College basketball rankings: 2024 could be a great year for Chris Beard, who is

The calendar flipped, at the stroke of midnight, from December 2023 to January 2024 and officially put another year in the books. It’s hard to imagine any college basketball coach had a stranger 12 months than Chris Beard.

Allow me to recap.

On the fifth day of 2023, Texas fired Beard following a domestic incident with a woman who was his fiancee at the time. Just like that, his dream job at his alma mater was gone. Just like that, his coaching future was uncertain. But then, less than 10 weeks after he was terminated, Beard was hired at Ole Miss. And on the final day of 2023, on Sunday afternoon inside The Pavilion in Oxford, the 50-year-old former CBS Sports National Coach of the Year guided the Rebels to a 95-78 victory over Bryant that improved Ole Miss to 13-0, which means that in the same year that Beard was fired by a Big 12 school, he now has a SEC school as one of the only three undefeated teams left in the sport. The others are Houston and James Madison.

Also worth noting: Ole Miss has already won more games this season than it did all of last season by matching the best start in program history.

“If we’re going to do the things that we want to get done here, and why we came to Oxford, there’s going to be a lot of records that need to be approached and broken over the years — and over the next months and weeks,” said Beard, whose Rebels are No. 15 in Monday morning’s updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings 

I have Ole Miss in the top 15 of the Top 25 And 1 largely because I believe that in a season where UConn, Duke, Arizona, Kentucky, FAU, and Creighton have all already lost to sub-70 teams at KenPom.com, there’s something to be said for just never losing to anybody (even if the resume is light on big wins). Yes, the Rebels own an 80-77 victory over Memphis that’s a notable resume-builder. But they haven’t beaten another top-70 team at KenPom.com so far this season, and that fact combined with their subpar computer numbers — Ole Miss is No. 60 in the NET, No. 67 at BartTorvik.com and No. 83 at KenPom.com — are are among the reasons some skeptics remain.

I get it.

But it should be noted that Beard’s coaching career is filled with examples of him exceeding expectations, often very quickly. He led Little Rock to a school-record 30 victories in his first and only season in the Sun Belt, then guided Texas Tech to its first trip to the Elite Eight in just his second season in the Big 12 before also coaching the Red Raiders to their first trip to the Final Four and national title game a year later.

In other words, it should only be surprising that Chris Beard is already overachieving at Ole Miss if you forget that this is Chris Beard we’re talking about. History shows this is exactly the kind of stuff he’s capable of doing, and it’ll be fascinating to see if he can keep it going as the Rebels prepare to open…