Texas Tech football: Recent plays that were gut-punches to Red Raider fans

Though we did not know it at the time, these heartbreaking plays proved to be critical in determining the fate of the Texas Tech football program.

So often, college football games come down down to a single play, the outcome of which often has long-lasting ramifications for the teams involved, especially the one on the short end of the final score.  Far too often during the Kliff Kingsbury era, those players did not seem to favor the Red Raiders and collectively, they changed the fate of the Texas Tech football program.

When Kliff Kingsbury was fired last fall, most of us pointed to the times his team fell flat in embarrassing losses as the worst moments in his tenure.  Certainly, there were plenty to choose from.

Multiple times during the Kingsbury run as head coach, Tech dropped a game by 30 points or more.  Of course, the most humiliating was the 82-27 loss to TCU in Ft. Worth back in 2014 as Tech allowed 785 total yards.

But that was not the biggest blowout of the last six seasons.  Rather, 2016’s 66-10 loss at Iowa State turned out to top the margin in the TCU debacle by a point.  In that game, Pat Mahomes managed to throw for just 219 yards in what was the worst game of his Red Raider career.

In 2014, Tech fell at Kansas State 45-13.  Davis Webb had four interceptions and threw for only 236 yards while Tech ran for a mere 46 yards in one of the worst offensive showings of the “Air Raid” era.

But more often, Kingsbury’s teams were unable to pull out critical close games.  Of the 40 losses in his time as head coach, 15 were by eight points or less.  Had Tech managed to simply have a winning record in such games, Kingsbury would have had a 43-32 career mark and would certainly still be Texas Tech head coach.

By contrast, since 2013 Tech has won just eight games decided by one score.  So it is obviously that the Red Raiders have struggled to win close games in recent years.

Compare the Kingsbury years to the final six years of the Mike Leach era, when Red Raider football made its assent to the upper echelon of the college football world.  From 2004-09, Tech went 12-9 in one-possession games, a winning percentage of 57.1% which is 22.8% better than Kingsbury did in such games.

So let’s take a look back at five plays that doomed the Red Raiders in one-score games.  As we do, we will see how thin the margin between success and failure can be in the Big 12 and just how close Kliff Kingsbury came to being viewed as a successful collegiate head coach.