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

By Matthew Conner

LUBBOCK, TEXAS - OCTOBER 19: Head coach Matt Wells of the Texas Tech Red Raiders exits the team bus in front of the stadium before the college football game against the Iowa State Cyclones on October 19, 2019 at Jones AT&T Stadium in Lubbock, Texas. (Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images)
LUBBOCK, TEXAS - OCTOBER 19: Head coach Matt Wells of the Texas Tech Red Raiders exits the team bus in front of the stadium before the college football game against the Iowa State Cyclones on October 19, 2019 at Jones AT&T Stadium in Lubbock, Texas. (Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images) /
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(Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images)
(Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images) /

Matt Campbell went 3-9 in 2016 at Iowa State

If a perennial Big 12 power can bloom in Ames, Iowa, one can bloom in Lubbock.  But while we now consider Matt Campbell’s Iowa State team as one that will always be in the conference fight, after his first season, no one imagined what he would turn the Cyclones into in such short order.

A four-year stint as head coach at Toldeo in which he went 35-15 vaulted Campbell to the top of the list of rising young head coaches and following the 2015 season he parlayed that into a Big 12 gig.  But it wasn’t the easiest of Power 5 gigs to say the least.

When Campbell arrived, ISU was in the midst of six-straight losing seasons.  What’s more, only a 7-6 2009 kept the program from enduring 10-straight sub .500 seasons prior to the Campbell era.

2016 was no honeymoon in Ames though.  In fact, in Campbell’s debut, he lost to FCS opponent Northern Iowa 25-20 in front of his home fans.  Not a great debut to say the least.  In fact, he lost his first three games before finally topping San Jose State.

By the time he won another game, he had endured a five-game losing streak until he won back-to-back games against Kansas and…yup…Texas Tech.   In a 66-10 drubbing on a blisteringly cold day in Ames, Campbell’s cloud defense (which his team switched to in midseason) beguiled the Red Raiders and QB Pat Mahomes to give the future NFL MVP his biggest collegiate humbling.

It only took one year for Campbell to turn around what was once a program that was mentioned in the same breath as Kansas in regard to futility in the Big 12.  In 2017 he racked up an improbable eight wins, including a road win at No. 3 Oklahoma and a home win over No. 4 TCU.  He followed that up with eight more wins in 2018 to legitimize his program’s success.

The last time Iowa State had put up consecutive 8-win seasons was when it ran off three-straight from 1976-78.  But sitting at 5-3 this year with four games remaining, Campbell is on the verge of his third in a row.  If it can be done in Ames, it can be done in Lubbock.

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