From a purely basketball perspective, when the Texas Longhorns play the No. 23 Ole Miss Rebels in Oxford at Sandy and John Black Pavilion on Wednesday, head coach Rodney Terry’s team tries to continue its recent surge of two straight ranked wins while facing a ranked opponent for the seventh time in eight conference games.
Tip is at 8 p.m. Central on ESPN2 with Ole Miss holding a 71-percent win probability and favored by 6.5 points on FanDuel.
The stakes are increased for the Rebels because Ole Miss has lost three straight games in conference play, including an overtime loss to Mississippi State and a late blown lead against Texas A&M in Oxford.
Ole Miss boasts the nation’s No. 12 defense in adjusted efficiency by turning opponents over on 23 percent of their possessions and defend well at the two most important levels of defense — the three-point line, where the Rebels are limiting their opponents to 30 percent shooting, 33rd nationally, and at the rim, with Ole Miss posting a 15.2-percent block rate, 12th nationally.
Offensively, the Rebels sit outside the top-50 nationally in adjusted efficiency thanks to struggles with having shots blocked (No. 311) and offensive rebounding (No. 291) and average raw shooting percentages. Ole Miss does protect the ball well at sixth nationally in turnover rate.
With a balanced scoring attack, six players are averaging 9.5 or more points per game, led by Virginia Tech transfer guard Sean Pedulla at 14.3 points per game, also the team’s leader in made three-point baskets. Inside, the leading rebounder and second-leading shot blocker is 6’9, 250-pound forward Malik Dia. Interestingly enough, it’s 6’6 guard Dre Davis who leads the Rebels in blocked shots.
Texas is hoping that star freshman guard Tre Johnson can find a level of consistency after an up-and-down start to SEC play that reached its current pinnacle in Saturday’s 22-point comeback against Texas A&M in which he scored 24 of his game-high and career-high 30 points in the second half, hitting all 10 of his free throws and adding four assists, two blocks, and one steal.
As a result, Johnson earned SEC Freshman of the Week honors for the second time on Monday after becoming the first Longhorns freshman to score 30 points since Kevin Durant.
Wednesday’s contest isn’t occurring in a vacuum, however — it’s also the first matchup between Texas and its former head coach, Chris Beard, who was fired by the university 755 days ago after he was arrested for felony domestic violence in Dec. 2022 and terminated with cause in Jan. 2023 before the charge was dropped by the Travis County DA in Feb. 2023.
Just 67 days later, Beard was hired by Ole Miss, which underwent an “extensive vetting process,” but still made the decision to hire the former Texas head coach.
According to the arrest affidavit, Beard’s fiancee, Randi Trew, said that “he just snapped on me and became super violent,” “choked me, threw me off the bed, bit me, bruises all over my leg, throwing me around, and going nuts,” and “I could not breathe.”
The altercation, which Trew admitted to starting by breaking Beard’s reading glasses after days of disputes between the two, left Trew with cuts to her face and thumb, a scrape on her leg, and a bite mark on her forearm, according to the affidavit.
Trew later released a statement denying that Beard strangled her and that he was acting in self defense; her desire for Beard to avoid prosecution was one of the major factors in the decision by the Travis County DA to dismiss the case.
When Beard was fired by the university in January, the vice president for legal affairs at UT laid out the rationale for that termination with cause in a communication with Beard’s lawyer.
“Chris Beard engaged in unacceptable behavior that makes him unfit to serve as head coach at our university,” James Davis wrote.
“It is his actual behavior that we consider, not whether some acts also constitute a crime. Whether or not the District Attorney ultimately charges Mr. Beard is not determinative of whether he engaged in conduct unbecoming a head coach at our university,” Davis continued.
“There seems to be an incorrect underlying assumption that the criminal process outcome dictates Mr. Beard’s employment outcome. But these are different processes, where different decision makers are weighing different factors.
“[A]gain, our evaluation of Mr. Beard’s fitness for service is not contingent on whether he is also convicted of a particular crime or whether those charges are dismissed at some point,” Davis wrote.
“Additionally, your letter this morning reveals that Mr. Beard does not understand the significance of the behavior he knows he engaged in, or the ensuing events that impair his ability to effectively lead our program. This lack of self-awareness is yet another failure of judgment that makes Mr. Beard unfit to serve as a head coach at our university.”
