Athletic Director Kirby Hocutt gave a candid assessment of the state of the Texas Tech football program Wednesday on his weekly radio show where he said that the team’s record is the “only thing that matters.”
Anytime a team has as many close losses as the Texas Tech football team has had this season, it is easy to find ways to justify or excuse the close defeats. Certainly, the Red Raiders have been rather unlucky this season as they have seen all three scholarship quarterbacks hit with various degrees of injury that has impacted their performances.
And many fans are pointing to those injuries as a way to excuse the team’s losing record. But on his weekly radio show, athletic director Kirby Hocutt took a much different stance.
"“That’s football. It’s a violent game” Hocutt said when asked about the impact of the injuries to the quarterbacks. “It’s not an excuse. Those things happen and you have to adjust, you have to deal with them and move forward.”"
The general consensus is that had freshman QB Alan Bowman remained healthy all season, Texas Tech would have notched at least one more win by now. But we will never know if that is true just like we will never know how 2017 would have been different if kicker Clayton Hatfield had not suffered a preseason hip injury.
All Hocutt and the rest of the Red Raider fanbase can deal with is the facts. And those suggest that this team and this coaching staff were not good enough to overcome their injuries.
One of the reason for that is the continued mental mistakes. Hocutt correctly identified the mental aspect of the game as one of this team’s major shortcomings.
"“Unfortunately, we just seem to continue to have lapses in focus,” he said. “Lack of discipline at certain times and those mistakes, those penalties continue to affect us and the success we’re not experiencing right now.”More from Wreck'Em RedTexas Tech football: Red Raider fans need to know about these MountaineersTexas Tech football: Red Raiders land first commit for class of 2025Texas Tech football: Why have the Red Raiders struggled on the road under McGuire?Texas Tech football: Why the Red Raiders can compete for a Big 12 titleTexas Tech football: Plenty of questions remain as conference play arrives"
Discipline and focus have been a troublesome issue for the Texas Tech football program under Kliff Kingsbury. The Red Raiders are 119th out of 130 teams in the country with 73.2 penalty yards accrued per game. In the six years of the Kingsbury era, Tech has finished no better than 99th in the country in that category and it was last overall in 2014.
Penalties are a multi-faceted aspect of the game. The number of flags a team is hit with can be a result of multiple factors but year after year, Kingsbury has been unable to make significant improvement in this area and it has continually haunted his teams.
Speaking of improvement, Hocutt was asked if he had seen any improvement from this year’s team. On the inaugural edition of the Kirby Hocutt Show, which aired the week of the season’s first game, Hocutt said that he needed to see improvement this year though he failed to specify what would qualify as such.
Wednesday, he touched on that subject a bit more. He said that he has seen some improvements, especially in the run defense and in the competitive nature of the team, but his comments seemed to indicate that he had expected to see more.
"Yes, there have been times that we’ve seen progress made this year,” he said. “But when you’re 5-6, it’s hard to hold your hat on a lot of that progress because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is our record.”"
This is as close as we have heard Kirby Hocutt come to saying definitively whether he’s been satisfied with the progress of the program this year. If he truly believes that the overall record is all that matters, then there is no mathematical way for this year’s team to show any improvement in the regular season over last year.
Now the question that remains is whether that lack of improvement is egregious enough in his mind to warrant change. That is what frustrated Red Raider fans want to know and one way or another we are just days from finding out.
"“I appreciate the fact that they care,” Hocutt said when asked what he wanted to say to frustrated fans. “As a Red Raider nation, we all want the same thing. We want to win. You know, recent history, we’ve not been successful in football. Let’s say it as it is. We’ve got some improvement that has to be made that is necessary. We’ll get to the end of the season and sit down and we’ll talk through where we are and what adjustments need to be made; have to be made and we’ll keep moving forward.”"