Texas Tech football: Best debut seasons by a Red Raider head coach
As we prepare for the debut season of new Texas Tech football head coach Matt Wells, let’s take a look at the best first seasons from other men that have led the Red Raiders into battle.
The 2019 season is starting to appear on the horizon and with each passing day, we begin to ponder more and more what the debut of new Texas Tech football head coach Matt Wells will bring. Certainly, this is a critical time for the program as Red Raider football finds itself in the unusual position of trying to fight for attention and relevance in West Texas where basketball and baseball have risen to the top of the athletic department’s hierarchy (at least in terms of fan interest and overall success).
Wells arrives with a career head coaching record of 44-34 in six seasons, all with his alma mater Utah State. Overall, he spent eight seasons coaching in Logan, Utah where he was part of the resurrection of a USU football program that has historically been one of the most downtrodden in the country.
Wells led the Aggies to five bowl games going 2-2 in games he coached. (His 2018 team won the New Mexico Bowl over North Texas without Wells on the sidelines as he had already accepted the job with Texas Tech.) But there are two glaring flaws on his Utah State resume.
First, Wells had three-straight losing seasons from 2015-17. It must be noted though that in 2015 and 2017, the Aggies went 6-6 in the regular season before losing their bowl games. In between those seasons was a disastrous 3-9 2016 that saw USU go just 1-7 in conference play.
The other knock on Wells’ career is that he is yet to win a conference title. In 2013, his first season as head coach in Logan, Wells guided the Aggies to the Mountain West title game where they lost to Fresno State 24-17, which was the only time his team reached the conference title game.
Despite that loss, Wells debut season as a head coach was impressive. Going 9-5, USU won the Poinsetta Bowl over No. 24 Northern Illinois, the third straight winning year for a program that had 12-straight losing seasons from 1998-2010.
Making that season even more impressive is the fact that three of the Aggies’ losses came to Utah, Southern Cal and BYU. Wells saw his team lose at Utah 30-26 and at USC 17-14 before falling at home to BYU 31-14. The other two losses that year were to Boise St. at home and a Fresno team that went 11-2 on the season.
A 9-5 record such as Wells had in his first season at Utah State is better than the debut records of all but one Texas Tech head coach; Dell Morgan went 9-2 in 1941. Overall, the 15 coaches in Red Raider history have gone a combined 88-73-7 in their first seasons on the job. That’s an average of 5.8 wins and 4.8 losses.
Certainly, Red Raider fans expect more this year from Matt Wells than that. In fact, nothing less than a bowl game appearance would be considered a successful season.
Should he accomplish that, Wells would be just the seventh Red Raider head coach to reach postseason play in year-one. But given that there are more bowl games now than ever before, it is not too much to ask wells to find a way to lead Tech to a 13th game in 2019.
Let’s take a look at some of the other debut seasons of Texas Tech head coaches to see what they were able to accomplish. Doing so might help us to set the first-year bar for the 16th head coach in program history.