NewsOK’s Berry Tramel writes about how new Texas Tech head coach Chris Beard has had 7 jobs in 62 months, which is terrific clickety-clack bait, because this is how it starts:

College basketball coaches can be nomadic. They can be a little dishonorable. But I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything like Chris Beard.

Beard is the new basketball coach at Texas Tech, and good for all concerned. Beard appears to be an excellent coach, and he spent 10 years as a Tech assistant during the Bobby Knight/Pat Knight years, so he obviously loves Lubbock.

It’s a good get for Tech in the wake of Tubby Smith taking off for Memphis.

But man. How can Tech have any trust in Beard?

Yeah, how could Texas Tech trust Chris Beard? Especially if you didn’t listen to any of Beard’s opening press conference or know much about the situation.

On the other end of the spectrum, DMN’s Tim Cowlishaw takes a bit of a different approach:

Beard took the Tech job Friday, so this should be a happy story in Lubbock. A former assistant for 10 years with family in the area comes home to try to continue the rebuilding job that Tubby Smith had underway before rushing off to Memphis this week.

The only problem is Beard had a job as head coach of UNLV. And he took that job a week ago.

I’m pretty sure I’ve had longer stays in Vegas, although those may have been three-day weekends that just seemed longer when leaving empty-handed.

I can’t condemn Beard for what he did. Timing is everything in life and sometimes it forces you to do things that seem selfish to others. But Beard certainly hadn’t been in Vegas long enough to convince any high schoolers to spend their college years there. I think the coaches who leave after one year – again victimized by timing in some sense – do more damage in terms of their impact on young athletes’ lives.

Maybe this is the biggest distinction between what Tubby Smith did, which was seemingly sneak out of Lubbock to look for another job and what Beard did. I don’t know that Smith took his dream job, but he took a job that he thought was easier (I think Texas Tech ended up getting Smith more money at Memphis), while Beard has certainly job-hopped over the past few years. One day I’d love to tell you all a story about Beard and how he thought he was going to get to stay in Lubbock, even when Gillispie was here and Beard really did intend, I think, to stay here as long as Texas Tech would let him.  It wasn’t Beard that ever wanted to leave, I can almost assure you of that.

It didn’t work out for Beard, so he did the next best thing, which was to work his tail off in order to get the job that he really wanted. From McMurry, to Angelo State, to Little-Rock.

It only took him 62 months to get here.