Underdog Texas Tech Blasts Music, Defies Odds to Get Its Shot at NCAA Title

MINNEAPOLIS — After he had guided Texas Tech to another stunning win and answered questions about it from TV and radio reporters. After he had soaked in the adoration of the faithful fans who followed his team here. And after he had walked down the steps of the raised court and embraced his family—Chris Beard broke into a full sprint. He blew by police officers and camera crews and stadium security. He passed doors in a blur and thundered through the last few hundred feet. And as he made the final approach to his locker room, he could hear the music.

While they waited for their head coach, Texas Tech's players bounced and sang along with "Dreams and Nightmares" by Meek Mill and "Yea!!" by Key Glock. Many of them expected that Beard would come in and request "Old Town Road," a viral country trap song by Lil Nas X that has become the team's anthem. But he told them that would have to wait. He said he was proud they knocked off another powerhouse basketball program in Michigan State, but that "Old Town Road" was on hold until after Monday night's national championship game against Virginia. "We enjoyed the win for about 15 minutes," Beard said. "But we came here to play 80 minutes of basketball, and we still have 40 minutes to go. I didn't want us to celebrate too soon."

It's the latest in a long line of creative motivational techniques that Texas Tech's enthusiastically eccentric coach has used on his players. And it'll be no surprise if this one works as well as all the others have on his team's remarkable run this postseason. Forget about the college dive bars filled with assistant coaches from across the country or the swanky cocktail parties populated by corporate executives, the best and most exclusive party in Minneapolis all week has been in Texas Tech's locker room. The Red Raiders' coaching staff takes celebrating so seriously that they travel with their own speakers and reserve the role of DJ solely to the head student manager.

"We all love music, and we all love having fun," said redshirt senior center Norense Odiase. "Coach Beard actually writes 'Have fun' on the board and says it in speeches before games and practices. Whenever you're grinding and the season gets tough, you gotta know to have fun. You're a person. This is a game. We're going for a greater goal, but we're going to have a good time along the way."

The music tradition goes back a long way, to Beard's brief stint at Arkansas Little Rock in 2016. After 10 years as an assistant coach and associate head coach at Tech, Beard wanted to become a head coach and worked his way up from a semi-professional team in South Carolina to Division III and then Division II teams in Texas and, finally, to Division I with Little Rock. But the Trojans, members of the one-bid Sun Belt Conference, did not always have the best accommodations. On a road trip to play DePaul in December 2015, Beard and his staff realized that they had been booked at a hotel eight miles from the arena in downtown Chicago.

"We quickly realized that, in traffic, it would take an hour to get there," says Brian Burg, an assistant under Beard at Little Rock and now at Tech. "We were worried our guys were going to get lackadaisical or just tired. We came up with this idea to have music on the bus."

But Beard didn't want to use the bus' suspect speakers, so he gave a student manager his credit card and told him to come back with the best sound system he could buy. On the bus to the arena that afternoon, the players took turns picking songs, from rap to country to the Serbian national anthem. They didn't even stop the music when they got off the bus. They took the speaker and walked it into the locker room. And after they beat DePaul by 22, they blasted music on the way home too. The songs haven't really stopped since for Beard's teams.

This is Beard's third season at Texas Tech, and the team is already on its second speaker. The first, from JBL, lasted two years before the bass blew out. And judging by the way they make the concrete walls in the tunnels of a massive football stadium shake, the new QSC loudspeakers seem destined for the same fate soon enough. "Even if I have the volume and the bass maxed out," said Cooper Anderson, the head student manager-slash-DJ, "Beard will walk in and tell me to turn it up louder."

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For Beard, blasting music is one of the many reminders to live in the moment. In his career, he spent years wondering if he'd ever get his chance to run a high-major program. And even now that he has coached one to consecutive Elite Eight appearances, he knows that it's no guarantee he'll ever get back to the Final Four or the national championship game. "A lot of what we do now dates back to the Division III days," Beard said. "What worked for us there helped us to get here. We're not going to stop being ourselves now."

His players realize that this run is once-in-a-lifetime. On paper, Texas Tech's roster doesn't scream title contender. The Red Raiders don't have a McDonald's All-American and they only have one top-100 recruit. That recruit, Jarrett Culver, is Texas Tech's leader in points, rebounds and assists this season, and has  blossomed into a likely top-10 pick in this year's NBA draft. But Tech's second-leading scorer, Matt Mooney, is a two-time transfer who started his college basketball journey at Air Force. Its third-leading scorer is Davide Moretti, a sophomore from Italy who went from averaging 3.5 points on 33.6 percent shooting a season ago to 11.4 points on 49.8 percent shooting this season.

"We weren't top recruits," said Mooney, whose 22 points carried the Red Raiders to their win over the Spartans on Saturday, "but we've believed from the beginning that we could beat anyone in the country."

In fact, before the season began, Beard told his players that he believed they had the talent to play on the final Monday night of the season. ("He might be psychic," Mooney joked on Saturday.) During the year, he has kept them motivated in a multitude of ways, from printing shirts that read "Never Lose The Chip" to taking them on impromptu frozen yogurt runs. And even during a brutal three-game losing streak in January or an opening-round exit against West Virginia in the Big 12 tournament, Beard has helped buoy his team by reminding them to remember where they came from and to "smell the roses." During this NCAA tournament run, Beard has told his players to treat each weekend like a two-game tournament, focusing on 80 minutes of basketball at a time.

Now, only 40 minutes remain. And like their final opponent, Texas Tech's final song is already locked in. Normally Anderson has to manage a tug-of-war between the players, who prefer radio hits and rap, and Beard, who likes a ratio of at least one country song for every three rap tracks. But everyone is in agreement about "Old Town Road," an unexpected hit from a previously anonymous artist that blends unlikely genres into something sensational. In that way, it's the perfect song for this Texas Tech team. And it's all any of them want to hear after the buzzer sounds on Monday night.

"We came here to win," Beard said, "and we'll dance when we've done it."