Chris Beard thriving at Ole Miss 2 years after Texas firing

OXFORD, Miss. -- On an October school night, Chris Beard passed the six towering white columns at the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house to give his pitch. About 125 -- no, it must have been 150 -- frat brothers crammed together to listen.

Weeks before the 2024-25 season, the University of Mississippi men's basketball coach arrived in their living room, where they play Xbox and watch football. He seemed so relatable, said Cale Spies, president of the chapter. Like one of the guys.

Beard spoke for about 10 minutes, vacillating between casual conversation and fiery motivation. The message was simple: We need you, and your lungs, to be at our basketball games. To be part of something their school has never experienced.

Most of the SAEs were standing anyway -- there weren't nearly enough chairs -- but Spies said they gave Beard at least four standing ovations.

"Everybody was really excited," Spies said. "I think a lot of people had a lot of hope for the season."

Beard has made these kinds of visits to Greek Row before, in other college towns, and has made his pitch to sororities, too. He has a group chat with chapter presidents.

Many of those wide-eyed students who met Beard in turn have packed into the Sandy and John Black Pavilion at Ole Miss, sometimes waiting in line for hours to get a coveted seat in the student section. Their loyalty has been rewarded. Ole Miss is 22-11, has knocked off two AP top-five teams for the first time in school history, and is back in the NCAA tournament for the first time in six years. The Rebels play North Carolina on Friday at 4:05 p.m. ET.

The fact that Beard has done this in just his second season isn't shocking to the decision-makers in the Ole Miss athletic department. Everywhere the 52-year-old coach has gone, from Little Rock to Lubbock, he has won. That he's doing it at a school in which basketball was an afterthought has put Beard back on the map 2½ years after a domestic assault arrest led to his firing at Texas. (The case was dropped shortly after his dismissal.)

Who knows what will happen in the chaos of March Madness, but in this corner of the SEC, at this moment, Chris Beard is thriving in what turned out to be a soft, and perfect, landing spot -- a place that needed him as much as he needed it. A football school in a town of 27,000, away from the bright lights of mass media coverage. A place longing for sustained success in basketball.

The NCAA tournament is peppered with coaches riding second and third chances, to the point at which it's easy to forget the transgressions that led to their temporary exiles. Ole Miss hired Beard 26 days after prosecutors dropped the domestic violence case against him, and the university and surrounding community haven't looked back.

"I know there were overall mixed opinions about him being hired," said a sorority member waiting in line to get into a game earlier this season. "But since then, I've been really happy with how our team has performed, and I think that's been really good for our school morale and morale specifically about the basketball team."

Beard has made the town his own, and calls the SEC the best conference and Oxford one of the greatest atmospheres. In a phone interview Wednesday night from Milwaukee, the site of his team's NCAA tournament bid, Beard talked about living "where your feet are" and enjoying the moment.

But in college basketball years, two seasons is an eternity, and this perfect match surely will be tested soon. Beard was pursued by Arkansas last year and already has been mentioned in this season's cycle of the coaching search rumor mill.

Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter told ESPN he wasn't going to let Arkansas snatch away its coach after Year 1 in Oxford, and he's hopeful Beard's stay is long. The school announced a new contract amid his debut season in March 2024, the one-year anniversary of his hire. Carter knows the unique moment Rebels basketball is in and wants to hang on to it.

"Being very candid," he said, "the situation that unfolded there [in Texas] certainly allowed us to get our name in. And a coach at that level -- I mean, he's a top-10 coach in the country, there's no doubt about that.

"Would Ole Miss be able to get a guy like that in a normal situation? I don't know. But things work out for a reason, and I think it's worked out really well."

A new era

The Ole Miss Rebels won just three of their 18 conference games in the 2022-23 season. With about a week left in the regular season, the school fired fifth-year coach Kermit Davis, who'd compiled a 74-79 record in a five-year run that started promisingly with an NCAA bid but flatlined thereafter.

Carter called Davis a fantastic coach and human being, and said he loved him. But Davis had back-to-back losing seasons, and it was time to bring new energy into the program.

