Texas Tech basketball: 5 signs you are not over National Title Game loss
Though the Texas Tech basketball team’s loss in the National Title game is now a month in the past, some Red Raiders are still in mourning. Here are five signs that might indicate you are not over Tech’s gutting loss to Virginia.
It’s been a month since the Texas Tech basketball team came within twelve seconds and one defensive stop from claiming the national title. But we all know how those final seconds and the sequent overtime period played out leaving us to mournfully ponder what might have been.
And in the weeks since, Texas Tech fans have taken two divergent paths when coping with the biggest disappointment in the history of our sports fandom. And where one falls on that spectrum likely depends on two factors…your inherent personality traits and how invested you have been in the struggles of Red Raider athletics.
The first group of fans are those who have taken solace in the fact that the Red Raiders had the most improbable season in the history of Tech sports. They point to the fact that Tech was picked to finish seventh in the Big 12 but still captured a share of the Big 12 regular season title and reached the National Title Game even after losing six of the top eight scorers from the 2018 Elite 8 team.
This is certainly the more healthy of the two camps to be in. These optimists have been able to appreciate what Chris Beard and his players accomplished while enjoying the ride for with it was; a magical run that we may never get to experience again.
But the other camp, of which I must admit I am a member, still can’t believe that the Red Raiders let a potential once-in-a-lifetime opportunity slip away. The history of college basketball is littered with teams like Utah, Seaton Hall, Georgia Tech and Butler (twice) which all reached the title game only to come up short and eventually fade back into relative obscurity before getting back to the Final Four.
Unfortunately, Tech’s inability to come up with that one final program-altering win has cast a pall over over what was in all honestly, a special tournament run and a defining period in Tech athletics. It is an unhealthy way to view the world but for those of us who have lived-and-died with the ups and downs of Texas Tech athletics (and let’s be honest, there have been far more downs), seeing our dream of a national title in one of the two main NCAA sports fall right through our fingertips has proven more difficult that we may have imagined.
Had Tech lost the UVA by 20 points and proven to be clearly inferior, it would have been easier to stomach this defeat as we did last year’s loss to Villanova, which was clearly the best team in the nation by a rather wide margin. But If Tech and Virginia would have played ten times, each likely would have won five games making the fact that Tech came up short to a team that it could have beaten exponentially more agonizing.
As such, there remains a huge swath of the Texas Tech fan base that is still trying to recover from the Minneapolis malaise that we just haven’t been able to shake over the past month. Here are five signs that you may not be over the Red Raiders’ loss in the National Title Game.