Texas Tech football: Matt Wells isn’t only coach to struggle in first year

Texas Tech football fans are less than excited about what they’ve seen in the first year of the Matt Wells era but it is important to remember that some of the most successful coaches in the game had a rough start at their current school.

Entering the 2019 Texas Tech football season, most fans agreed that a six win-showing was the minimum of what would be deemed acceptable from Matt Wells’ first year.  If that’s going to happen, the Red Raiders are going to have to go 3-1 in November, which is a time of year that has caused problems for this program for quite some time.

I Wells doesn’t manage to get his team to bowl eligibility this season, he will become the first Red Raider head coach to fail to do so since Jerry Moore in 1981.  That year, Moore went just 1-9-1 in what was a truly awful debut season.

Wells himself set the bar rather high when, at his introductory press conference, he said that he considered the job ahead of him a “reload” rather than “rebuild“.  Of course, he went on in later interviews to point out that the presence of QB Alan Bowman was one of the main reasons that he felt like he could have success right away in Lubbock.

Unfortunately for Wells, Bowman has missed every Big 12 game this year after suffering a left shoulder injury in the second half of the loss to Arizona in week three.  That’s made it nearly impossible to evaluate the first-year head coach and his staff because, as we learned last year, the absence of one’s starting QB is likely to derail just about any team’s season.

But perhaps those of us who thought the Red Raiders should get to a bowl in 2019 underestimated just how tough it is for coaches in their first year at a new job.  Coming into an unfamiliar situation and having to work with a roster that likely doesn’t fit what he wants to run, new coaches are tasked with their toughest jobs in year one.

What’s more, this program was less suited for instant success than more high-profile programs may be in transition situations.  Whereas programs such as Oklahoma or Ohio State have rosters built to withstand a coaching change because of their abundance of four and five-star players, programs at the level of Tech often find the cupboard rather scantly stocked when a new coach arrives.

Though a significant number of Texas Tech fans disagree, the reality is that Kliff Kingsbury’s failures on the recruiting trail in the last handful of years have given Wells less to work with than he needs from a roster standpoint.  While there are some nice players on this team, such as LB Jordyn Brooks and DE Broderick Washington, Brooks is likely to be the only all-conference honoree this team produces.  And most weeks, the afore-mentioned duo are usually the only Red Raiders that would start for the opposition.

What’s more, the quality of the backups in Lubbock is significantly lacking.  As we’ve seen on a regular basis, this team simply does not have enough Big 12 caliber players to fill out a proper two-deep, especially on defense.

Of course, no one outside of West Texas is going to feel any sympathy for the Red Raiders.  That’s because the struggle that this program finds itself in is nothing unique or new.  At times, every program at Tech’s level has had to persevere through similar periods of strife.  The good news is that there are a number of successful head coaches who have built strong programs despite unimpressive debut seasons.