Texas Tech football: Why the Red Raiders lost to the Jayhawks

Looking inside the stats from Saturday night’s defeat reveals just why the Texas Tech football team lost to Kansas for the first time since 2001.

We woke up today in a reality that we didn’t want to accept.  Just two days ago, we learned in the harshest of ways that the Texas Tech football program is currently the worst in the Big 12.

If you were to gage each of the programs in this conference on any number of factors, Tech would be at the bottom of the heap.  And with West Virginia not playing this past weekend, our Red Raiders now own the longest losing streak in the conference.

It’s not how we planned for the first year of the Matt Wells era to go.  We expected there to be highs and lows but no one expected the lows to be this tough to swallow.

This was supposed to be the dawn of a new era, filled with hope, a reload, not a rebuild as wells himself said in his introductory press conference.  If ths has been a reload, it would seem like Wells and Co. have been loading their weapon with blanks.

This was supposed to be the point when the season turned around.  After facing a five-game stretch to open the conference play that included four of the six teams picked to finish ahead of the Red Raiders in the preseason poll, the closing stretch of the year was supposed to offer an opportunity for this program to finally finish a season with some positive momentum.

Now, that appears unlikely with Tech almost certain to enter each of the final four games this year as an underdog.  Of course, as we saw this past weekend when every favored team in the conference lost, Tech could pull off an upset or two along the way.

But the team’s ultimate goal of a bowl birth appears to grow more and more unattainable with every passing data point we receive about this team.  Given that we just saw Wells’ team outclassed by a program that has spent the better part of the last decade as the model of futility, how can we expect the final month to look any better than September and October?

The loss to Kansas was a new low for this program.  It rivaled the 1997 and 1999 losses to North Texas, each of which was a huge indication to many fans that Spike Dykes was starting to lose his ability to put competitive teams on the field.

But what makes this such a troubling turn of events is the fact that it occurred in the first year of what was supposed to be a new and brighter day.  Of course, losing a single game, regardless of how putrid the opponent, does not mean that Matt Wells won’t have success at Tech down the road.

But losing to Kansas does show us just how far away that success is.  It forces us to accept the fact that this program is in worse shape than it has been in three decades and the climb out of this hole may take much longer than we had hoped.

To say that this loss was just another in a season full of them would be a gross understatement. Sure, it counts the same as the loss to Iowa State but symbolically, it carries so much more weight.

When the pasty, scrawny, feeble kid in the schoolyard punches you in the nose and you have no response, you must come to grips with what you really are.  The new schoolyard punching bag.

Texas Tech desperately needed to beat Kansas but couldn’t.  It wasn’t that Tech lost because the players didn’t play hard or didn’t take Kansas seriously.  Unfortunately, Tech gave Kansas as good of a shot as it could muster and that wasn’t enough.  Let’s go inside the numbers and see why the Red Raiders couldn’t beat what was we all assumed until Saturday was the worst team in the Big 12.