Texas Tech football: Loss to KU brings concerns about program’s future
Is Tech football doomed to be just a mid to lower-level program?
The current decade is set to become the first losing one for Texas Tech football since the 1980s and one of the worst in the history of the school. But being at the middle to the back of the conference rase is nothing new for this program and many are wondering if that is what our lot in life is going to be.
Perhaps the 2000s were just a mirage. After all, the times when the program has spiked to such levels have been rare.
After almost a century of football, we have plenty of evidence to suggest what this program is. Average.
In 93 seasons of football, Tech has finished as a ranked team just 12 times. The highest the Red Raiders have ever been to end the season has been just 11th, which happened in 1938 and 1973. What’s more, only three times has this program finished consecutive seasons in the top 25.
Tech’s overall winning percentage is just slightly above average at 54%. That just good for 59th-best in the country.
The program ranks in the middle of the pack in other telling stats such as weeks in the A.P. poll (60th), players drafted in the NFL (60th), consensus All-Americans (48th), and wins (72nd) though many of those stats are influenced by the fact that this is still one of the younger football programs in the NCAA.
It feels like the magic of the Mike Leach era was a special occurrence rather than a baseline for our future expectations. After all, outside of that magnificent decade which was part of a program-best 16-year streak of winning seasons, there have been only two other instances in which Tech has had at least six straight winning seasons (1931-38 and 1972-78).
The reality is that building a winning football program is the toughest task in the NCAA. That’s why we’ve gone since 1996 without seeing a school capture its first national title.
Even in the Big 12, we’ve seen only four schools other than Oklahoma or Texas win a conference title since 2003. In one of those years (2012), OU shared the title with Kansas State meaning that in only two of the last 15 seasons has a team other than the Sooners or Longhorns been able to win even a conference title.
College football is the most elite sport in the world. New powers simply aren’t encouraged to join the party. Some schools may poke around at crashing the party of the upper-crust from time to time but they rarely have staying power. The system is so slanted towards maintaining the exclusivity of the blue-bloods that it feels impossible for the middle class to ever think it can rise up.
Yet, that’s no reason for Texas Tech to stop trying. If we don’t strive to move upward, we are destined to fall backward.
Next. The all-time West Texas Red Raider football team. dark
Still, many fans are logical to wonder if Texas Tech football will forever be chasing the wind when it comes to trying to do what seems more and more impossible with each passing year…become an elite program. Though we’ve seen that happen in basketball, baseball, track, and other sports, many of us fear we will die before we see that happen with Red Raider football.