Copied and pasted below because it is too good.
https://theathletic.com/911951/2019...-championship-red-raiders-vow-theyll-be-back/
MINNEAPOLIS — Chris Beard stopped short of the steps in the far corner of the elevated floor, as if he wanted someone to just try and make him leave. He exhaled. He put his hands on his hips and then turned back to a landscape of silver and yellow streamers and confetti and elation, all of it for the other guys. Texas Tech’s coach stared it down, much like he stared down the first moments of an unfolding celebration, with the ireful look of a man who knows when he’s not invited to a party, a man who knows he’ll never get one the easy way.
As his players passed by, Beard extended a hand to each. Soon, he came across one who needed something more. Brandone Francis already had ripped out of an assistant coach’s grip and tugged his jersey collar up to hide his face when he approached Beard and the tears overwhelmed him again. Beard grabbed his senior guard’s jersey, hard, and brought him in close to say things only Francis should hear. Then Francis pushed away. He let loose a scream and turned in anguish toward the Red Raiders fans in the crowd. He raised his voice again.
“I’m sorry,” Francis said, loud as he could, for everyone to hear.
He was sorry not for himself but for what Virginia 85, Texas Tech 77 meant for the people in the stands, for all of the moments they wouldn’t get to enjoy beyond Monday night, for all of the celebrations that wouldn’t happen and for a previously unfathomable pride they wouldn’t get to feel. This is the double-loss for every team that comes up shy in a national championship game. It’s especially acute if you made history but just not enough of it, as the Red Raiders did in reaching their first Final Four and only fading out after five extra minutes were put on the clock at U.S. Bank Stadium. It’s also not necessarily the best way to contextualize what happened across three weekends this March and April. Look through the disappointment, and what you see looks less like something gone and more like a promise.
No one was going to try to explain it late on Monday, and it’s unlikely anyone in the Texas Tech operation would’ve cared to listen. But none of this was accident. None of this was coincidence. Over the past three years, this program has been structured and staffed and supported precisely in the way that brings any program to these big moments. Though its constituents may beg to differ, a championship was not necessarily required to make an argument that a fresh basketball leviathan might be starting to rise on the South Plains, and all that this run to the cusp of a title did was leave an impression that it could happen faster than anyone might have hoped.
“Winning is this culture,” senior center Norense Odiase said, sitting in a corner of a silent locker room. “I don’t want fans to think we’re happy with just getting here. Maybe they are. But this program and everything we’re about is winning. This program will be back. They’ll be back to this moment.”
Beard consoled Francis as the senior left the court for the last time. (Robert Deutsch/USA Today Sports)
As of April 14, 2016, Texas Tech needed a men’s basketball coach. Tubby Smith had departed for Memphis, and while these things naturally create some inconveniences, identifying the preferred replacement was not among them. The guy doing the hiring, athletic director Kirby Hocutt, had a short list with Chris Beard’s name atop it. No less a figure than Bob Knight had recommended Beard as the only choice, given Beard’s past life as an assistant coach for Knight and his son Pat in Lubbock. Pat Knight stopped midway through a round of golf to phone Beard, in fact, and provide some fair warning that Smith was leaving and his friend might be getting a call, and to start strategizing accordingly.
Beard, of course, had been employed in Las Vegas for less than three weeks as UNLV’s head coach. Though a contract had been signed, he had barely settled on a hotel to work out of, let alone put down roots. The Wynn? This place isn’t us, Beard had decided. So he and his newly appointed coaching staff checked out and stationed themselves at the Hyatt Place near campus. Eventually, everyone wound up at the Eastside Cannery Hotel and Casino, because that was a little more anonymous and out of the way and, well, leaving the job you just took for another job tends to upset people, so being as anonymous and out of the way as possible is the best way to proceed.
When Hocutt kited into town to have a chat about this opportunity for career advancement, it wasn’t guaranteed that Beard would leave for Texas Tech. But it also didn’t take long for him to hear the one promise he needed to hear.
