Texas Tech basketball: What we hope the new coach does better than Chris Beard

Develop young big men

Another aspect of Beard’s tenure that was maddening was his unwillingness to develop the young big men on his roster.  In fact, you could argue that his lack of patience with the underclassmen post players that he brought into the program was one of his greatest mistakes.

Four recruiting cycles in a row, Beard brought a high school post player into the program and all of them, (Malik Ondigo, Josh Mballa, Russell Tchewa, and Vlad Goldin) were from Putnam Science Academy in Connecticut.  While Goldin might stick around now that Beard is gone, none of the other three lasted more than two years under Beard before being processed for other players.

The cautionary tale is Mballa, who played his freshman year at Tech in 2018-19 seeing action in only 17 games and averaging a mere 3.4 minutes in each of those appearances.

A year after he left Tech at the behest of Beard and his coaching staff, the 6-foot-9 forward would transfer to Buffalo and blossom into one of the better big men in the game.  As a sophomore, he averaged 10.8 points and 9.6 rebounds per game, and this season, he put up 15.3 points and 10.8 boards.

Players of that ilk are hard to come by and yet, Beard had one right under his own nose and couldn’t recognize it.  That was where his impatience and his insistence on always processing half of the roster in the offseason proved to be unwise.

Big men often take time to develop.  When they arrive on campus, they are often still growing into their massive bodies and they need time in a college strength and conditioning program to develop the agility to play against elite competition.  However, you don’t just toss them aside if they aren’t all-conference contributors as freshmen.  Yet that’s what Beard did and it left his program woefully small in the paint.  Here’s hoping the next man in charge takes a different approach when it comes to developing young big men.