Texas Tech football picks up commitment from 3-star RB Tahj Brooks

Saturday, Tahj Brooks, a 3-star running back from Manor, TX verbally committed to the Texas Tech football program.

For the second time this week, the Texas Tech football program has added to its 2020 recruiting class.  Saturday, 3-star RB Tahj Brooks announced via Twitter his intent to join the Red Raiders just two days after Clinton Anokwuru, a 3-star DE also committed to Matt Wells’ staff.

Brooks is a powerfully-built 5’9″, 212-pound running back who is rated the No. 35 running back in the nation and the No. 75 player in Texas by 247Sports.com.  He chose Tech over offers from schools such as Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Iowa State, Kansas State, Minnesota, Missouri, TCU, Utah and Vanderbilt among others.

Having already visited Vanderbilt, Duke and Georgia Tech this spring, Brooks was in Lubbock last week for an official visit.  This came just over a month after he decomitted from Tulsa, to which he had been committed since August.

In three years of high school ball thus far, Brooks has amassed 2,610 yards and 34 touchdowns on the ground and 416 receiving yards and five touchdowns on 38 receptions.   He has been a 1,000-yard rusher in each of the past two seasons, topping the 1,200-yard mark as a junior.

Running back is a position that Wells has to reinforce in the class of 2020.  The program lost seniors Tre King and Demarcus Felton to graduation and sophomore Da’Leon Ward to the transfer portal this offseason but did not add a running back in the 2019 signing class. As a result, Tech added grad transfer Armand Shyne from Utah but he will be gone after this season making the position a priority in the current recruiting cycle.

The other two running backs on the roster expected to see significant time this year, sophomore Ta’Zhawn Henry and redshirt freshman SaRodorick Thompson, are far from proven commodities.  Henry was tied with Ward as Tech’s most productive running back last year but he ran for just 341 yards.  Meanwhile, Thompson played in only four games putting up 105 yards.

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The Red Raiders have not had a 1,000-yard rusher since DeAndre Washington ran for 1,492 in 2015.  It was his second-consecutive 1,000-yard season.  Since then, the most a Red Raider running back has run for was the 797 yards Justin Stockton put up in 2017.

But new offensive coordinator David Yost had an offense that produced a 1,000-yard and a 900-yard rusher last year at Utah State.  He ran the ball over 50% of the time in 2018 and will place a greater emphasis on the ground game than we have seen from a Red Raider play-caller in quite some time.

That should appeal to a player like Brooks who has averaged 145 carries per season in the last two years.  And his addition is a huge boost to a Red Raider recruiting class that still lags behind the rest of the conference.

Currently, Tech still has the lowest-ranked 2020 class in the Big 12 according to 247Sports.  With only five players committed, Tech has three fewer commits than the school with the next-smallest class, Iowa State.

That could change in the next several days because dozens of recruits are currently on campus for official visits.  Hopefully, Brooks’ is just the first of many dominoes to fall for Matt Wells as he tries to put together a solid class in his first full recruiting cycle as Red Raider head coach.