I would liken this to the midpoint of a criminal investigation. It’s not solved yet so there’s a lot that you don’t know but there’s also a lot that you do know and there are logical conclusions that can be made based on what you do know.There are plenty of times that a coach or leader in business gets fired because they have "lost the locker room" or in the case of the business leader, they have lost their staff who no longer truly follows them.
Again, we also do not know what other conversations or actions were taken outside of these 2 events of one sign being posted and another replacing it.
I'm not sure if your concern about denying a diversity of thought is valid and my sense is that it is not the thought or believe of anyone that was the reason he was fired but instead a perceived lack of leadership and behavior that was the deeper cause.
It isn’t likely that Coach Kurt Beathard’s reassignment in 2020 had much of anything to do with performance on the field. Maybe AD Lyons or Coach Spack will claim that it was football field related to divert attention away from divisive issues but that wouldn’t pass the sniff test. The Redbirds were coming off a 10-5 season in 2019. That team was 8-3 with QB Brady Davis as the starter and Davis was returning for the 2020 season.
The change in Beathard’s status does correspond to the flap over the poster on his door. Could that have been the reason for his reassignment? YES. How do I know that? Because ISU athletes also called for the resignation of another member of the Athletic Dept. for a nearly identical reason. You may recall that we had some athletes that wanted Larry Lyons to resign. Why? Lyons had committed the offense of saying “All Redbird Lives Matter.” That was it. People keep saying we don’t know the whole story but clearly if they had better reasons for him to resign, they wouldn’t have offered just that one. And if Larry Lyons had not issued an apology, they may have been able to force his removal. It’s the athletes that were driving this thing and they weren’t silent. We do know what they were thinking. Larry Lyons and Coach Spack were just ones to carry out their wishes when Coach Beathard was reassigned. AD Lyons didn’t want to go down and Coach Spack didn’t want to go down. Coach Kurt Beathard had the audacity to express his grief on a poster, so he was the one that took the hit. Maybe there were other conversations before Coach Beathard put his poster up. He may have expressed the view that he did not support BLM. So what. The players that supported BLM got to express their views. And yes, Coach Beathard may have lost support of some of the players in the locker room as you suggest, but he didn’t lose it for football related reasons. Beathard and Lyons lost support for expressing personal views. And Beathard didn’t just lose support, he lost his job. He was denied diversity of thought.
This was a teaching moment in college athletics that went horribly wrong. The athletes could have been asked to practice tolerance along with Kurt Beathard. Beathard didn’t agree with their point of view but he was still willing to work with them. They were not willing to work with him. If Beathard had not been reassigned some athletes would have staged a boycott and some would have left. That’s their choice. If they weren’t willing to learn tolerance then maybe it is best that they leave and we lost some transfers anyway. But they weren’t asked to display tolerance. The university caved to demands and intolerance was supported. And now everyone is a loser including the Illinois State Football team which has gone 5-10 since Beathard left. That’s a complete turnaround, from 10-5 to 5-10. It sure is.