The new round of college football Top 25 polls have been released and despite a convincing win over Kansas, the Texas Tech football team is still on the outside looking in.
The Texas Tech football team will not enter this weekend’s showdown with Iowa State as a ranked team. But it is close.
The Red Raiders just missed out on earning a spot in the AP Top 25 checking as the unranked team earning the most votes (54). Tech finds itself looking up at No. 25 Appalachian State, which is ranked for the first time in school history thanks to a 5-1 record.
Though the Mountaineers are a nice story, their validity as a Top 25 team is certainly open to question. With no wins over a ranked team on their schedule and their only showing against a power 5 team being a 45-38 OT loss at Penn State in week one, their resume is rather thin.
Though the Red Raiders’ most recent win over Kansas was nothing to write home about, it was the program’s third win in four Big 12 games. And the Red Raiders have won road games at TCU and Oklahoma State while also handing the 6-1 Houston Cougars their only loss of the season, three wins more impressive than anything Appalachian State has managed this year.
But that resume is not enough to place Tech in the Top 25 for the second time this year. (Tech was previously ranked No. 25 following its win over OSU but dropped out of the polls the next week following a loss to West Virginia.)
And in the other poll, the Amway Coaches Poll, Tech is even further removed from the rankings. Receiving just 8 votes this week, Tech is behind eleven other unranked teams that received votes, including Appalachian State and Houston.
Superstitious fans might be glad to see Tech remain unranked prior to the Iowa State game. Some believe that entering Ames as a ranked team would put a greater target on the Red Raiders’ back making an already road test even more daunting.
But regardless of rankings, the Cyclones, who will have had two weeks to prepare for the Red Raiders thanks to this week’s bye week, pose one of the tougher challenges remaining on the 2018 schedule. Ranked or not, Texas Tech will have its hands full in a stadium in which it lost 66-10 the last time the Red Raiders visited the Hawkeye State in 2016. Avenging that loss would certainly put the Red Raiders in the Top 25 and serve notice to the rest of the Big 12 that Texas Tech is a serious title game contender.