During their hasty and somewhat clandestine meeting at a private airport terminal in Las Vegas, Beard wanted Hocutt to assure him that the Red Raiders basketball program would be given what it needed to compete for championships. He knew the job well enough, after all, to know it was not as attractive an opportunity otherwise, if he’d face a nickel-and-dime struggle to build a contender. “He probably did not have interest in coming to Texas Tech if we weren’t going to resource this program to compete — not to go to NCAA Tournaments every few years,” Hocutt recalls. “He wanted the resources to build a developmental program that could have sustainable success.”
The story of Texas Tech reaching the national championship game on Monday night is a Chris Beard story, yes, featuring all of those cloying anecdotes about cutting cardboard boxes behind grocery stores to supplement his meager income and bringing his own towels to the Final Four because he’d be one of like eight guys stuffed into a hotel room. He is the guy with the Whataburger table marker and the Hunt’s Oyster Bar sticker and the framed picture of a star and a cannon and the phrase COME AND TAKE IT displayed prominently in the coaches’ meeting room in Lubbock, yes. This is all true.
More germane to this program getting this far, however, is the aggressive imagination of its coach and the ability of those at the school to flesh it out, and the possibility that it may create a new emergent power in the Big 12.
The story of Texas Tech is how much has been invested into the basketball operation, in every sense, and how it was built as a result, and how repeatable all of this is. Given the results of the past two seasons, the build seems to meet Beard’s code. How long it lasts is the open-ended question. “Our goal has never been to make a tournament,” Beard says. “It’s been to win the tournament. It’s easy to talk about and really, really hard to do. But that’s where we started this whole thing, was just trying to have the expectations and the vision where we could be relevant. It starts by trying to be relevant in the Big 12. If you can get in the top half of the Big 12 and compete, you can beat anybody once the tournament starts. That’s been proven several times in recent history here. The big thing with Kirby and I is, we shared the vision we could be relevant in the Big 12, which ultimately meant we could be relevant nationally.”
Achieving that meant adhering to one of the lesser-known catchphrases that dominate the airspace around this program: Spend the money. Maybe it’s the guy who says he wasn’t paid at any of his first four jobs speaking, but it is Beard’s intention to leave no penny unconverted into something that can push his basketball team forward, because if you don’t spend it today who knows if it’ll still be laying around tomorrow. As just one example: Following a middling first season in Lubbock, Beard was able to dispatch his staff to various teams at various levels around the country, to soak up their best practices and apply them at Texas Tech. Minds were open and nothing was off-limits; strength and conditioning coach John Reilly spent a few days with the Philadelphia 76ers and learned about the restorative powers of bone broth for athletes, and in turn, the Red Raiders gave bone broth a try as a means to aid recovery from games and workouts.
As another example: Texas Tech has the standard allotment of three full-time assistant coaches. It also has a chief of staff, a senior adviser to the head coach, a man in charge of player development and seven — seven — graduate assistants, all of whom travel with the program everywhere it goes.
And this doesn’t even get to the strength coaches and athletic training staff on hand in Lubbock and along for the ride all season. A budget to accommodate all that is no small ask. But it’s what Beard asked for from the start. “I know in the athletic department, they joke that ‘4:1’ means staff-to-player ratio,” says Tim McAlister, Texas Tech’s chief of staff. “But that’s one of the biggest things Coach is very adamant about — having the right people and having a lot of people in place to try to help those (players), every day. These guys don’t want for anything. Do they need to get in the gym? Well, there’s somebody there. Do they need to get in and get a lift in? There’s a strength coach there. Do they need to get treatment? There’s somebody there. These guys can worry about nothing but academics and basketball.”
