Texas Tech football: DC Keith Patterson has had very Tech-like defenses

One of the keys to the 2019 Texas Tech football season will be the defense of new DC Keith Patterson so let’s take a closer look at what his defenses have accomplished in past seasons.

For the past two decades, the Texas Tech football program has been one of the most defensively inept programs of any in a Power 5 conference.  There’s no simple answer as to why.  After all, the Spike Dykes teams of the 1980-90s showed that defense can be played at a high level in Lubbock.

To begin with, we must allow for the fact that recruiting top defensive talent to Texas Tech has been far more difficult in the “Air Raid” era than recruiting elite offensive talent.   When trying to find players to play in the spread offense, former head coach Mike Leach had an advantage in that his scheme allowed for him to get the most out of over-looked players such as Wes Welker, Carlos Francis, and Eric Morris.

None of those players, or a host of others to play for Leach, would have been a fit in a traditional scheme but were perfectly suited for the spread attack.  What’s more, Tech implemented the spread at a time when the passing game revolution had started to take over the high school ranks in Texas leading to a surplus of offensive skill-position talent on the recruiting trail.

But when trying to stock the defensive side of the ball with elite talent, Tech had to go head-to-head with every other school in the nation without the advantage of a unique scheme to recruit to.  In other words, in the early days of the spread revolution, it was easier for Tech to bring in overlooked slot receivers than it was to land 4-star linebackers and defensive ends that were being recruited by every program in the Big 12.

Another reason for Tech’s struggles on defense has been an inexplicable laissez-faire attitude towards that side of the ball by two of the three head coaches in the Air Raid era.  Neither Mike Leach nor Kliff Kingsbury prioritized the defense as both offensively-obsessed men seemed to derive their pride only by scoring as many points as possible.

Both Leach and Kingsbury were content to leave the defense up to their assistants to the point that seeing either in a defensive meeting was as rare at times as seeing Halley’s Comet in the night sky.  Kingsbury reportedly only began to give attention to the other side of the ball in 2017 when he was in danger of losing his job after five years of defensive struggles.

"When defensive lineman Taylor Nunez told The Ringer’s Sam Fortier “I feel a big difference on [the defense’s] sideline, knowing that my head coach is for the whole team,” prior to Kingsbury’s second-to-last season at Tech, it should have given everyone an idea of how little the program’s head coach prioritized his defense.  That’s no way to build a well-rounded program."

Still, another reason for the Red Raiders’ defensive woes has been the revolving door that has been the defensive coordinator position.  Since Leach took over, nine men have been tasked with coordinating Tech’s defense with the average stint for each being just 2.1 years.  That type of turnover is guaranteed to breed dysfunction.

Now, Matt Wells has brought in veteran defensive coordinator Keith Patterson to fulfill the most challenging and important position on his staff.  It is a move that could very well determine the success of the program for quite some time.

Patterson has had eight seasons as a defensive coordinator in the college ranks.  That includes stops at Tulsa, West Virginia, Arizona State and Utah State where he worked under Wells last fall.

He’s developed a reputation for bringing loads of pressure by attaching with frequent blitzes from his 3-3-5 scheme.  But you will have to forgive many Texas Tech football fans for feeling pessimistic about Patterson being the defensive messiah that this program has been longing for.

The good news for Patterson is that Tech’s offense is good enough that if he could simply field a top 75 unit in the nation, there will be rejoicing in the streets again as Tech football should be back among the contenders in the Big 12.  No one expects Patterson’s defenses to rival those that Alabama or Clemson are fielding but he certainly must move the program out of the bottom quarter of the nation’s defensive rankings.

So let’s take a look at what Patterson has managed to accomplish at the last three schools he’s coordinated defenses for.  As we do, we will, unfortunately, find that there are a lot of similarities to the type of defense we’ve seen out of the Red Raiders in recent years.