Texas Tech football: Despite loss, Red Raiders still alive in Big 12

Despite falling to 3-2 in Big 12 play this week, the Texas Tech football team’s hopes of a conference title game appearance remain alive.

Saturday afternoon, it appeared that the Texas Tech football team’s 40-31 loss to Iowa State had virtually eliminated the Red Raiders from the Big 12 football race. But by the end of Saturday night’s action, which provided yet another week of Big 12 chaos, there remained a path to the Big 12 title game for Kliff Kingsbury’s team.

Thanks to Oklahoma State’s 38-31 win over Texas Saturday night in Stillwater, every team in the league has at least one loss in conference play. Therefore, Texas Tech sits just one game back of the three teams atop of the Big 12 standings, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Texas.

What’s more, in the next two weeks, Texas Tech can hand both the Sooners and the Longhorns their second conference loss as each come to Lubbock in the next two weeks. If the Red Raiders can find a way to recapture the Jones Stadium mystique that has eluded the program since the end of the Mike Leach era, they will be in prime position to make the program’s first ever trip to the Big 12 title game.

But beating OU and Texas in back-to-back weeks seems like a tall order. Tech has never defeated the Horns and Sooners in the same season, which it will have to do to reach the conference title game.

Adding to that, Tech has lost its last six games to Oklahoma and the last four matchups with Texas in Lubbock. The last time Tech knocked off OU at Jones Stadium was in 2009 in what would be Mike Leach’s final game as head coach and the last time Tech beat UT at home was in the famous 2008 game that was won on a Michael Crabtree touchdown catch with just seconds to play.

However, even if Texas Tech runs the table over the final four games of the season, it will need some help. West Virginia and Iowa State are both ahead of the Red Raiders and both hold head-to-head wins over Tech.

Fortunately, Tech needs to pass only one of those teams to reach the conference title game. West Virginia has the much more difficult remaining schedule having to travel to Texas this week before hosting TCU, traveling to Oklahoma State and hosting OU to end the regular season.

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The Cyclones have what appears to be only one true test left this year, a trip to Austin on November 17th. This week, they travel to Kansas before hosting Baylor next weekend. Following the trip to Austin, ISU concludes the Big 12 portion of its schedule with a home game against Kansas State.

It would appear far more likely that Texas Tech will be able to pass West Virginia than ISU given the two team’s remaining journeys. But none of that will matter if Tech loses another game this year.

It might feel a bit overly-optimistic to envision Texas Tech winning out given the way the Red Raiders struggled on offense against the Cyclones on Saturday. But Tech will not see a defense as stout as ISU’s again this year.

Of the four teams still on the schedule, Texas ranks highest in total defense at 4th in the Big 12. OU ranks 5th while Baylor is 8th and Kansas State is last. Taking it a step further, none of those four teams rank higher than 4th in the league in pass defense.

For the Red Raiders, the road to a Big 12 title game appearance is narrow. But when the calendar turns to November this week, there will remain the possibility that Kliff Kingsbury could guide his team to AT&T Stadium on the first Saturday in December and that is all any Texas Tech fan could have asked for when the season began.