Texas Tech football: Loss to KU brings concerns about program’s future

Is Matt Wells capable of building a winner at Texas Tech?

The most obvious question right now is whether or not Matt Wells is the right man for the job.  We won’t know for at least two more seasons after this one but there are no signs right now to indicate that he is.

Wells has done nothing to assuage the fears of those who did not view him as the best possible hire that Hocutt could have made.  That contingency, of which I must admit I was part, was concerned by his recent track record and now that he’s barreling towards his fourth losing season in the last five, even those of us who have decided to give him a fair shot can’t help but fear the worst.

Looking back at his tenure as a head coach prior to arriving in Lubbock is not going to help reassure too many skeptics.

Taking over the Utah State program in 2013 after being promoted from offensive coordinator, Wells had a 19-9 combined record in his first two seasons.  That’s a winning percentage of 67.8%.

Since then, his overall record is 28-30.  That includes a 10-win season last year (Utah State’s 11th  win in 2018 doesn’t go on his ledger because he was already at Tech).

Thus, it is easy to see how a significant portion of the fan base might believe that he had his best success when piggy-backing off of the momentum his mentor and predecessor Gary Andersen built in Logan.    There’s no doubt that he deserves credit for the 10-2 record Utah State had in the regular season last fall (as well as the success his team’s had when he was the offensive coordinator) but one season of success with his own players and procedures in place does not mean the man is a program builder.

We don’t know if he would have validated that success this fall because he parlayed last season into a promotion to a Big 12 program that is remarkably similar to Texas Tech in the world of the Mountain West in that it has had more years of mediocrity or futility than excellence and is often fighting an uphill battle against programs with more resources at their disposal.

For what it’s worth, Utah State is just 4-3 this year and coming off a 31-7 beating at the hands of Air Force this weekend.  Their other two losses came to No. 2 LSU and Wake Forest.

Every Texas Tech fan should withhold judgment on Matt Wells as head coach of the Red Raiders until enough time has passed for us to evaluate his ability to build a program, not just a team.  But what he has working against him is the fact that this fan base is going to be less patient with him than Kingsbury because he did not come to town with the amount of goodwill that his predecessor had on hand before he ever called a play.

What’s more, when Kingsbury arrived, the memories of the glorious late 2000s run were still fresh and the satisfaction from that time period was still helping ease the pain of unmet expectations over the three years of the Tuberville era.  When Wells arrived, Tech was already in the midst of its first run of three-straight losing seasons for the first time since enduring seven-straight from 1979-85.  Thus, it is asking quite a bit more for fans to be patient now as opposed to at any other time in the previous 30 years.

Does Wells have it in him to not only build a winning program at ay level of the sport (emphasis on the word “build”) much less at a Big 12 program that is far from at the top of the league when it comes to finances and resources?  We won’t know that answer for a few years but after what we’ve seen this year, those of us who were skeptical have not been persuaded to believe otherwise.