Nine days earlier, in Austin, Texas, Travis County District Attorney José Garza moved to dismiss a felony domestic violence case against Beard. Garza said in a statement that after a review of the evidence, and taking into account the wishes of Beard's then-fiancée, Randi Trew, not to prosecute, Garza's office decided that a charge of assault by strangulation/suffocation-family violence couldn't be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

Carter said that in the early stages of their coaching search, he was keeping tabs on what was going on in Austin while exploring options. He said that Beard was the best coach on the market.

The University of Mississippi might have Top 25 football rankings, Olympians and a 2022 Men's College World Series national championship trophy, but make no mistake, basketball is the athletic director's baby.

Carter came to Oxford as an 18-year-old shooting guard from Arkansas whose life would not be defined by his dream to play for the Razorbacks -- who shunned him -- but by brief glimmers of Ole Miss basketball glory in the late 1990s. He led the Rebels to three of their 10 NCAA tournament appearances in school history, played overseas, then came home and felt the pull of his alma mater.

Sixteen years have passed since his return, and he has seen only two Ole Miss NCAA tournament wins -- one was a First Four game in 2015 -- and endured four losing seasons from 2017 to 2023.

Carter said losing in basketball "eats at you," especially when the sport is your background.

"I guess if you're the fan base and I'm the AD, you're like, 'Well, surely he can figure out basketball,'" Carter said. "I love all of our 400 student-athletes and want to give them everything we can, but basketball is one that, to me, I certainly pay a little special attention to."

Ole Miss, Carter said, went through an intense vetting process that lasted a couple of weeks, adding that Beard's case being dropped was just one of the "green lights" that allowed the school to move forward. Carter declined to specify whom the university spoke with during the vetting process but said it was "the key people [who] are around the situation."

Carter eventually met with Beard and Ole Miss chancellor Glenn Boyce, and Carter said they talked for two or three hours in a pivotal moment in their decision to hire him.

"Clearly in this scenario, we wanted to make sure that we were doing all the things we needed to do," Carter said. "Because in my opinion, you could be the best coach in the world; I'm not going to put my career on the line if there's something that I don't feel comfortable with."

Final moments at Texas

Just after 2 a.m. on Dec. 12, 2022, two Austin Police Department officers responded to 1901 Vista Lane -- the residence of Beard and Trew -- for an urgent disturbance. The couple had been together for six years and engaged for three at that point.

Austin Police Department body camera footage obtained by ESPN shows that Trew, who along with her attorney didn't respond to interview requests for this story, opened the front door to officers and joined them outside, wearing black sweatpants, a short-sleeved T-shirt and slippers.

"I just want to talk to y'all out here because he's inside," Trew told police.

In the body cam footage, Trew told officers that she and Beard were having an argument shortly before midnight when he "snapped" on her and "went super violent." She said he bit and choked her and that she had bruises all over her legs.

Police then called emergency medical services, per policy, to examine the possible strangulation.

She narrated as she showed photos to police, describing scrapes on her legs, her hand being "messed up," bite marks, scratches on her back and a mark on her face from her glasses being slapped off of her face. All photos were blurred in the body cam footage.

When police asked if Trew struck Beard at any point, she said she was "trying to hit his jewels" to make him stop but she never made contact with him. Trew told police the altercation stopped when he found out she was calling the police, and he was "chasing [her] around trying to get [her] phone."

Trew told police Beard left the house for 45 minutes, said he was going to a hotel, and came back to try and apologize then "got worked up again and walked out. He's tried to come talk to me like three different times," Trew said.

Toward the end of her statement to police, she asked how the investigation would proceed because she didn't want to press charges.

"My only concern is he's the basketball coach for UT, so he obviously has a lot going on right now," Trew told police. "But I'm not, this was absolutely way out of control and everything."

When officers learned Beard was the men's basketball coach at Texas, one of them called his police supervisor, who then drove to the house, as did a lieutenant. Once Trew went inside the ambulance for an EMS examination, officers went into the house to speak with Beard. Body camera footage of the interaction could not be obtained because access to footage recorded inside a private residence is limited by Texas open record laws.