It’s not much of an exaggeration. Carrying the seven grad assistants permits Texas Tech to encourage and facilitate the extra work its players do, because those grad assistants are generally on-call to help the players do that work whenever it fits the player’s schedule. “Any time of the day — 6 a.m., 11 at night, 12 at night, whenever,” says guard Matt Mooney, a grad transfer who previously played at Air Force and South Dakota. “We’re spoiled.” Likewise, Reilly takes the somewhat uncommon approach of letting players decide when they will come in for lifts instead of regimenting it himself. (The lifts are required, of course, but not locked into a specific time.) That can mean long days for Reilly in particular — “It’s a marathon,” he says — but it also means having enough personnel on hand for almost round-the-clock workouts. So Reilly is staffed with an assistant and a grad assistant himself. “We have three strength coaches that work 15 guys,” Reilly says. “It’s totally different from anything out there.”
And it literally can be out there sometimes. Mooney tweaked a shoulder early in the season, so Reilly suggested Bikram yoga as a solution to loosen him up … and then joined the player for the session. “I remember the first time I went, it was like 20 minutes in, and I was like, Coach, is this thing almost done?” Mooney says. “(Reilly) was like, ‘You got like 45 more minutes.’ But it’s been good for me.” From there, Mooney and Reilly ventured to The Yoga Stand at least once a week, and other veterans like Francis and Odiase joined in. Maybe other programs can devote that sort of personal attention to their rosters too. As for one of the two programs that was vying for a title on Monday night, Beard believed Texas Tech couldn’t get where it wanted to go without it. A lack of a rebounder here or a closed door there interrupts that developmental process, and in his estimation programs such as Texas Tech can’t afford those interruptions. If it wants to play the long game, all of it is essential.
“People think the process is coming in and getting work in and getting out,” McAlister says. “That’s not it at all.”
This week, Beard recalled the night he accepted the job and his decision that, no, in a league with Bill Self and Lon Kruger and Bob Huggins and others, he would not win by out-coaching people. Neither would he win, at least at the start, by putting more sheer talent on the floor than any other Big 12 team. He decided the key element was to stay old — “I think experience is everything,” he says — and that is inherently an extended process requiring consistent reinvestment of resources. Inasmuch as talent replenishment matters, Beard now can call upon a private jet to take him around the country to recruit; it’s how he and assistant Brian Burg were able to make a face-to-face impression on Mooney within hours of Mooney deciding to transfer from South Dakota, and how Texas Tech compiled a top-15 recruiting class this year, featuring one top-100 high school player from Texas, another top-100 prospect from Chicago and a highly rated junior college forward who played at the College of Southern Idaho.
“Obviously that success speaks for itself,” Hocutt says.
To maintain all this, or indeed to rise to the level of hegemonic Big 12 and national powerhouse, there is a cost. According to Department of Education data, Texas Tech reported $9,020,201 in men’s basketball expenses in the 2017-18 reporting period. That ranked seventh among the 10 Big 12 programs. For the sake of broader comparison — while admitting we’re using two-year-old numbers for a present-day juxtaposition — Texas Tech’s spending that year ranked fourth among programs that reached this year’s Final Four.
On the other hand: Construction is now underway for the Dustin R. Womble Basketball Center, a 58,000-square foot facility that will give both the men’s and women’s programs a standalone training facility, at the cost of $29.5 million. “Texas Tech is built to win,” Burg says. “Kirby Hocutt has allowed us to have the resources to be able to do this. That was pretty immediate — as soon as we stepped foot on campus, the administration has been 100 percent behind us.”
And as Beard and his team cut down the nets after winning the West Region to advance to Minneapolis, Hocutt stood to the side and all but declared resources would not be an issue if Texas Tech has to outbid other suitors for Beard’s services. He reiterated as much late on Monday in a much more somber setting, saying he’d most likely meet with Beard within 72 hours to discuss the future and vowing that the school will continue to invest in the program and “recognize” its basketball coach for what this team accomplished. “We’re going to be proactive,” Hocutt said. “This is the best place for him.”
That’s the trick with having everything you could ask for: having the right people around to do the right things with it.
