Why Texas Tech football hasn’t seen recruiting bump under Matt Wells
Texas Tech has not been nationally relevant in a decade
It is hard to believe but when Michael Crabtree and Graham Harrell knocked off Texas in 2008, the kids in the recruiting class of 2020 were six or seven years old. That means that the last time Texas Tech was relevant nationally, the players Tech is trying to recruit this year were far more interested in Sponge Bob than Raider Red. What’s wore, over the past decade, Sponge Bob has likely remained far more relevant in their lives.
Tech has seen a number of its rivals ascend up the ranks of the Big 12 in the past decade while the Red Raiders have been on a downward trajectory. Consider that in the past decade, Oklahoma, Texas, TCU, Oklahoma State, Baylor and Kansas State have all had at least one top-15 finish while the Red Raiders have failed to have even a single top-25 season and it is easy to see why Texas Tech football is not a premier program in the minds of many of today’s high school athletes.
Take Baylor for example. Though they were rocked by the Title IX scandal that brought down Art Briles, they were still far more top of mind for a generation of high school players that had grown up during a time when Baylor finished in the top-15 four times in five years and produced a Heisman Trophy winner in Robert Griffin III than the Red Raiders.
What we have learned from the Baylor rebuild under Matt Rhule is that though controversy and scandal matter (and rightly so) to a huge swath of society, it does not seem to outweigh the benefits of a run of success in the minds of teenage recruits who likely do not take the time to consume the news of the day and may be rather unconcerned with any controversies or scandals. Rather, they have been watching Baylor play big-time games in high-profile television windows while wearing new age uniforms and that has kept the program relevant in their minds.
We often seen huge recruiting bumps with new coaches at schools that have recently been successful like Baylor or at blue-blood programs like Texas, Michigan (which saw a huge jump in recruiting in 2016 under Jim Harbaugh) or Miami (which currently has the No. 5 recruiting class in the first year of the Manny Diaz era). But for a team that has been as far off the national radar as Texas Tech has been, it is more difficult to get that kind of instantaneous bump in recruiting after being a college football afterthought since the first year of the Obama Administration.