According to the written police statement, Beard said that after Trew snapped his glasses in half in the guest bedroom, he grabbed her to keep her away from him after she "took a couple shots at him."

He told police he waited to return to the primary bedroom after calming down, but when he returned, Trew "became volatile with him and was swinging at him and attempting to hit him in the private parts," the police report said.

Beard said the altercation stopped once Trew realized he was recording the incident, but he did not wish to share the recordings with police.

Additional body camera footage obtained by ESPN shows police escorting a handcuffed Beard from the house. He also was examined by emergency medical personnel and said yes when police asked if he wanted to go to the hospital.

An officer then told him that police already had made the mandatory notifications about his arrest, including to UT.

"If you go to jail [hospital], it's only going to prolong things, and by the time you get over to the jail, there's probably already going to be the news out there," the officer said. "Where, if we get you over there now, then you're going to get in before anyone knows."

Beard said that the officer "seems like a reasonable guy," but that he didn't "know who to trust." The officer reassured him he was trying to look out for him.

"I'll take the help," Beard told the officer. "Whatever you think is best. Thank you." The officers then took Beard to the police station rather than stopping at the hospital.

Later that same day, Texas suspended Beard.

Eleven days after the altercation, Trew released a statement saying that she initiated a physical struggle between her and Beard and that he did not strangle her, and that she told that to law enforcement the night of his arrest.

"Chris has stated that he was acting in self-defense, and I do not refute that," Trew's statement read. "I do not believe Chris was trying to intentionally harm me in any way."

On Jan. 5, before the district attorney dropped the case, records obtained by ESPN show that a notice of termination signed by athletic director Chris Del Conte landed in Beard's inbox.

Multiple outlets reported that Jim Davis, then UT's vice president of legal affairs, wrote a letter to Beard's attorney saying Beard engaged in "unacceptable behavior that makes him unfit to serve as head coach at our university."

The assistant vice president of university communications for Texas said Davis, who is now the university's interim president, was not available for an interview about Beard.

In a statement about the dropped case, the DA's office heralded its track record since 2021 of indicting or formally charging more than 2,000 individuals with assault/family violence and securing more than 1,000 criminal convictions on family violence charges. Prosecutors incarcerated about 200 people accused of domestic violence in 2022.

Garza's office did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story.

Katherine Redmond, president of the WeLEAD Project, which works with survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault and harassment, said it's not surprising the case didn't move forward.

"When the victim refuses to testify," she said, "... if they don't cooperate, there's really not a lot left that you can do."

In Beard's introductory news conference in 2023, he declined to answer questions about what happened that night. He said that he and Trew agreed to not speak about the details of the evening.

"What I can tell you is much of what was reported was not accurate, and that's been proven with the case not only being dismissed, charges dropped, but also Randi's statement on Dec. 23," Beard said at the time.

In the interview with ESPN on Wednesday, Beard referred back to those comments.

"It went through the legal process," Beard said. "I was never charged. The case was rejected. I never went to court [then] I was back in college basketball two months later."

When asked if there was a nondisclosure agreement with Trew, he said he's "not going down those roads."

Beard said he never felt the need to reestablish his reputation.

"The people that I love," he said, "the people that know me, the people that I've coached, the people I've worked for and with, the people I'm concerned about, their opinion, nothing changed in that regard."

He said he had no doubt he'd coach again. Perhaps the biggest struggle in the early days of 2023 was being a basketball coach with no team to lead.

His coaching friends told him to play golf and enjoy the rare respite. But he couldn't relax. Beard said he spent an extensive amount of that time with his parents. It was the first chance he could do that in the three decades since he'd been coaching.

His mom, Connie, was battling cancer at the time, he said, and called it a "God thing" that he was able to spend so much time with them. A few months later, in June 2023, Beard's dad, Richard, died.

Beard was going through his parents' mail after his dad's death and came upon a box. Inside was an Ole Miss license-plate accessory his dad had ordered.

"Which is a pretty big move," he said. "My dad's from Texas. It was always Texas Tech, and Texas of course."

