Texas Tech football: Why the Red Raiders were able to beat West Virginia

Jett Duffey outplayed Austin Kendall

At first glance, the numbers each QB put up on Saturday look rather comparable.  Duffey was 22/34 for 354 yards and one touchdown.  Meanwhile, Kendall was 26/43 for 355 yards while throwing no touchdowns.

Of course, the biggest difference came when looking at interceptions.  While Duffey had his third-straight game without an interception, Kendall thew two passes to the Red Raiders.

In the first quarter, he was picked off by Douglas Coleman on a play where he missed his receiver causing him to dive for the ball.  The receiver got his hand on the ball but only enough to deflect it into Coleman’s lap for the INT.  Tech would turn the ensuing drive into seven points for a 21-3 lead.

Late in the third quarter, Kendall left an ill-advised ball up for grabs at the goal line off of a flea-flicker.  Thrown into double coverage, it was an easy pick for Damarcus Fields, who returned the ball 34 yards.  That would be the last pass of Kendall’s afternoon as he was replaced by Jarrett Doege, a native of Lubbock and the younger brother of former Texas Tech QB Seth Doege.

While the two QBs threw for almost identical yardage totals, their days couldn’t have been more different.  On more than one occasion, Kendall missed opportunities for huge plays by underthrowing balls and causing his receivers to have to wait for the pass to arrive.  That was one reason the Mountaineers did not have the huge TD plays that other Red Raider opponents have made a living on.

Meanwhile, Duffey connected on his one deep strike, an 81-yard bomb to Dalton Rigdon down the seam, for Tech’s second TD of the game.  In other games, we’ve seen Duffey miss deep throws but he hit on that one and it proved to be an important moment in the game because it gave Tech a double-digit lead.

Though there is no doubt that Duffey is limited as a QB, he’s given his team all it could have asked for from a player who began the year at best third on the depth chart.  Most importantly, he’s gone 131 passes without being intercepted, which shows huge progress in his development as giving the ball away was his biggest flaw prior to this year.

Anytime one QB has a rating of 94.1 and his counterpart has a rating of 21.1, it’s not going to be too difficult to decipher which team was victorious.  That was how greatly Duffey outplayed Kendall on Saturday and was a huge reason for the Red Raiders’ success.