Thursday night, the Texas Tech football team will be in Ft. Worth to take on TCU in a game that will give the victor a one-game edge in the series since the Frogs joined the Big 12.
For almost as long as Texas Tech has been playing football, the TCU Horned Frogs have been one of the Red Raiders’ chief in-state rivals. The schools first met in 1926, in just the second season that Texas Tech fielded a football team.
Overall, the teams have met 60 times with Tech holding a 31-26-3 advantage. But since TCU joined the Big 12 in 2012, the teams have split six regular season meetings with the road team taking the last three contests.
After the Frogs’ five-game winning streak to being the series, Tech has had a decided advantage. On two separate occasions (1973-1978 and 1985-1990) the Red Raiders have run off six wins in a row.
On the other hand, TCU has only once had a streak of at least three wins in-a-row (1958-60) during that time. And as you might expect with two heated rivals, there have been some classic matchups through the years.
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One of the most shocking wins in the series came in 1936 when a Texas Tech team that would go just 5-4-1 on the season would shut out a TCU team quarterbacked by the legendary Sammy Baugh, 7-0 in Lubbock. That TCU team was the defending national champion and would go 9-2-2 on the season en route to a Cotton Bowl victory but it’s first ever loss to the Red Raiders would be a stain on their stellar season.
In 1985, the Red Raiders ended a series of three-consecutive ties in Lubbock with its most lopsided win in the series. Freshman QB Billy Joe Tolliver led Tech to a 63-7 drubbing of the Frogs in Lubbock to begin a series of six-straight wins.
TCU pulled off their own big upset in 1994 when they beat the Red Raiders 24-17 in Ft. Worth. The win denied Texas Tech an outright Southwest Conference title, something that the Horned Frogs certainly took delight in.
Ten years later, Tech would fall behind 21-0 at home before Sonny Cumbie (the current TCU offensive coordinator) would lead the Red Raiders on a 70-7 run for a 70-35 win.
The Frogs would return the favor in the next meeting two years later playing punishing defense as they would hold Mike Leach and Texas Tech without a touchdown in a 12-3 win in Ft. Worth. That game was arguably the worst in the career of Texas Tech quarterback Graham Harrell as the sophomore was nearly beaten to a pulp by the relentless TCU pass rush.
Tech would not see the Frogs again until TCU joined the Big 12 in 2012. That year, Tech won a 56-53 shootout in Ft. Worth. The next season, Tech knocked off No. 24 TCU at home on a Thursday night, 20-10 in Kliff Kingsbury’s first Big 12 game as head coach.
But the next year, TCU humiliated Tech 82-27 at home in a game that signaled the end of the honeymoon period for Kingsbury. Tech would drop a 55-52 game the next season when the Frogs scored a last-minute touchdown on a tipped pass to take the lead for good.
In 2016, Tech pulled out a tough 27-24 double-OT win at TCU thanks to the heroics of sophomore QB Pat Mahomes. But last year, the Frogs turned in another dominating defensive performance in a 27-3 win that was the first time Tech had been held to three points or fewer in the “Air Raid” era.
This has been a highly contentious series that has featured a lot of bad blood between the two schools. But since 1973, Tech leads the series 20-8-3 with 11 of those wins coming in Ft. Worth. Here’s hoping for No. 12 tomorrow night.