Climbing the ranks

Texas was never Beard's dream job, he said. Maybe people assumed that, he said, because he served as a student manager for the Longhorns in the 1990s. His dream job is wherever he is coaching.

He had 13 jobs before Ole Miss. Though he didn't stay long in a number of those places, former employers were effusive in their praise for Beard's work ethic, basketball knowledge, loyalty and persistence.

Vic Trilli, the former coach at the University of North Texas, said he'd just been hired in 1997 when he received a 1 a.m. phone call from Beard, who was his team manager a few years prior at Texas. Beard declared he was on his way.

"I said, 'You're on your way? What are you talking about?'" Trilli said. "He's on his way to Denton. He had pronounced to me that he was going to be my assistant coach."

When Trilli arrived the next day, Beard already had made himself at home.

"To me, that gives you an idea about what kind of guy he was," Trilli said. "High energy, go, get after it. I love working with him."

At the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Beard's first Division I head coaching job in 2015, former athletic director Chasse Conque enthusiastically shared details of the exhilarating one-year ride with Beard that culminated in a trip to the NCAA tournament and a first-round upset win against fifth-seeded Purdue.

Much like his visits with the fraternities and sororities at Ole Miss, Beard was intentional about getting the students in Little Rock involved with the basketball team.

"He would show up to the baseball clubhouse and tell the guys, 'Come out, I'll buy you pizza after the game,'" Conque said. "He and his assistants would take their SUV in the middle of campus with some Frisbees and footballs in the back trunk, and I think they even brought a little charcoal grill one time and just grilled for the students.

"We didn't necessarily have the environment on our campus at that time that really believed that we were about to do something special. ... [But] by the time we got to probably the end of January, we started seeing tremendous support. We had the governor attend several of our games down the stretch."

On the court, Beard asked his players to buy into a style of play that leaned on a tenacious defense and doing the little things that are not necessarily appealing to star players. He wins with people you probably haven't heard of.

Beard went from Little Rock to UNLV in 2016 but left just weeks later when the Texas Tech job opened. He said at the time that returning to the school where he'd served as an assistant to Bob Knight a decade earlier was a big factor in the decision.

That first season, the Red Raiders upset No. 7 West Virginia. In 2018, Beard took Texas Tech to the Elite Eight. Around that time, Matt Mooney, a first-team all-conference player in the Summit League for South Dakota, was at a crossroads in his basketball career. He wanted to experience the feeling of the NCAA tournament, not just for an auto-qualifying team, but a team that could realistically win a few games in March.

He narrowed his choices to Texas Tech, Creighton and Northwestern. His friends had hoped he'd go to Northwestern. The scorer from Niles, Illinois, knew that Creighton and its high-octane offense was a good fit. Texas Tech seemed to make the least amount of sense, because they'd have to replace five seniors from that Elite Eight run and because Mooney knew that playing defense wasn't exactly his forte.

But everything changed when he spoke with Beard.

"I just had the sense, like, 'Man, this guy is going to win,'" Mooney said. "They're my kind of culture, you know, guys who are gym rats. Get in the gym, work hard, have aspirations to be pros.

"He talked about winning the national championship, which was like, 'All right, that's pretty ambitious.' How are you going to talk about that when you just lost a first-round draft pick ... and I think four out of five starters. But he was just talking about, 'Look, we're going to compete for a national championship, and we need you to do it.'"

Mooney prayed about it and went to Lubbock. He was one of three transfer players in 2018-19. After the first practice, Mooney said, Beard told the team that it had the people who could be playing on the final Monday night of the season. And six months later, Texas Tech made it to the national championship game against Virginia. The Red Raiders lost in overtime.

"After the season," Mooney said, "I remember him saying, 'I should've said we'll win on Monday night.'

"But he had a vision."

NIL backing

When Ole Miss was in the middle of its coaching search in 2023, and Beard's name came up as a candidate, former Rebels coach Rob Evans called his old shooting guard Keith Carter. Evans wanted to vouch for Beard.

"Let me tell you," Evans said, "if I didn't believe in him -- I don't give out accolades to everybody. There's certain people that I wouldn't say this about. I know he's made mistakes, but I've also seen the other side of him.

