Texas Tech football has a chance for rare feat against Longhorns

This week, the Texas Tech Red Raiders have an opportunity to accomplish something that has been rare in their long series with the Texas longhorns; back-to-back wins.

Saturday, the Texas Tech Red Raiders and the Texas Longhorns will meet for the 58th time. Unfortunately for Texas Tech fans, the series has been decidedly slanted towards the Longhorns who hold a 50-17 edge.

But following last year’s 27-24 win in Austin, Kliff Kingsbury’s team has an opportunity to do accomplish one of the rarest feats in Texas Tech football history, knock off the Longhorns in back-to-back seasons. In all, the Red Raiders have won consecutive games against the Red Raiders only four times and never has Tech managed three-straight.

This series began in 1928 with a 12-0 Longhorn win in Austin. Tech would drop the first seven games in the series before finally breaking through in 1955 with a 20-14 road victory in what was the first night game played at Memorial Stadium.

Texas would rattle off eight-straight more wins before Tech took back-to-back games in 1967-68. In 1967, an unranked Red Raider team handed No. 8 Texas its second-straight loss to open the season. The next year, Tech would again score an upset of a top-10 UT team beating the No. 6 Longhorns 31-22 in Lubbock.

It would be two decades until the Red Raiders were able to notch back-to-back wins against UT again. In 1988, Tech trailed 32-15 late in the third quarter but Billy Joe Tolliver hit Eddy Anderson for a 46-yard touchdown and Travis Price for a two-point conversion to give the Red Raiders a huge win 33-32. The game was significant as it was the first visit from Texas head coach David McWilliams who left Texas Tech after just one season to take the same job at Texas in 1987.

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One year later, Tech would win in Austin for the first time since 1967 thanks to touchdowns from James Gray, Bart Talkington and Anthony Manyweather. Following the 24-7 win, hundreds of fans showed up at the Lubbock airport to greet the team giving us the classic video of a smiling Spike Dykes working his way through the adoring mob.

Combined with a win in 1986, these two victories gave Tech three in four seasons in what has been its most successful run against UT thus far. But if there was one thing Spike Dykes was good at, it was beating the Longhorns.

In 1993 and 1994 Tech scored two wins against UT by a combined score of 64-31. In 1993, Red Raider running back Bam Morris led the way with two touchdown runs in a 31-22 win in Austin. The next year, Zebbie Lethridge threw three touchdown passes as Tech won easily 33-9.

The final winning streak against UT came at the end of the decade. In 1997, both teams featured running backs named Ricky Williams. The Texas Tech version ran for 138 yards on 25 carries leading the Red Raiders to a 24-10 road win. The next season, both Ricky Williams had big games going for over 140 yards but it was Texas Tech QB Rob Peters that had the game winning two-yard TD run in the fourth quarter for a 42-35 win.

It would be until 2002 before Tech would beat UT again thanks to heroics by Kliff Kingsbury and Wes Welker in a 42-38 win in Kingsbury’s final game in Lubbock as a player. Of course, we all remember the 2008 39-33 win over the No. 1 Longhorns a decade ago. Interestingly enough, it was the third decade in a row that Tech had knocked off UT in a year ending with the number 8.

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Hopefully, that trend continues this year. If it does, Tech will not only win its second-straight game against its most hated foe, it will give Kingsbury three wins over Texas six seasons and it will be the most significant home win of his tenure as head coach.

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