Coach Beard’s nearly tragic backstory has ‘Ted Lasso’ fans bawling

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Ted Lasso Season 3, Episode 11.

Although he’s mostly cut a mysterious figure of fun in Ted Lasso, we have seen some deeper aspects of Coach Beard’s (Brendan Hunt) personality in the sports comedy drama, most notably in the season two episode “Beard After Hours.” However, in this week’s episode “Mom City,” we got a deep glimpse into how he and the good-natured coach built their seemingly indestructible friendship, and it has left multiple fans of the hit Apple TV show in tears.

Hunt was electric in the scene, where he confronted Nate (Nick Mohammed) about returning to Richmond as a coach for the final game of the season. Earlier on in the episode, the idea had been discussed among the staff, but Beard had rejected it out of hand in classicly dramatic Beard fashion, calling Nate a Judas for his previous actions in the show. However, later on in the episode, Ted convinces Beard that people shouldn’t be judged for what they did at their lowest, but what they can be — a classic Lasso move that does the charm. The mysterious coach is moved enough to go and visit Nate, even though it’s the middle of the night.

The pivotal scene begins with him standing menacingly in the rain (a potential callback to an earlier joke in the episode regarding Freddie Krueger, likely as the Ted Lasso writers are known for their love of callbacks), and after a worried Nate asks if Beard is here to “kill him,” the American tells the Brit the story of how he and Ted met.

Their friendship began in college, where they were both backup football players. While Ted went into coaching, Beard fell in with the wrong crowd and ended up in jail for stealing meth (which, as anybody who’s known former upper addicts will tell you, makes his energetic personality make a lot of sense). When he was released, he was all alone, having been abandoned by his family, but he called Ted, an effective stranger at that point, and the kind-natured coach immediately took him in, fed him, and tried to help him get back on his feet.

Beard goes on to say that he repaid Ted by stealing his car, and was only spared being rearrested as Ted turned up at the scene of the crime to convince the officers he’d let Beard take it (a similarity with Les Miserables as Nate points out, not the first musical parallel they’ve made on the show this season). As an emotional coach finishes recounting the story, he tells Nate he’s forgiven him, and hopes that he’ll repay Ted for all the good he’s done for him. And, given how the American prison system seems happy to traumatize and institutionalize a conveyor belt of criminals to sustain itself rather than actually help people out, it shouldn’t be underestimated just how important Ted’s intervention was here.

In a show that’s increasingly been making people laugh as much as it makes them cry, this scene hit particularly hard. A large part of that was Hunt’s extraordinary delivery of his monologue, which ached with enough emotion that you could feel it through the screen. The theme of redemption has always been strong in Ted Lasso, and this appears to be another facet of it shining through in a glorious way. As the series reaches its conclusion, we’re only left wondering: how can they top this in the finale?