The staff that new Texas Tech football head coach Matt Wells has assembled in his first year in Lubbock is stronger than Kilff Kingsbury’s first staff virtually across the board.
One of the most undervalued aspects of any college football program is the quality of the head coach’s assistants. That’s why it is important for Texas Tech football fans to understand just how much stronger of an assistant coaching staff that Matt Wells has assembled in his first season as compared to the staff that Kliff Kingsbury had when he took over in 2013.
If there was ever a time for Tech to splurge on the salaries of its assistant coaches, it would have been when the Red Raiders handed their program over to a 34-year-old who had only five years coaching experience at any level and had never been a head coach. But in a way, Kingsbury was set up to fail because at the time, the Red Raiders’ assistant coach salary pool was among the smallest of any Power 5 school.
For instance, in 2013, Tech’s highest-paid assistant was defensive coordinator Matt Wallersteadt whose $425,000 salary made him just No. 7 among nine reporting Big 12 schools in terms of the salary of their most well-compensated assistant.
The program remained cheap through the 2016 season, Kingsbury’s 4th on the job, when Tech’s average salary per assistant was just $279,000. That was ahead of only Iowa State and Kansas in the Big 12 (though TCU and Baylor do not have to release salary info due to the fact that they are private institutions).
In recent years, Tech has attempted to be more competitive in that regard. That included a 7% raise across the board for assistants in 2017 but according to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, at that time, defensive coordinator David Gibbs was the only Red Raider assistant in the top 350 in the country in regards to salary and the only one in the top 40 in the Big 12.
So it should have come as no surprise that Kingsbury struggled. Relying on an assistant coaching staff that featured six of nine members below the age of 40 was not what the first-year Red Raider head coach needed.
Certainly, some of that was by Kingsbury’s own design as he attempted to make the program synonymous with youth, swagger, and energy. But what the program may have gained in style points, it lost in key areas such as discipline, strategy, and experience.
Therefore, few were shocked to see that by the start of Kingsbury’s fourth season, only two coaches on his initial staff, offensive coordinator Eric Morris and offensive line coach Lee Hayes, were still with the program. Coaches not paid competitively will not stick around nor do coaches that are inexperienced and still learning how to ply their craft.
The good news is that Tech allowed Matt Wells to have full say over the assistants he brought to Lubbock. That will hopefully pay dividends since the vast majority of the staff was together last year at Utah State thus making the transition much smoother in Well’s first year.
So let’s take a closer look at why Wells’ first Texas Tech staff is much stronger than Kingsbury’s. By looking some key assistants, we will see that the 2019 Red Raider football coaches are more experienced and accomplished almost across the board.