"Chris will be the first one to tell you that he's made mistakes. But there's a lot of guys that's coaching basketball on a collegiate level that's made mistakes that didn't have it publicized."

Evans met Beard about 15 years ago, when Evans stopped to get breakfast in Lubbock with his wife and saw Beard sitting with a handful of players. Evans introduced himself, and Beard told him that he ate breakfast with his seniors once a week.

"And I thought, 'What a great idea,'" Evans said. "He spends time with them, so there's no second-guessing from the kids. They know this is what he does, this is what he wants."

He was drawn to Beard because of his technical knowledge, and his ability to communicate with every person associated with the program. It reminded him of Hall of Fame coach Eddie Sutton.

Perhaps no Ole Miss coach came to Oxford under tougher circumstances than Evans, the first Black head coach in a major sport in school history. When he arrived in 1992, the Rebels had had just one winning season in a decade. Football people, he said, were in charge, and weren't interested in the basketball program. Resources were limited.

One time, the team came back during Christmas break, and there was no heat in the gym. So they practiced with ski caps and gloves.

It wasn't that dire when Beard arrived in 2023. But donations in support of name, image and likeness for Ole Miss basketball were struggling.

Walker Jones, executive director of the Grove Collective, said apathy had set in. But that quickly changed under Beard.

"He believes in NIL," Jones said. "He believes in player advocacy, and he really brought some new life into our program from a competitive standpoint and also from the off-the-court NIL piece. It kind of got our donors excited, our people excited, about basketball. And we've been able to spend competitively these last two years because of his leadership and his commitment."

NIL directors don't like to talk specific numbers, but in 2024 when Arkansas hired John Calipari, it was reported that the new coach had a $5 million budget to build his team through NIL.

Jones said Ole Miss was competitive with that number, and with the increasing budgets this year.

"I would put our spending commitment in a very competitive light with the top half of our league," Jones said. "And if you're in the top half of the SEC, then you're in a pretty good spot on the national scale."

Winning the town

A mile and a half from campus, inside the University Sporting Goods store on the Square, a framed photo showed Eli Manning rearing back to uncork a throw. Just about every piece of Ole Miss football merchandise a Rebels fan could want is here. Basketball gear is harder to find.

It was about 5 o'clock on a late January afternoon, and the owner of the store sat on a chair near the door, waiting to close for the day. He didn't feel much like talking about basketball.

"Get out," he said in curmudgeonly-yet-whimsical tone.

A few minutes later, outside, the man rolled up near the front in a Lexus SUV.

"Get in," he said.

He didn't want to get into his background, but he said his name is Pat, and that sometimes he recruits for the university. He did not mention that on occasion, he likes to give out-of-towners tours. "The town is his family," said Ben Requet, the director of planning for the city who works near the bookstore.

Pat circled around the Square, and then the town.

He drove past the Grove, which he said is perennially voted the best tailgate spot in America.

"And it's just a sea of red and blue," he said.

He drove to the old dorm house of James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first Black student to be admitted into the racially segregated University of Mississippi. Pat said he couldn't go to school during that time because of the tear gas from the riots.

He drove by the house of Nobel Prize-winning writer William Faulkner, and then his grave. By now, it was dark. He said English majors and writers come by and toast Faulkner with tiny liquor bottles.

Through most of the 50-minute ride, he changed the subject whenever basketball was broached.

But Pat did have memories of it that span six decades and three arenas. Much of the memories were in the Tad Smith Coliseum, a 59-year-old facility that used to be the home for Ole Miss basketball. (Beard held a throwback game there earlier this season.) Pat said the Tad Pad was state of the art in the 1960s, but it obviously outlived its time. The seats were miserable, he said, but they made you feel closer to the action.

His view of the basketball program, at least in its early stages of the Chris Beard era, is different from that of the 19-year-olds in the student section. It's different for a businessman selling merch in a football town.

"Basketball doesn't drive s--- around here," he said. "Well, maybe [for] some of the restaurants [it does].

"But if we had to count on what we made off basketball, we would starve to death. It's just not there. Now, it may come back."

