Texas Tech football: The strangest endings in Red Raider history
After last weekend’s wild and unfortunate finish for the Texas Tech football team in its loss to Kansas, let’s look back at some of the wildest endings in Red Raider history.
What makes college football so great is that almost weekly it seems as if there’s a game that ends in the most improbable of manners. Unfortunately for Texas Tech football fans, the Red Raiders were on the short end of such a game Saturday night in Lawrence.
In the 37-34 loss to the Jayhawks, the final two plays of the game were truly a rollercoaster of emotions. Facing almost certain defeat with Kansas set up to attempt a 40-yard field goal with just thirteen seconds to play, dejection had already set in for Red Raider fans.
But when DL Nick McCann blocked the kick, that dejection quickly turned to shock and elation. How long has it been since Tech made a huge special teams play like that with the game on the line? We instantly began to think about how much momentum that play would carry into the OT periods to give Tech a huge advantage.
Of course, we never got to find out because Douglas Coleman made the most infamous play of his career. After scooping the ball up the senior safety, who on the game’s first play picked off his NCAA-leading seventh pass of the year, attempted to lateral it to a teammate in hopes that the Red Raiders could return the ball for a game-winning score of their own.
Coleman played last Saturday on a sprained ankle and was clearly not at 100%. It is fair to wonder if his bum wheel made him more prone to try to get the ball to a teammate because he knew he wouldn’t have the speed to return the ball all the way.
Unfortunately, his gamble didn’t pay off as KU was the team that came up with his ill-fated lateral attempt. When Tech was unable to block its second-straight field goal and third kick of the night (Tech also blocked an extra point attempt earlier in the game), the Red Raiders were handed their first loss to Kansas since 2001 and the insanity of the final sequence made an already bitter pill nearly impossible for folks in scarlet and black to swallow.
We’ve seen our share of improbable and unexplainable endings throughout the years in college football. Because the players aren’t quite at the level of NFL players, the college game is far more prone to the jaw-dropping ending. Anything can and often does happen.
Of course, the most iconic ending of any football game may be the ending of the Stanford vs. Cal game in 1982. Known simply as “The Play”, the Golden Bears successfully completed five laterals to return the game’s final kickoff to win 25-20 scoring the final touchdown by running through the Stanford band, which was already on the field in celebration. The best aspect of “The Play”, what makes it truly unforgettable, is the fact that in the endzone, Cal’s Kevin Moen slammed into Stanford trombone player Gary Tyrell in what was the most literal of exclamation points.
A similar ending took place on Halloween night of 2015 when Miami took down Duke by completing eight laterals on the game’s final play for a 30-27 win. However, this finish was significantly tarnished when the ACC admitted that the officials missed several instances that should have been flagged as illegal forward passes.
In fact, that officiating crew was suspended for its incompetence, something that Tech fans would have liked to see happen to the Big 12 crew that botched this year’s game at Baylor on a play that should have been far easier to correctly officiate.
Like in Lawrence on Saturday night as well as in the other games we’ve discussed above, special teams often play a role in wild endings. Most notably was the famous “Kick Six” Iron Bowl classic. In 2013, Auburn’s Chris Davis fielded a missed Alabama 57-yard FG in the endzone and returned it 106 yards for the game-winning score in an unforgettable 34-28 contest.
Each year, end-of-season montages will feature the wildest finishes of the season and unfortunately, this year the Red Raiders will likely be included in that group for the wrong reason. But this isn’t the first wild ending in which our beloved football program has been involved. So let’s take a look at some of the wildest finishes in Texas Tech football history, a list that now somehow will forever include a loss to Kansas.