Beard and the Red Raiders were perhaps one defensive stop from a national title. (Robert Deutsch/USA Today Sports)
More than anything on Monday night, Texas Tech simply could not do what it wanted to do. It could not dictate. It could not impose itself on the other team and bludgeon the action until it submitted to its terms, which is basically what this team had done in parts or all of five previous NCAA Tournament games. Instead, the Red Raiders didn’t make a single field goal in the first seven-plus minutes. On the fateful play near the end of regulation that resulted in a game-tying 3-pointer from Virginia’s De’Andre Hunter, the best and most witheringly efficient defensive team in the country had a bad switch and made a game-plan mistake. In overtime, Texas Tech surrendered 17 points in five minutes. It felt like a game in which the Red Raiders were always fighting to catch up with themselves.
Also, it was a game in which Texas Tech did not blink. Not until the very end, anyway. But it doesn’t even get that far without a stretch of incredible second-half shotmaking, a run of 12 makes in 16 attempts that vanquished what seemed to be an unlikely-to-be-vanquished Virginia lead, given the Cavaliers’ own stifling defense and a tempo that limited possessions and opportunities. The season pushed down hard on Texas Tech, and Texas Tech pushed back. “I’ve loved every team I’ve ever coached,” Beard said, standing in the hall, having ditched his suit for a team-issued polo and jeans. “What you hope for is they get the maximum potential and they play to the bone and give yourselves a chance. This year’s team did. Guys were picked, like, last in the Big 12. None of you picked us in the 68. When this tournament started, Buffalo was supposed to beat us, then Michigan was supposed to beat us, then Gonzaga was supposed to beat us, then Michigan State was supposed to beat us. We paid attention. Tonight, we were right there. Give Virginia a lot of credit. They beat us. But I think our guys played their hearts out.”
About a half-hour earlier, when those locker room doors finally swung open, the space was dense with silence. The speaker that blared music before tipoff at obnoxiously aggressive volumes — loud enough to hear through two sets of closed doors — was sitting idle on a shelf next to a can of soda. Tariq Owens, the grad-transfer center who suffered a severe high-ankle sprain in the semifinal win over Michigan State before starting and playing 22 minutes on Monday, lay flat on the floor, his arms spread out wide and his legs propped up on his chair. Mooney buried his head in his hands and answered questions in a sub-whisper. “One Shining Moment” played on a flat-screen in the trainer’s room, but no player set eyes on it.
“We should’ve won the whole thing,” Mooney said, nearly inaudibly, and there is certainly a bit of regret that will chase this group around for a lifetime. He was soon joined at his locker by Francis, who sat on the floor and reached one hand out to Mooney and his other to Owens, sitting nearby. He then proceeded with a heartfelt postgame chat that played out before everyone in the room, thanking them for all they did in their short time, and how they helped author this story.
“We had them,” Francis told Mooney and Owens. “We had them.”
It wasn’t and isn’t enough. You grind all season to get here, as Odiase put it, and you can’t let the opportunity go by when it arrives.
But it also was and is enough, in some ways. Texas Tech basketball damn near won a championship and it wasn’t a fluke but a calculated result borne of deep investment on many levels from many people. It was the night doubt left Lubbock for good.
At some point, the players and the coaches will figure out how to resolve the conflict in those two ideas. For now, Beard could stare out on that floor and see everything he needed to see. He had long dreamed of being the one team that ends its season with a win, and he was this close to it. He could see a celebration and turn that picture into a brand, stamped on his mind, a scar that will last him forever. If he couldn’t quite convince himself that no one expects anything from his program anymore, he surely could and assuredly did convince himself that no one expects Texas Tech to make it to Atlanta and play for another national championship next April.
