moody was the perfect arena at the perfect time, but beard is the one who built the student support from the ground up, with the most aggressive student interaction campaign i’ve ever seen. again, i’ve never seen anything like it.
sure, tom izzo will bring you some pizza while you’re camping out, bruce pearl will paint his chest and cheer his ass off with you in the student section, and larry eustachy will bang your daughter; but chris beard, like the maniacal, obsessive person that he is, will seek out all 50,000 undergrads and do anything he can to reach them and sell them on why they should become hardcore Texas Basketball fans. he was rabid in his pursuit of building student excitement in a way that nobody at UT has ever seen. this atmosphere does not exist without beard.
i can also guarantee you that we don’t have hundreds of empty student seats for a saturday game against the no.1 team in the country. not a chance. he’d never let that happen, he’d be all over it. moody is great, but Beard’s one lasting legacy here is giving us a legit student section thanks to his total obsession with making that happen.