Texas Tech basketball: 5 questions as Red Raiders begin camp
As the Texas Tech basketball team begins practice for the 2019-20 season, here are five questions that the program must answer.
The moment starting QB Alan Bowman was lost for several weeks with a left shoulder injury, many fans began sarcastically pointing out how many days there were until the Texas Tech basketball season. Certainly, we are living in strange times where it feels like Red Raider football and basketball have swapped placed in the hierarchy of fan interest with football now playing second fiddle and almost serving as a time kill for many fans while they wait for Chris Beard’s team to return to action.
In the past, we’ve seen Tech basketball have success but still fail to surpass the football program in terms of fan enthusiasm.
In 1996, Darvin Ham lifted Tech to the Sweet 16 thanks to the famous backboard shattering dunk against North Carolina. But the impending move to the Big 12, which was set to take place in the fall of that year, kept the fan base primarily focused on the gridiron.
Make no mistake, the Big 12 was formed with football in mind. And Tech football was a hot commodity in Lubbock in the mid-1990s given that Spike Dykes had led his team to three-straight bowl games, the first time Tech had accomplished that feat since 1947-49.
Even the legendary Bob Knight could not make Tech a basketball school. Though he came to Lubbock as the winningest coach in NCAA history and he captivated fans with his on-court demeanor and his off-court interactions with school administrators at the Market Street salad bar, he was nowhere near as popular as his counterpart in the football offices.
By the time that Knight took Tech to the Sweet 16 in 2005, Mile Leach had started to gain serious momentum with his football program. Already with five-straight bowl appearances on his Texas Tech resume, Leach’s program was coming off a huge upset of Aaron Rodgers and No. 4 Cal in the Holiday Bowl and not even Knight’s deepest tournament run could propel the basketball program to the top of the Texas Tech sports landscape.
Of course, Beard has taken his program further than the Sweet 16 in each of the past two years. An Elite 8 and National Title Game run has made the United Supermarkets Arena the epicenter of Red Raider sports. That rise has also come with a huge helping hand in the form of the football program’s mediocrity.
Tech football has had only one winning season since going 8-5 in 2013. During that time, the Red Raiders have been to just two bowl games, the Texas Bowl and the Birmingham Bowl (neither of which carry a ton of weight nationally) and both of those appearances resulted in uninspiring losses. During that span, Red Raider hoops has climbed to the top of the sport
Stop for a moment and consider if there has even been a time when the Texas Tech basketball coach would be infinitely more recognizable in Lubbock than the football coach. Even when Knight was in his Red Raider heyday, he was nowhere near as popular in West Texas as Leach.
Certainly, Dicky was never as beloved as Dykes and even the legendary Gerald Myers, who was not only a former Tech basketball star but was one of the program’s most successful head coaches, was never as important in Lubbock than any of the men leading the football program during his time, especially in the 1970s when Jim Carlen and Steve Sloan built Tech football into a national power.
This truly is a new era of Texas Tech athletics. Even the baseball program is threatening to challenge the football team for its place in the hearts of a huge swatch of the fan base. But there’s no question that Red Raider basketball is the king of the West Texas jungle. So as the most anticipated season in this history of Tech hoops nears, let’s look at five questions that Beard and his team must answer if they are going to remain a Big 12 and National Title contender.