Angry overreactions to Texas Tech football team’s ugly loss at OU
Following the Texas Tech football team’s disheartening 55-16 loss to Oklahoma, fans are going to overreact and what follows is what many Red Raiders may be feeling.
One of the best and most unique aspects of football is that because there are so few games in a season and only one game per week, there’s certain to be overreaction after each game. And after Saturday’s pants-dropping in Norman by the Texas Tech football team, you can understand why the majority of the Red Raider fan base is in poor spirits.
No one but the most pollyanna of fans truly thought that Matt Wells would lead his team into the home of the No. 6 team in the nation and pull off an upset with a pair of backup QBs leading the way. But well all expected Tech to at least put up some fight.
Instead, Tech looked as helpless against the Sooners as Montana State and UTEP looked against the Red Raiders in the season’s first two games. Honestly, this team never really thought it could win in Norman and that was apparent from the start.
Down 17-0 before they showed any signs of life, the Red Raiders were as much of a threat to the Sooners as a fly is to the read end of a rhinoceros. With just a flick of its collective tail and a literal flick of Jalen Hurts’ wrist, OU swatted the Red Raiders back into their frustrating role of being nothing more than a Big 12 afterthought.
No, the season isn’t over and technically the Red Raiders could still be a factor in determining how this conference shakes out but what we saw Saturday afternoon is that this program is about as far from contending for this league’s championship as humans are from colonizing a planet in the Alpha Centauri solar system.
After the loss to Arizona two weeks ago, we talked about how that outcome was a reality check for Red Raider fans who may have thought that the rebuilding of the football program would be as quick as the resurrections we’ve seen this decade from the baseball and basketball programs.
But tonight, we are now wondering if that type of rebuild is even possible. After all, as long as Lincoln Riley is in charge at OU, the rest of the conference will likely be playing a hopeless game of chase. Of course, the odds say that one of the years the Sooners will stumble or be upset but when that happens, there’s no reason to believe that Tech will be in a place to capitalize.
Based on what we’ve seen this year, Tech has been as unimpressive as any team in the Big 12. Even Kansas can at least point to a Power 5 win as a bragging point, though it was over the worst team in the ACC, Boston College.
Iowa State is also 2-2 with their wins coming over an FCS team and a weak no-Power 5 team but their two losses (vs. Iowa and at Baylor) have come by a combined three points. Tech’s two losses have come by a combined 50 points.
Yes, two-thirds of the season remains and Tech can still get better and finish strong. But right now, this team has shown no signs of having that capability. So don’t expect too much sunshine pumping to come from the Red Raider fan base this week.
We are going to overreact each week because we are football fans and the taste that was in our mouth for the last two weeks following the Arizona game has only turned more putrid after being embarrassed on national TV. So let’s all just embrace the suck and jump in the deep end of the pool of pessimism with some major overreactions.