If there’s one thing Chris Beard has never seemed to lack, it’s motivation.
So when the SEC preseason poll came out and slotted Ole Miss 13th in the 16-team conference, the Rebels coach didn’t roll his eyes, dismiss the poll or pretend he hadn’t seen it.
Instead, he smiled and essentially said, “Thanks for the fuel.”
“Absolutely, it’s motivation,” Beard said Tuesday at SEC Tipoff ’27.
Honestly, it would have been more surprising if he said anything else.
Beard has always struck me as the kind of coach who can find motivation in just about anything. Pick his team near the bottom of the league? Motivation. Pick his team near the top? Motivation. It really doesn’t matter.
As Beard explained, one of the few sayings his program consistently embraces is simple.
“Never lose your chip,” Beard said. “We’re always trying to find motivation. We’ve been on the other side of the coin a few times over the years where maybe somebody picks you to win a league. We use that as fuel as well. So it doesn’t really matter where you are in the rankings. There’s an opportunity to find fuel.”
That’s why a 13th-place prediction probably landed exactly where you think it did: on the bulletin board.
What’s interesting is that Beard didn’t sound angry about the poll. He actually acknowledged that he values opinions from people he respects. But competitors are wired differently. They’re always looking for an edge, even when they have to create one themselves.
“I think every great competitor that I’ve ever studied, known, met with, learned from, it always comes up early on,” Beard said.
The timing is understandable.
Ole Miss is coming off an unusual season under Beard.
It was the first losing season of his Division I coaching career, and for much of the winter, the Rebels never quite found the consistency needed to build an NCAA Tournament résumé.
But Beard’s perspective on last season is a little different than what the final record suggests.
He keeps coming back to how the Rebels finished.
“I was really proud of the way we finished the season playing our best basketball,” Beard said. “We were a real factor in Nashville, in a lot of ways just a basket away from a 40-minute opportunity to make the Big Dance again.”
The Rebels did go on a Cinderella-like run in last season’s SEC Tournament, nearly upsetting Arkansas for a spot in the championship game. In Beard’s mind, the issue wasn’t how his team finished.
It was the ground it had already lost earlier in the year.
“We just left a lot of unfinished business on the floor throughout the year where we didn’t have the résumé to get in,” he said.
That outlook probably helps explain why he’s so comfortable sitting here in October with a low preseason ranking.
Preseason polls aren’t standings. Nobody gets an SEC win because they were picked fourth. Nobody loses one because they were picked 13th.
Beard knows that and the Rebels will get an early chance to prove that prediction wrong.
Ole Miss faces Alabama on Thursday in a rare preseason exhibition between two SEC teams. It’s a matchup Beard says should reveal plenty about where this team stands before the regular season begins.
For now, though, Beard seems perfectly comfortable with where the expectations sit.
After all, if your program is built around never losing its chip, being picked 13th in the SEC is a pretty good place to start.
