Chris Beard of Little Rock to UNLV

[T-Dog]

Pending the i's being dotted and t's crossed, Beard is a one-and-doner in Little Rock and heading to Sin City.

[asu66]

Pending the i's being dotted and t's crossed, Beard is a one-and-doner in Little Rock and heading to Sin City.

No surprise there; as four of his eight-man rotation are seniors. Whoever sits in that seat next season will struggle to finish over the .500 mark. Beard's doing the steppin' stone stomp while he can.

[T-Dog]

He's been a head coach at six different schools now and never been at one place longer than two seasons. He'll do the same to UNLV after one 20-win season.

[proasu89]

He's in the rent don't buy group of coaches.

[APPdiesel]

Can't blame him though. While not great recently, the UNLV name still holds stock. More stock than any Sunbelt basketball program has.

twitter.com/DieselOnRadio

[EastHallApp]

Little Rock was the first of those that was even D1. Dude has worked his way up from coaching at a community college to UNLV in 15 years. In any other industry this would be praised as hard work and hustle.

According to wikipedia, he has three kids. I suspect all those juco and D2 gigs didn't exactly pad his bank account. Good for him for making a career for himself and a better life for his family.

[app97]

I knew it wouldn't take long after the success he had at Little Rock in his first and only year there. I wonder how he did it. I know that UALR and several other sun belt teams have quite a few juco players, but his philosophy and coaching style must have been a stark contrast to what they've had in recent years, considering UALR was near the bottom of the belt last year. They were near or very close to the top of the ncaa in scoring defense all year. They were the #1 team in the ncaa in fg% defense most of the season.

[newtoasu]

I know Chris fairly well from his two years here at Angelo State prior to moving to UALR. He took a losing program here and turned them into a sweet 16 DII team. He did this mainly using DI transfers and juco's, so I will be the first to admit I wasn't sure if he could get the same types of players to a DI that he could get at a DII. Generally, you build DI programs with HS kids and not other college transfers, although it can be done.

Two years ago he was making around $120,000 at Angelo State. That doubled to $260,000 including bonuses at Little Rock. Rumors are the new contract at UNLV is $900,000 to $1,000,000 for a 5 year deal.

Let me also say that Chris was a great guy in addition to being a good coach while at Angelo State. I only wish him the best. I hope he finds the same level of success at UNLV.

[app97]

maybe not....

http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketb ... h-thursday

[EastHallApp]

Might as well just tweak the thread title.

[newtoasu]

This is a much better fit for Coach Beard. He has three daughters in the north Texas area and was an assistant at Texas Tech for about 10 years under Bobby and Pat Knight.

I have had some expensive stays in Las Vegas, but Beard's may be one of the biggest I have seen. He was officially their coach for 6 days; so his approximately 1 week stay will cost about $1,000,000. (That's the buyout that I assume Tech will pay to get him out of the UNLV contract.)

This will be Chris's 4th job in a 54 week span. What a salary progression: $120,000 --- $260,000 --- $1,000,000 --- $1,900,000

[Budman2154]

If I didn't know better, I would think his last name was Peterson.

[EastHallApp]

Rumor during the season was that Pitino might see the UNLV job as a way to escape the heat in Louisville. Would it be too much to ask for Vegas to go after him now, just so Louisville can then hire Beard away from Texas Tech?

[T-Dog]

When he was hired at UNLV, he had to sit through a two-hour board session to approve his contract, which wasn't a unanimous vote. The chairman of the board (not Sinatra) told him "If you're half as good coaching as you are negotiating a contract, you'll be fine" before voting against the contract. I would have walked out and told them to shove it right there.