And if that was the result on Monday, if that was the only thing he’d get to carry back to Lubbock, well, at least Chris Beard knows exactly what to do with it. “We’ll get back to work tomorrow and try to get right back here next year, somehow, some way,” he said. “The message is, we’re not going anywhere.”
https://theathletic.com/911951/2019...-championship-red-raiders-vow-theyll-be-back/
MINNEAPOLIS — Chris Beard stopped short of the steps in the far corner of the elevated floor, as if he wanted someone to just try and make him leave. He exhaled. He put his hands on his hips and then turned back to a landscape of silver and yellow streamers and confetti and elation, all of it for the other guys. Texas Tech’s coach stared it down, much like he stared down the first moments of an unfolding celebration, with the ireful look of a man who knows when he’s not invited to a party, a man who knows he’ll never get one the easy way.
As his players passed by, Beard extended a hand to each. Soon, he came across one who needed something more. Brandone Francis already had ripped out of an assistant coach’s grip and tugged his jersey collar up to hide his face when he approached Beard and the tears overwhelmed him again. Beard grabbed his senior guard’s jersey, hard, and brought him in close to say things only Francis should hear. Then Francis pushed away. He let loose a scream and turned in anguish toward the Red Raiders fans in the crowd. He raised his voice again.
“I’m sorry,” Francis said, loud as he could, for everyone to hear.
He was sorry not for himself but for what Virginia 85, Texas Tech 77 meant for the people in the stands, for all of the moments they wouldn’t get to enjoy beyond Monday night, for all of the celebrations that wouldn’t happen and for a previously unfathomable pride they wouldn’t get to feel. This is the double-loss for every team that comes up shy in a national championship game. It’s especially acute if you made history but just not enough of it, as the Red Raiders did in reaching their first Final Four and only fading out after five extra minutes were put on the clock at U.S. Bank Stadium. It’s also not necessarily the best way to contextualize what happened across three weekends this March and April. Look through the disappointment, and what you see looks less like something gone and more like a promise.
No one was going to try to explain it late on Monday, and it’s unlikely anyone in the Texas Tech operation would’ve cared to listen. But none of this was accident. None of this was coincidence. Over the past three years, this program has been structured and staffed and supported precisely in the way that brings any program to these big moments. Though its constituents may beg to differ, a championship was not necessarily required to make an argument that a fresh basketball leviathan might be starting to rise on the South Plains, and all that this run to the cusp of a title did was leave an impression that it could happen faster than anyone might have hoped.
“Winning is this culture,” senior center Norense Odiase said, sitting in a corner of a silent locker room. “I don’t want fans to think we’re happy with just getting here. Maybe they are. But this program and everything we’re about is winning. This program will be back. They’ll be back to this moment.”
Beard consoled Francis as the senior left the court for the last time. (Robert Deutsch/USA Today Sports)
As of April 14, 2016, Texas Tech needed a men’s basketball coach. Tubby Smith had departed for Memphis, and while these things naturally create some inconveniences, identifying the preferred replacement was not among them. The guy doing the hiring, athletic director Kirby Hocutt, had a short list with Chris Beard’s name atop it. No less a figure than Bob Knight had recommended Beard as the only choice, given Beard’s past life as an assistant coach for Knight and his son Pat in Lubbock. Pat Knight stopped midway through a round of golf to phone Beard, in fact, and provide some fair warning that Smith was leaving and his friend might be getting a call, and to start strategizing accordingly.
Beard, of course, had been employed in Las Vegas for less than three weeks as UNLV’s head coach. Though a contract had been signed, he had barely settled on a hotel to work out of, let alone put down roots. The Wynn? This place isn’t us, Beard had decided. So he and his newly appointed coaching staff checked out and stationed themselves at the Hyatt Place near campus. Eventually, everyone wound up at the Eastside Cannery Hotel and Casino, because that was a little more anonymous and out of the way and, well, leaving the job you just took for another job tends to upset people, so being as anonymous and out of the way as possible is the best way to proceed.
When Hocutt kited into town to have a chat about this opportunity for career advancement, it wasn’t guaranteed that Beard would leave for Texas Tech. But it also didn’t take long for him to hear the one promise he needed to hear.
