. Which made Saturday night kind of awkward, because Michigan is a bit of a cake eater school itself, but is more so a school of cake eater imitation. Michigan kids are trying to be Yale kids. In doing this, they accidentally obscure that a lot of them grew up in Grosse Pointe and just couldn’t get into any school “out east.” But then TCU’s a cake eater school, too, but they’re dressing up like they’re Texas Tech? And what about the cake eater optics at Texas Tech, where there’s an admirable lack of inhibition but, I mean, there’s a lot of money there too. It isn’t really a cake eater vibe, because I don’t think they serve cake in West Texas, but there are some echoes of it.
Where we’re getting with this is that cake eaters have taken over college football, and they might have done it a long time ago, and it’s time we found the least cake eater school in the country and pour every resource we have into making that football program excel. I nominate Kansas State.
Where else we’re getting with this is that we need to do a cake eater ranking of Texas FBS schools, so let’s do that quick, from most cake to least:
1. SMU
2. TCU
3. Rice?
4. Texas (this is hard because of the two halves of Texas, but the half that eats cake is louder)
5. Texas A&M
6. Texas Tech
7. Baylor (not fun enough)
8. Texas State
9. North Texas (because of the art stuff)
10. Houston
11. UTSA
12. UTEP
Sam Houston State will probably slide in somewhere in the 8-13 range when it makes its FBS transition. There’s are pretty clear tiers here.
The final place we’re getting with this is that the cake eater decision tree has been rendered unusable for Monday night. Georgia’s got some cake, it’s not as much cake as TCU, the football program has more cake eater vibes than TCU’s (if you touched Mike Leach, you stopped being a cake eater, so Sonny Dykes is always welcome), the whole thing’s a wash. We’re forced to figure out other ways to identify our feelings.
The Pack Are Back
My headphones were all tangled up and then I got distracted, so I didn’t actually watch the video in question, but Stephen A. Smith tweeted one a video earlier with the caption, “That bad man Aaron Rodgers is getting on my nerves!”
We did it, everyone. Stephen’s scared. Do I understand why? Of course not. My headphones were all tangled up and then I got distracted. But Stephen A. Smith called Aaron Rodgers a “bad man” and admitted Rodgers is in his head. It’s over for the NFC.
We Told You About Illinois
The panic button is getting a workout in Champaign, and don’t say we didn’t warn you. Since this season’s opening NITe, we named the Illini as an NIT contender. Now, they might be the NIT favorite (kidding, that’s still Memphis, but Illinois’s getting close).
Last NITe’s result was the funniest, because it came against Northwestern and everything’s funny when Northwestern’s involved so long as you aren’t the one playing them (this applies to all sports, and also to many social phenomena). Still, there’s work to do. None of the losses are horrible yet. There are two good wins on the team sheet. Our best bet from this crew remains for them to finish right at or above .500, and the projection is for Illinois to finish 18-14, which is possibly good enough to dodge us (depends where the cut line lands). So, we’ll keep dreaming, but in the meantime, we need Brad Underwood & Co. to keep working. Don’t let up yet. You have so many funny ways left to lose.
**
Our itinerary for the evening:
7:00 PM EST: UAB @ FAU (ESPN+)
This is getting hyped by the blogosphere, which is funny because the blogosphere is treating it like an NCA* *********t-impacting game when we know this is really about that NIT bid. We’re looking for strategic losses at the top of Conference USA right now. The blogosphere wouldn’t understand. Game of the NITe.
8:00 PM EST: Washington State @ Arizona State (P12N)
9:00 PM EST: Oregon @ Colorado (ESPN2)
9:00 PM EST: Indiana @ Iowa (FS1)
The Pac-12, as usual, is banging down our door, but credit to the Big Ten for the resurgence. There are NIT candidates all over the place in the Big Ten right now.
11:00 PM EST: Gonzaga @ San Francisco (ESPN2)
Gonzaga isn’t a lock to miss us yet. And with the Final Four in Las Vegas????????? Gonzaga is familiar.
9:30 PM EST: USC @ UCLA (ESPN)
You ever hear of someone going to a funeral to make sure the guy’s dead?
