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Texas Tech football: The biggest JUCO flops in Red Raider history

By Matthew Conner

LUBBOCK, TX - SEPTEMBER 12: The Texas Tech Red Raiders mascot Fearless Champion leads the team onto the field prior to the game against the UTEP Miners September 12, 2015 at Jones AT
LUBBOCK, TX - SEPTEMBER 12: The Texas Tech Red Raiders mascot Fearless Champion leads the team onto the field prior to the game against the UTEP Miners September 12, 2015 at Jones AT /
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(Photo by Brett Deering/Getty Images) /

DT Rika Levi 2014

For most of the last decade, Tech has struggled to stop the run.  That was certainly the case in the first half of the Kliff Kingsbury era.

To remedy that problem, Tech brought in one of the top JUCO defensive tackles in the 2014 class, Rika Levi.  Listed at 6-foot-3, 330-pounds but tipping the scales closer to 350, the San Franciso native was the No. 18 JUCO DT in his class according to 247Sports.

At the time, Tech fans we elated to beat out the likes of Oregon, Missouri, and Washington for Levi who was expected to be a monster in the middle of the defensive line, where the Red Raiders had been struggling.

After allowing 201 yards per game on the ground in 2013 (98th in the nation), Tech was hoping the big JUCO recruit would help cure the defense’s ills.  But that never really came to fruition.

In his first game, Levi sustained a knee injury that hampered him for most of the season.  Though he appeared in eleven games in 2014, he made just one start and recorded just18 tackles as his weight ballooned as he spent more time trying to rest his knee than improve his cardiovascular conditioning.

The next season, he saw action in every game after dropping significant weight in the offseason.  Still, he was not any more effective, making a mere 15 tackles with only one for loss.

In the two seasons he was on campus, Tech allowed an average of 269.5 yards per game on the ground, ranking in the bottom ten nationally against the run both years.  Unfortunately, Levi did not help the Red Raider defense the way that he was supposed to when the Red Raiders fished him out of the JUCO pond.

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