During their hasty and somewhat clandestine meeting at a private airport terminal in Las Vegas, Beard wanted Hocutt to assure him that the Red Raiders basketball program would be given what it needed to compete for championships. He knew the job well enough, after all, to know it was not as attractive an opportunity otherwise, if he’d face a nickel-and-dime struggle to build a contender. “He probably did not have interest in coming to Texas Tech if we weren’t going to resource this program to compete — not to go to NCAA Tournaments every few years,” Hocutt recalls. “He wanted the resources to build a developmental program that could have sustainable success.”
The story of Texas Tech reaching the national championship game on Monday night is a Chris Beard story, yes, featuring all of those cloying anecdotes about cutting cardboard boxes behind grocery stores to supplement his meager income and bringing his own towels to the Final Four because he’d be one of like eight guys stuffed into a hotel room. He is the guy with the Whataburger table marker and the Hunt’s Oyster Bar sticker and the framed picture of a star and a cannon and the phrase COME AND TAKE IT displayed prominently in the coaches’ meeting room in Lubbock, yes. This is all true.
More germane to this program getting this far, however, is the aggressive imagination of its coach and the ability of those at the school to flesh it out, and the possibility that it may create a new emergent power in the Big 12.
The story of Texas Tech is how much has been invested into the basketball operation, in every sense, and how it was built as a result, and how repeatable all of this is. Given the results of the past two seasons, the build seems to meet Beard’s code. How long it lasts is the open-ended question. “Our goal has never been to make a tournament,” Beard says. “It’s been to win the tournament. It’s easy to talk about and really, really hard to do. But that’s where we started this whole thing, was just trying to have the expectations and the vision where we could be relevant. It starts by trying to be relevant in the Big 12. If you can get in the top half of the Big 12 and compete, you can beat anybody once the tournament starts. That’s been proven several times in recent history here. The big thing with Kirby and I is, we shared the vision we could be relevant in the Big 12, which ultimately meant we could be relevant nationally.”
Achieving that meant adhering to one of the lesser-known catchphrases that dominate the airspace around this program: Spend the money. Maybe it’s the guy who says he wasn’t paid at any of his first four jobs speaking, but it is Beard’s intention to leave no penny unconverted into something that can push his basketball team forward, because if you don’t spend it today who knows if it’ll still be laying around tomorrow. As just one example: Following a middling first season in Lubbock, Beard was able to dispatch his staff to various teams at various levels around the country, to soak up their best practices and apply them at Texas Tech. Minds were open and nothing was off-limits; strength and conditioning coach John Reilly spent a few days with the Philadelphia 76ers and learned about the restorative powers of bone broth for athletes, and in turn, the Red Raiders gave bone broth a try as a means to aid recovery from games and workouts.
As another example: Texas Tech has the standard allotment of three full-time assistant coaches. It also has a chief of staff, a senior adviser to the head coach, a man in charge of player development and seven — seven — graduate assistants, all of whom travel with the program everywhere it goes.
And this doesn’t even get to the strength coaches and athletic training staff on hand in Lubbock and along for the ride all season. A budget to accommodate all that is no small ask. But it’s what Beard asked for from the start. “I know in the athletic department, they joke that ‘4:1’ means staff-to-player ratio,” says Tim McAlister, Texas Tech’s chief of staff. “But that’s one of the biggest things Coach is very adamant about — having the right people and having a lot of people in place to try to help those (players), every day. These guys don’t want for anything. Do they need to get in the gym? Well, there’s somebody there. Do they need to get in and get a lift in? There’s a strength coach there. Do they need to get treatment? There’s somebody there. These guys can worry about nothing but academics and basketball.”
