Texas Tech Football: What’s keeping the offense from getting untracked
Against the only two Power 5 teams the Texas Tech football team has faced this year, the offense has struggled so let’s take a look at some of the contributing factors.
It appears that we were wrong to just assume that a high-powered offense was the Texas Tech football program’s birthright. After beefing up against two weaklings to start the season the offense has bogged down against Arizona and Oklahoma, scoring an average of just 15 points.
Even last year when the Red Raiders had to start three different quarterbacks for at least two games each, the offense was able to put up better than average numbers ranking 4th in the conference in points (37.5 points per game) and first in passing (352.6 yards per game). So that suggests that this year’s problems run deeper than another injury to Alan Bowman.
After all, even with him playing the entire game against the Wildcats, Tech failed to resemble the offensive juggernaut that the program has come to be the identity of the program for two decades. Against a defense that entered the game ranked in the bottom ten nationally in both total defense and scoring defense, the Tech offense was the team’s Achilles heel.
The overall numbers for this offense have been rather skewed by the first two weeks of the season when the opposition was less than capable of giving us a true look at what the Red Raider offense was capable of. Still, Tech sits uncharacteristically low in the Big 12 offensive standings.
Putting up 460 yards per game, Tech is just 7th in the conference in total offense. In the last two games, the offense has averaged a mere 362.5 yards, including a season-low 314 against Oklahoma on Saturday.
Tech is also in the bottom four of the conference standings in scoring offense (8th), pass efficiency (10th), and 3rd-down conversions (8th). Needless to say, Red Raider fans had higher expectations given the track record of offensive coordinator David Yost, who was billed as one of the most creative and innovative minds in the game.
Last year at Utah State, Yost coordinated an offense that was second in the nation in scoring at 47.5 points per game and 11th in total offense (497.4 yards per game). That was the type of production that Red Raider fans were expecting to see from the Red Raiders this year but through the first two games against major conference opponents, the Red Raiders simply have not resembled a competent offensive team.
It would be easy to pin this all on the loss of Alan Bowman but when leading the Red Raiders against an Arizona defense that had given up 45 points to Hawaii and 41 points to Northern Arizona, he couldn’t help the offense get out of its own way. There are other issues facing this team’s offense, some of which have nothing to do with the QB and some of which were already problematic prior to the loss of the team’s starting QB.