Texas Tech football: New staff looking outside Texas for recruits

Though the Matt Wells era of Texas Tech football is still in its infancy, one apparent characteristic of the new coaching staff’s recruiting philosophy is a heavy focus on players outside of Texas.

There is no doubt that the state of Texas is the most fertile high school football recruiting area in the nation. And for years, Texas Tech football has been built almost completely off of home grown talent. But new head coach Matt Wells and his staff have not been shy about targeting players from all parts of the nation in an attempt to elevate the Red Raiders’ fortunes on the recruiting trail.

For instance, of the ten players in the 2019 class to receive an offer from the new staff, all but one are out-of-state targets. It began immediately when California JUCO tight end Travis Koontz was the first player to receive an offer from Wells after the coaching change. He has already signed his letter of intent and will feature heavily into the offensive game plan this fall.

Tech has also landed a commitment from Austin McNamara, the top kicker in Arizona. In addition, offers have gone out to three players from Oklahoma as well as prospects in Illinois, Georgia, Kansas and Florida.

This is likely a product of the fact that Wells has assembled a staff with no coaches that were plying their craft in Texas last year. In addition to the eight assistants that came with Wells from Utah State, he has hired coaches from Oklahoma and Memphis and a chief of staff from Washington State meaning that the connections the new Red Raider staff already have in place should span most of the country.

But it does not appear that Tech is going to just stay in-between the Red River and the Rio Grande in the 2020 cycle either. Already, 14 players from outside of Texas have received offers from the Red Raiders.

That includes multiple players from Florida as well as targets from South Carolina, Arizona, California, Georgia, Oklahoma, Louisianan, New Jersey, Nevada and the state of Washington. In all, over 20% of the offers handed out to 2020 targets thus far have gone outside of the state.

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By contrast, only 12.5% of the current roster are non-Texans. But it remains to be seen if the new coaching staff will have better luck than previous regimes when venturing outside of the Lone Star State.

One of the biggest reasons that Texas Tech has been primarily built around Texas players is that the program has been unable to create much of a national footprint in the sport. Schools that win national titles are able to pluck players from around the nation with ease because the notoriety of their accomplishments do a huge amount of recruiting for them before they ever set foot in a recruit’s living room.

But Tech has always been more of a regional program that has built its success through grass-roots efforts. Texas Tech has had to recruit by building strong individual relationships to help compensate for its relative lack of success on a national level. That is far easier to do with kids in Texas than it is to do with kids in far off locales.

What’s more, high school football prospects are far more likely to stay close to home than basketball prospects. It has become commonplace for top high school hoops players to leave home and go across the country to prestigious prep academies in search of a scholarship. Additionally, the national AAU basketball circuit takes players all over the nation making it seem much less intimidating for players to entertain the idea of going to college far from home.

But Tech has often found it difficult to lure football prospects from within Texas to Lubbock because many believe it is too far away from their families in Houston or Dallas. So that same sentiment often applies to players from other states.

That’s not to say that Tech has not had its successes from out-of-state. The most obvious that comes to mind is Wes Welker who was the Oklahoma high school player of the year when he came to Lubbock but he is one of just a few non-Texans in the Air Raid era to become a star at Texas Tech.

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Most of the players from other ports of call that have made an impact as Red Raiders have first gone the JUCO route (Dwayne Slay, Robert Johnson, Will Smith) but Wells and his staff seem to be willing to try their hand with a significant number of far away prospects. It seems like the new Red Raider head coach is hoping that recruits not born in the great state do what the famous bumper sticker says and get here as fast as they can.

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