It’s not much of an exaggeration. Carrying the seven grad assistants permits Texas Tech to encourage and facilitate the extra work its players do, because those grad assistants are generally on-call to help the players do that work whenever it fits the player’s schedule. “Any time of the day — 6 a.m., 11 at night, 12 at night, whenever,” says guard Matt Mooney, a grad transfer who previously played at Air Force and South Dakota. “We’re spoiled.” Likewise, Reilly takes the somewhat uncommon approach of letting players decide when they will come in for lifts instead of regimenting it himself. (The lifts are required, of course, but not locked into a specific time.) That can mean long days for Reilly in particular — “It’s a marathon,” he says — but it also means having enough personnel on hand for almost round-the-clock workouts. So Reilly is staffed with an assistant and a grad assistant himself. “We have three strength coaches that work 15 guys,” Reilly says. “It’s totally different from anything out there.”
And it literally can be out there sometimes. Mooney tweaked a shoulder early in the season, so Reilly suggested Bikram yoga as a solution to loosen him up … and then joined the player for the session. “I remember the first time I went, it was like 20 minutes in, and I was like, Coach, is this thing almost done?” Mooney says. “(Reilly) was like, ‘You got like 45 more minutes.’ But it’s been good for me.” From there, Mooney and Reilly ventured to The Yoga Stand at least once a week, and other veterans like Francis and Odiase joined in. Maybe other programs can devote that sort of personal attention to their rosters too. As for one of the two programs that was vying for a title on Monday night, Beard believed Texas Tech couldn’t get where it wanted to go without it. A lack of a rebounder here or a closed door there interrupts that developmental process, and in his estimation programs such as Texas Tech can’t afford those interruptions. If it wants to play the long game, all of it is essential.
“People think the process is coming in and getting work in and getting out,” McAlister says. “That’s not it at all.”
This week, Beard recalled the night he accepted the job and his decision that, no, in a league with Bill Self and Lon Kruger and Bob Huggins and others, he would not win by out-coaching people. Neither would he win, at least at the start, by putting more sheer talent on the floor than any other Big 12 team. He decided the key element was to stay old — “I think experience is everything,” he says — and that is inherently an extended process requiring consistent reinvestment of resources. Inasmuch as talent replenishment matters, Beard now can call upon a private jet to take him around the country to recruit; it’s how he and assistant Brian Burg were able to make a face-to-face impression on Mooney within hours of Mooney deciding to transfer from South Dakota, and how Texas Tech compiled a top-15 recruiting class this year, featuring one top-100 high school player from Texas, another top-100 prospect from Chicago and a highly rated junior college forward who played at the College of Southern Idaho.
“Obviously that success speaks for itself,” Hocutt says.
To maintain all this, or indeed to rise to the level of hegemonic Big 12 and national powerhouse, there is a cost. According to Department of Education data, Texas Tech reported $9,020,201 in men’s basketball expenses in the 2017-18 reporting period. That ranked seventh among the 10 Big 12 programs. For the sake of broader comparison — while admitting we’re using two-year-old numbers for a present-day juxtaposition — Texas Tech’s spending that year ranked fourth among programs that reached this year’s Final Four.
On the other hand: Construction is now underway for the Dustin R. Womble Basketball Center, a 58,000-square foot facility that will give both the men’s and women’s programs a standalone training facility, at the cost of $29.5 million. “Texas Tech is built to win,” Burg says. “Kirby Hocutt has allowed us to have the resources to be able to do this. That was pretty immediate — as soon as we stepped foot on campus, the administration has been 100 percent behind us.”
And as Beard and his team cut down the nets after winning the West Region to advance to Minneapolis, Hocutt stood to the side and all but declared resources would not be an issue if Texas Tech has to outbid other suitors for Beard’s services. He reiterated as much late on Monday in a much more somber setting, saying he’d most likely meet with Beard within 72 hours to discuss the future and vowing that the school will continue to invest in the program and “recognize” its basketball coach for what this team accomplished. “We’re going to be proactive,” Hocutt said. “This is the best place for him.”
That’s the trick with having everything you could ask for: having the right people around to do the right things with it.
