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Larry Fedora claims Tim Beckman got fired because he didn't win enough
This is a stretch, Larry Fedora.
Former Illinois coach Tim Beckman is now a volunteer coach at North Carolina. Beckman spent the 2015 season out of football after he was fired a week before the season as multiple former players reported mistreatment.
Fedora, the North Carolina head coach, said Wednesday that Beckman didn’t lose his job over the allegations of mistreatment. Rather it was because he wasn’t successful enough.
“I don’t believe everything I read, all right,” Fedora said via the News & Observer. “I know Tim. I know his side of the story, also. So I was comfortable with it. If I wouldn’t have been, obviously I wouldn’t have brought him. I wouldn’t have allowed him to be in our program.
“But I was very comfortable with it. I don’t have any issues with it at all.”
Fedora also had this to say.
“And I know (criticism is) going to happen, and then a couple of days from now it won’t be news,” Fedora said. “I mean, I promise you, I didn’t see anywhere where the NCAA said that he should be banished from the game of football. You know?
“I mean, the guy didn’t win enough games. That’s all it was.”
We get why Fedora is defending Beckman’s presence around his team. He’s not going to disparage a guy he’s allowed to help out coaching his football program. But his comments assume that college football observers are too obtuse to not realize why a coach would be fired days before a season rather than immediately after the conclusion of a porous one.
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And while we encourage the “don’t believe everything you read” strategy when it comes to internet political conspiracy theories, the practice needs to be thrown out the window in this case. Illinois fired Beckman after an investigation by an outside law firm corroborated claims made against the coach.
Plus, Illinois athletic director Mike Thomas had supported Beckman publicly before the investigation. Believing he wanted to reverse course and have that support undermined by evidence defies logic.
Second chances happen in football all of the time. Had Fedora simply said Beckman had learned from his mistakes and reflected upon them in his time away from college coaching, the hire could seem defensible. Instead, Fedora’s weak public reasoning inexplicably invites more criticism.
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Nick Bromberg is the assistant editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
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