After the drive, he pulled back into the Square and said his goodbyes. He gave his last name: Patterson. A Google search reveals that Pat Patterson was Oxford's mayor for two terms.

A night with 'Club Red'

The temperature dropped to below freezing on a Wednesday night in late January, and the wind whirled around the long line of students who'd been waiting to get into Ole Miss' showdown with then-No. 13 Texas A&M. Some stood there for two hours.

During a break in the first half, students waved red plastic cups as a mascot dressed as a red Solo cup galloped around the court to the tune of Toby Keith's "Red Solo Cup."

After the game, students took their cups to a local bar for a $4 Hotty Toddy daiquiri. The new plastic cup bit encourages students to stay for the full game; $4 daiquiris aren't redeemable until the final buzzer.

In the front row, freshman John Jenkins' vein bulges from his head as he's roaring for the Rebels. He's repping his oversized, blue foam cowboy hat and the free "Club Red" T-shirt that was waiting in the student section bleachers for each collegian as they arrived.

"I just try to stand out in the crowd and wear the most obnoxious thing I can find," Jenkins said of the foam hat he has worn to every game he has attended in 2025.

He wasn't necessarily a basketball fan before Ole Miss, but as a freshman in the "Beard-ball" era, that has changed.

Before Beard, students could show up five minutes before tipoff, Cale Spies said, and get a seat at the game. Now some students purchase assigned basketball tickets to avoid waiting in line.

Ole Miss forward Jaemyn Brakefield said he looked back at some old game videos from the pre-Beard era and noticed a lot of empty seats. It struck him how different things are now.

"Just having students be there two hours early," Brakefield said, "that's something that motivates players to want to go out and play for the university, and play for the head coach, and play for the students.

"It's more than just the name on the back of the jersey ... I feel like the engagement with the community is definitely part of winning."

The Rebels led until Texas A&M hit a 3-pointer with 13 seconds to win 63-62. A subdued arena emptied.

"That hurt my soul," Jenkins said.

'I am a gigantic fan of Chris Beard'

On social media channels and insider podcasts, speculation churned for weeks about Beard's future. Debates ensued over whether he was in consideration for the Indiana job, which became open when the school announced last month that coach Mike Woodson was stepping down at the end of the season.

St. John's coach Rick Pitino, who has turned around the Red Storm after his own second chances, told the "Pardon My Take" podcast last month that Indiana should hire Beard. He said the Hoosiers shouldn't even bother interviewing anyone else.

"I am a gigantic fan of Chris Beard, and I think he would kill it at Indiana," Pitino said on the podcast. "He'd have them in the top five to seven every single year. ... He's a superstar and a top-three coach in my estimation."

That speculation ended earlier this week when Indiana hired West Virginia's Darian DeVries.

Beard said there will never be an offseason in which "things aren't written about" him possibly taking another job. But he doesn't pay attention to it.

"The way I feel right now today at Ole Miss is, I was hired here to do the job, and we're going to do it," he said. "I love it here. [I've] got to be careful as a coach saying, you know, 'I will never leave' and this and that. Because the other side has to feel that way, too. People always try to get the coach to say things like that, but there's never an athletic director that comes out and says, 'Hey, I want this guy to be my coach forever,' I promise. So it's a business. We all know that.

"But I love Ole Miss. I love it here. I think I've proven that over [the] last offseason, where we had some opportunities after one year [at] Ole Miss, and we didn't even blink. I mean, we're here to do a job. I spend zero seconds in my day thinking about anything other than Ole Miss. And I really do like it here personally, too."

Perhaps no moment defined Beard's enjoyment of where he currently is than March 5. Ole Miss had just upset No. 4 Tennessee, and the students flooded onto the court. Beard had seen this kind of scene before, in many gyms, and started to head to the locker room.

Then something came over him, he said. He wanted to stay. So he stood on a chair and watched his players celebrate.

"I have never done that before," he said, "and I've had many opportunities over the years. But it was just a cool 30 seconds. Just watching my players and embracing how much fun they were having out there."

And in that moment, at least, Chris Beard was home.

ESPN researcher John Mastroberardino contributed to this report.