20 Signs You’re A Texas Tech Red Raider: Part 1

Jul 22, 2013; Dallas, TX, USA; Texas Tech Red Raiders head coach Kliff Kingsbury speaks to the media during the Big 12 media days at the Omni Dallas Hotel. Mandatory Credit: Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports2.

2. You are continually complaining about the lack of in-state media coverage of the Red Raiders.

To be fair, every college football fan base feels slighted by the media’s coverage of their team. But Texas Tech Red Raider fans are especially sensitive in this area because, despite the fact that the Tech alumni base in the Dallas / Ft. Worth Metroplex is the largest Tech fan base outside of Lubbock, and hundreds of thousands of Red Raiders live in Houston and San Antonio, it seems that Tech is an afterthought to most major Texas media outlets.

Granted, the program’s recent lack of success has given the media little to cover. But Tech is a major university of over 30,000 students in a power five conference which is lucky to get a ten-second mention on a Dallas sportscast or 400-word column at the bottom of the final page in the Houston Chronicle’s sports section.

Because Tech is treated as an afterthought, every time you turn on the television or read the paper to see coverage of Texas head coach Charlie Strong dramatically walking to his car or TCU’s Gary Patterson tying his shoes before giving an interview while his face changes colors like a mood ring, you become upset that as far as the media is concerned, Texas Tech doesn’t exist.

You acknowledge that the hour-long plane trip to Lubbock is perilous and taxing on the Dallas or Houston media, but it is true that many people have made the trip to the frontier outpost known as Lubbock and survived to tell about it. Perhaps the media could, too, and I promise it’s not quite as bad as traveling the Oregon Trail.

Thus, you must rely on that bastion of cutting-edge journalism named The Lubbock Avalanche Journal for your Red Raider news. And on those rare occasions, the major Texas or national media conglomerates find it worth descending upon Lubbock is when a coach throws a salad at the school president, locks a player in a utility closet, slaps the headset off of a graduate assistant during the middle of a game, or an opposing player takes a swing at one of your fans, you can’t help but feel like the media doesn’t care about Texas Tech.

And you are probably right.