During Beard’s introductory press conference at Ole Miss, he avoided direct questions about his arrest.
“Respectfully, Randi and I have agreed not to talk about the details of what happened, not only that night, but in the nights we went through during this process,” Beard said. “But what I can tell you is that much of what was reported is not accurate, and that has been proven with the case being dismissed and the charges being dropped, and also Randi’s statement on Dec. 23. I think that statement speaks for itself.”
The accuracy of that statement is highly questionable — Trew’s statement doesn’t necessarily speak for itself and Beard’s accusations of inaccurate reporting were not vindicated by the DA’s decision not to prosecute the case.
From a legal perspective, Beard’s statements were carefully crafted and avoidant because of the potential for Trew to bring a civil case against Beard, which only requires a “preponderance of evidence,” a 51-percent standard of certainty instead of “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the standard in a criminal case that requires a certainty of more than 90 percent.
That means that full public accountability from Beard could require exposing himself to legal liability.
The context around Beard’s arrest, as illustrated by the statistics and realities surrounding domestic violence also raises further serious concerns beyond whether or not a university should employ him as their head basketball coach.
Regarding the overall accuracy of the statements Trew made to police on the scene, “validated studies show that false reporting in domestic violence cases and rape cases is between 2 percent and 6 percent.” So the not only are the odds of Trew lying in the immediate aftermath of the altercation extremely small, research suggests that 80 to 90 percent of survivors of domestic violence recant their initial statements.
The reasoning behind those decisions to recant are varied, according to FindLaw.com:
Physical evidence of strangulation often doesn’t exist, making it difficult to document in an arrest affidavit, with one published study showing that marks are only visible in less than half of strangulation cases. In the affidavit, Trew alleged that Beard’s arm was across her neck while he held her from behind.
“Serious consequences can happen in only mere seconds after being strangled. Preventing air and blood flow by compressing one’s throat can cause swelling and closure of the airway, or delayed stroke or cardiac arrest,” Gael Strack, CEO of the Alliance for HOPE International, told DomesticShelters.org.
But the absence of visible marks doesn’t decrease the danger of strangulation, regarded by experts as the highest predictor of murder:
In a study of homicide victims killed by an intimate partner, it was found that 43 percent had experienced a non-fatal strangulation by their partner prior to their murder. In attempted homicides by an intimate partner, 45 percent of victims had been strangled before the attempted murder. Researchers in the study, including acclaimed domestic violence expert Jacquelyn Campbell, who developed the Danger Assessment in 1987, determined that being strangled by a partner even one time increases a victim’s risk of homicide by that perpetrator over 600 percent.
Leaving an abusive relationship only increases the survivor’s risk — the first 18 months are considered the most dangerous.
“When the person being abused attempts to leave the relationship, it is a major loss of control for their abusive partner,” said Stephanie Klotz, professional training manager at JBWS. “The majority of domestic violence homicides and, most of all, serious injuries in abusive relationships occur when the survivor ends the relationship.”
Beyond the failure of judgement caused by Beard’s lack of self awareness cited in his termination for cause by Texas, the overarching truths about domestic violence highlight why Beard is unfit to coach the Longhorns or any other school — he’s not just untrustworthy, he’s a physical threat to any domestic partner with whom he’s in a relationship with no public evidence that he’s done anything to treat anger management issues that have manifested in less violent ways on the basketball court.
“That’s not me,” Beard said at his introductory press conference. “That’s not who I am. It’s not who I’ve been. It’s not who I will be.”
But even the aspects of the affidavit that Trew did not or could not recant because of the physical evidence of the bite mark and other abrasions on her body belie that statement by Beard — “who you are some of the time is who you are all of the time,” as Texas head football coach Steve Sarkisian likes to say — as do domestic violence statistics that give significantly more credence to Trew’s initial statements in the arrest affidavit than her statement disputing the police’s characterization of strangulation.
Trew didn’t deny Beard biting her or throwing her across the bed. In the moment, she was afraid enough for her safety that she called the police and described how “super violent” Beard became.
And that makes the decision by Ole Miss to hire Beard so morally repugnant, an ugly stain on the university on display every time the Rebels take the court that merely takes on a slightly different light Wednesday given the opponent.