Beard and the Red Raiders were perhaps one defensive stop from a national title. (Robert Deutsch/USA Today Sports)
More than anything on Monday night, Texas Tech simply could not do what it wanted to do. It could not dictate. It could not impose itself on the other team and bludgeon the action until it submitted to its terms, which is basically what this team had done in parts or all of five previous NCAA Tournament games. Instead, the Red Raiders didn’t make a single field goal in the first seven-plus minutes. On the fateful play near the end of regulation that resulted in a game-tying 3-pointer from Virginia’s De’Andre Hunter, the best and most witheringly efficient defensive team in the country had a bad switch and made a game-plan mistake. In overtime, Texas Tech surrendered 17 points in five minutes. It felt like a game in which the Red Raiders were always fighting to catch up with themselves.
Also, it was a game in which Texas Tech did not blink. Not until the very end, anyway. But it doesn’t even get that far without a stretch of incredible second-half shotmaking, a run of 12 makes in 16 attempts that vanquished what seemed to be an unlikely-to-be-vanquished Virginia lead, given the Cavaliers’ own stifling defense and a tempo that limited possessions and opportunities. The season pushed down hard on Texas Tech, and Texas Tech pushed back. “I’ve loved every team I’ve ever coached,” Beard said, standing in the hall, having ditched his suit for a team-issued polo and jeans. “What you hope for is they get the maximum potential and they play to the bone and give yourselves a chance. This year’s team did. Guys were picked, like, last in the Big 12. None of you picked us in the 68. When this tournament started, Buffalo was supposed to beat us, then Michigan was supposed to beat us, then Gonzaga was supposed to beat us, then Michigan State was supposed to beat us. We paid attention. Tonight, we were right there. Give Virginia a lot of credit. They beat us. But I think our guys played their hearts out.”
About a half-hour earlier, when those locker room doors finally swung open, the space was dense with silence. The speaker that blared music before tipoff at obnoxiously aggressive volumes — loud enough to hear through two sets of closed doors — was sitting idle on a shelf next to a can of soda. Tariq Owens, the grad-transfer center who suffered a severe high-ankle sprain in the semifinal win over Michigan State before starting and playing 22 minutes on Monday, lay flat on the floor, his arms spread out wide and his legs propped up on his chair. Mooney buried his head in his hands and answered questions in a sub-whisper. “One Shining Moment” played on a flat-screen in the trainer’s room, but no player set eyes on it.
“We should’ve won the whole thing,” Mooney said, nearly inaudibly, and there is certainly a bit of regret that will chase this group around for a lifetime. He was soon joined at his locker by Francis, who sat on the floor and reached one hand out to Mooney and his other to Owens, sitting nearby. He then proceeded with a heartfelt postgame chat that played out before everyone in the room, thanking them for all they did in their short time, and how they helped author this story.
“We had them,” Francis told Mooney and Owens. “We had them.”
It wasn’t and isn’t enough. You grind all season to get here, as Odiase put it, and you can’t let the opportunity go by when it arrives.
But it also was and is enough, in some ways. Texas Tech basketball damn near won a championship and it wasn’t a fluke but a calculated result borne of deep investment on many levels from many people. It was the night doubt left Lubbock for good.
At some point, the players and the coaches will figure out how to resolve the conflict in those two ideas. For now, Beard could stare out on that floor and see everything he needed to see. He had long dreamed of being the one team that ends its season with a win, and he was this close to it. He could see a celebration and turn that picture into a brand, stamped on his mind, a scar that will last him forever. If he couldn’t quite convince himself that no one expects anything from his program anymore, he surely could and assuredly did convince himself that no one expects Texas Tech to make it to Atlanta and play for another national championship next April.
And if that was the result on Monday, if that was the only thing he’d get to carry back to Lubbock, well, at least Chris Beard knows exactly what to do with it. “We’ll get back to work tomorrow and try to get right back here next year, somehow, some way,” he said. “The message is, we’re not going anywhere.”
