Texas Tech football: How 10 men contributed to decline of Red Raider football

Kliff Kingsbury

On the surface, it is tough to fault Kliff Kingsbury for his lack of success as Texas Tech head coach.  Unlike his predecessor, he was fully invested in making Red Raider football elite and he poured everything he had into the task.

But the results never came.  Kingsbury managed to go just 35-40 in six seasons.  His .466 winning percentage is the third-worst of the 15 full-time head coaches in program history.

So if we can agree that Kingsbury wasn’t ready for the job, where was he at fault?  The answer lies below the surface of what we saw.

Building a college football program, especially at a non-blue-blood program like Texas Tech, requires a coach to take off his headset and become a public figure.  In West Texas, there still remains an intrinsic desire for interpersonal relationships.  It is a place where the handshake is still as important as the signature.

But Kingsbury took on an odd persona in Lubbock.  Rather than becoming the face of the program like Spike Dykes or Mike Leach (who both were able to win over the community in vastly different ways and with personalities that were virtually polar opposites), Kingsbury became the Hub City’s Phantom of the Opera, appearing in public so rarely that sightings of him became the High Plains version of seeing Bigfoot.

For all his virtues, Kingsbury’s greatest flaw may have been his stubbornness.  Refusing to change from his reclusive ways, he failed to endear himself to big-money boosters and a fan base that absolutely adored him.

The naturally charming head coach missed out on tremendous opportunities to build his program in key areas off the field such as facilities and fan support at a time when the program needed an injection of goodwill from its most public and beloved alum.

What’s more, his rather hermetic tendencies did not play well on the recruiting trail either.  Kingsbury had all the style and panache needed to be a top recruiter but he lacked the interpersonal skills necessary to execute such a task, especially when dealing with high school coaches and those in the prep football game.

He was also horrible at hiring assistant coaches.  Too often, he hired assistants he was friends with or who were former teammates, only shifting course to bring in more experienced coaches at the end of his tenure when the writing was already on the wall.

There had to have been some people in the athletic department, likely Hocutt himself, giving Kingsbury advice on how to be a better program builder and not just an offensive mastermind.  But calling plays seemed to be his only obsession as he only paid attention to defense when his job was in jeopardy.

Because he was too stuck in his ways, too unwilling to leave his comfort zone, too unable to adapt (as we would expect a young coach with a brilliant mind to do) he did not become the head coach that he could have been.

Kliff Kingsbury was successful in reuniting a fractured fan base and that fact should not be dismissed.  But that was more because of who he was and not what he did.  His actions as head coach, though earnest in intent, proved to be misguided and ultimately resulted in the worst stretch of Texas Tech football since the early 1990’s leaving an even bigger mess for Matt Wells to mop up.