Texas Tech football: Areas of disappointment thus far in 2019
After one-quarter of the Texas Tech football season, let’s look at some areas where the Red Raiders have disappointed.
Defining expectations for any team in the first year of a new coaching staff is rather difficult. That’s why the 2019 Texas Tech football season is open to personal interpretation.
Some may believe that nothing short of a bowl appearance should be considered acceptable. Though Red Rader fans should have stopped taking for granted the opportunity to play in a 13th game after missing the postseason in three of the last six seasons, many in West Texas still believe that a bowl game is the floor of what this program should produce each year.
That’s especially true for the generation of fans that grew up on Tech football in the late 90s and 2000s when we saw the Red Raiders in a bowl every year from 2000-2010. What’s more, Tech went from 1993-2010 without failing to earn enough victories to qualify for the postseason.
If you are in the camp that has such expectations, Tech is going to have to win at least four Big 12 games for just the fourth time since 2009 to keep you from feeling like this season is a disappointment. But others in the fan base will have a different view of what constitutes a successful season.
The more patient fans will be looking for signs of improvement in areas where the program has struggled for far too long. They may be satisfied with seeing the team play with more discipline, put up a better fight on defense, stop making critical mistakes at the most inopportune times, and start winning some homes in league play. If most of those areas of the game show some a bit of an uptick this year but Tech still goes 5-7, some will still have optimism about the direction Wells is taking Texas Tech.
What’s more, last week’s news that Alan Bowman will miss several weeks and could conceivably be out for the rest of the season has dampened the outlook for 2019 across the board. That situation also has to change the way any fan defines success this season.
The point is that the expectations of the fan base vary as much this year as in any season since the first year of the Mike Leach run in 2000. That’s why it’s tough to define what is a disappointment and what is not.
But we can all agree on certain areas of the game in which we expect the Red Raiders to be solid, if not excellent. However, in some of those areas, Tech has not lived up to what we thought we were going to see so far in 2019.