It May Be Time To Accept That Tim Beckman Will Be Back

If you're still holding out hope that Tim Beckman is going to be fired it's probably time to acquiesce and move on with your life. At this point the odds point heavily in favor of Tim Beckman returning for a second season.

Typically there is a 24-72 hour window from the end of the regular season that schools use to fire head coaches. Most of those firings come at the 24-hour period, as you saw on Sunday when coach after coach was shown the door across the country. Obviously, that hasn't happened with Tim Beckman.

Though that hasn't stopped the rumors. Yesterday on The Score in Chicago, Dan Bernstein reported that Mike Thomas has a replacement in mind, but that unless he could get this replacement to agree to take the job, nothing was going to happen. Bernstein also said that it was a replacement that would please the school's trustees.

Which, if true, tells you that it's not Bobby Petrino.

Of course Bernstein saying all this caused the kind of firestorm you'd expect on message boards. When the news broke yesterday that Northern Illinois' Dave Doeren was no longer in the running at Purdue, fans did that kind of silly math -- you know, the kind of math that doesn't involve numbers or actual evidence of anything tangible -- where "Dave Doeren being out of running at Purdue + Radio Rumor = DAVE DOEREN TO ILLINOIS."

Which doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

Fans were upset with Thomas last year for hiring a guy that had a short track record of success in the MAC, so now he's going to fire that guy after only one year and replace him with a guy that has a short track record of success in the MAC? That doesn't make any sense.

Also, if Thomas really was thinking about replacing Beckman if he gets the right replacement, would he be dumb enough to let anybody aside from himself and that candidate know about it? This isn't something you can risk going public because if the deal falls through you have a head coach that knows you were trying to replace him running your program next season.

That will work really well both on the field and in recruiting.

No, odds are what's happening here is that Dan Bernstein and others reporting similar things are talking to people who have positions of power at the school, but not nearly as much power as they think. They're probably just trustees or boosters who are not happy with the Beckman hire -- and there are plenty of those to find! -- and are doing a bit of wishful thinking through the media. Hoping that if they say it and the media reports it, maybe it will come true.

Now, obviously, I could be wrong here. In fact, I may be way off in my theory. It wouldn't be the first time. Part of the problem is that while it may be Tuesday and Tim Beckman hasn't been fired, it's also Tuesday and in spite of all these rumors Mike Thomas hasn't come out and said that Tim Beckman will be back either.

Which leaves the door open to these rumors.

That being said, I'm still confident that my theory is closer to reality than the alternative. Tim Beckman is going to be back in 2013 and we'll all just have to grit our teeth and bear it.