Ole Miss head men’s basketball coach has been duly awarded for a stellar second season as the Rebels’ frontman.
Beard was announced on Monday as the recipient of the 2025 Jim Phelan National Coach of the Year award after leading Ole Miss to the program’s second-ever Sweet 16 appearance, and first in nearly a quarter of a century.
After amassing a 20-12 record and missing the NCAA Tournament in his debut season in Oxford, Beard built on a strong foundation he had laid and added talented transfers to a veteran-heavy roster built to make a run in March. Longtime Ole Miss players Matthew Murrell and Jaemyn Brakefield joined forces with newcomers Sean Pedulla (Virginia Tech), Malik Dia (Belmont), and Dre Davis (Seton Hall), among others.
The cast led a strong nonconference effort and went into SEC play with a chip on its shoulder. Ole Miss posted its first winning record versus conference opponents in six years, which featured victories over top-five Alabama and Tennessee. This feat marked the first time Ole Miss had defeated two opponents ranked No. 5 or better in a season.
The Rebels enjoyed a first-round breather in the SEC Tournament as a No. 8 seed and later earned a thrilling 83-80 victory over Arkansas courtesy of late-game heroics by Pedulla. The conference tournament run ended with a five-point loss to Auburn — a team currently in the Final Four.
Ole Miss entered March Madness as a No. 6 seed, taking down North Carolina and Iowa State before falling just short in a 73-70 heartbreaker versus No. 2 seed Michigan State in Atlanta. Overall, the Rebels won 24 games in the successful season, tying the third-most wins in program history while matching the best-ever end result of a basketball campaign in Oxford.
Coach Beard has been named the 2025 Jim Phelan National Coach of the Year!#HottyToddy x #Culture pic.twitter.com/Q7vloQ9ixI
— Ole Miss Men’s Basketball (@OleMissMBB) March 31, 2025
The Jim Phelan Award is named in honor of the head coach who is best known for his 49-year career at Mount Saint Mary’s, where he accumulated over 800 wins and was inducted into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2008. Introduced in 2003, previous winners of the award include Tubby Smith, Tony Bennett, John Calipari, Bob Huggins, and current Ole Miss assistant Mark Adams.
Though the Rebels bid farewell to the 2024-25 season with a puncher’s chance to make it to the Elite Eight for the first time ever, the work is far from over. The latest transfer portal period opened up last week, and Beard has already been in contact with some of the top prospects looking for a new collegiate home. Come November, Ole Miss is expected to be a force again in college basketball.
