If the name Tim Beckman rings some bells in your brain, it’s because he was fired just about a year ago as the head football coach at Illinois for pressuring players to play while injured and not reporting injuries to the proper authorities.
That’s obviously a cardinal sin in football considering how serious the injuries can be, and he has rightly been off the map since. That is, until North Carolina’s head coach Larry Fedora strangely decided to hire as a volunteer assistant. Until Thursday that is, when he resigned.
“When I first learned yesterday that Coach Larry Fedora had invited former Illinois head coach Tim Beckman to serve as a volunteer with the football program, I was surprised and disappointed,” UNC Chancellor Carol Folt said in a statement Thursday. “The decision for Mr. Beckman to withdraw from his volunteer position was the right thing to do, and moving forward I don’t expect this situation to recur.”
When news of the hiring broke, Fedora didn’t really have a good explanation for why Beckman was hired, and said the reason he was fired at Illinois was because he didn’t win enough games. It’s true Beckman’s teams didn’t perform well on the field but that’s missing the point by a fair margin.
Beckman, due to arcane NCAA rules, couldn’t actually coach the players because of limits the NCAA puts on the number of assistant coaches, but he was photographed with the players at practice anyway.
Beckman and Fedora were on the same staff at Oklahoma State under Mike Gundy about a decade ago.
With all of the scandals the UNC athletic department has found itself in in recent years, hiring someone who was fired for something as egregious as Beckman was is incredibly short-sighted and stupid. The situation might have been rectified but his hiring in the first place still makes little sense.