Texas Tech football: Matt Wells has exactly the type of debut he needed

Wells’ discipline-first approach led to a clean game

For far too long, Texas Tech has been a sloppy program.  Somewhere in the last 19 years, the Red Raiders seemed to unconsciously adopt the belief that a prolific offense could make up for lapses in discipline such as penalties, turnovers, and mental miscues.

But since his arrival, Wells has been preaching the virtues of discipline and living up to a higher standard, one that he says he will not deviate from.  Time will only tell if that brings about a true culture shift in the program but after one week, the results are encouraging.

Tech was penalized only four times for 29 yards in week one and one of those was on the coaching staff, which was late getting the punt team onto the field leading to a delay of game.  Perhaps even more important to Wells was the fact that only two of the penalties were of the dead-ball variety.  In other words, only two penalties came as a result of mental mistakes.

Over the years, we’ve come to lament this program’s propensity for inexcuseable and idiotic penalties such as taunting, late hits out of bounds, and other infractions that are completely avoidable and unnecessary.  We saw none of that on Saturday.

The only major gaffe the team had at all was White’s fumble in the second quarter.  However, that was not a mental mistake but an example of a young and inexperienced player trying to do too much.  Wells’ team was as focused and on-point mentally as you could hope for from a team not only playing its first game of the season but its first game under a new coaching staff.

Discipline is one of the most difficult qualities to instill in young people.  Any parent knows that.  What we don’t know is how some coaches are seemingly able to produce disciplined teams virtually every year, as if it were an innate part of their coaching acumen.

It’s hard to say just why a coach like Bill Snyder was able to ingrain that quality in his Kansas State program for decades but every Red Raider coach of the 21st century has failed to do the same.  Saturday’s game was promising because it helped us believe that maybe Matt Wells will be able to bring a new mental responsibility to the Red Raiders.