Texas Tech football: Turning points in Red Raiders win over West Virginia
In the Texas Tech football team’s win over West Virginia, these turning points helped the Red Raiders swing the momentum in their direction.
The game between the Texas Tech football team and West Virginia has come to jokingly be known as the Battle of John Denver. Apparently, the only way some fans of each school can muster up any way to really care about the other is by pretending that winning the game gives their school the right to claim the late folk-pop singer as their own.
Thank you so much conference realignment. Instead of playing Texas A&M every year, we now get to play a school that we have no history with or angst towards. One is far much more likely to get a rise out of a Red Raider when discussing the merits of the Whataburger vs. In-N-Out debate than you would when discussing the Mountaineers.
There’s just no history there and now that former Texas Tech assistant Dana Holgorsen is no longer running the show in Morgantown, most fans only care about beating West Virginia in the sense that is a conference win. (Yes, Neal Brown is also a former Red Raider assistant but we nowhere as beloved in West Texas as Holgorsen.)
But unlike beating one of the in-state rivals or even one of the Oklahoma schools, beating West Virginia doesn’t rev the collective engine of this fan base…unless we prevent them from playing John Denver’s “Country Roads” after the game, as is their custom in Morgantown following a victory.
In all honesty, John Denver isn’t worth fighting over. His music is about as culturally significant as a melodic belch in the wind. Sure, there were some catchy tunes but when listing the all-time greats of American music, Denver falls somewhere between Vanilla Ice and whoever wrote the theme song for “Growing Pains”.
But I guess if you are going to fight over something, you might as well win the fight. Tech plays Texas for the Chancellor’s Spurs and TCU for the Saddle Trophy and those prizes feel only slightly more meaningful than being able to claim the rightful connection to an effeminate singer who probably couldn’t have spelled football much less told us anything about it during his life.
Sure, Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. was born 175 miles west of Lubbock in Roswell, New Mexico and attended Texas Tech before dropping out after two years. And yes, he mentions West Virginia in a song but that’s not because of any connection to the state but rather because his co-writer, who had also never been to West Virginia, thought the idea of West Virginia’s winding roads worked well for the tune.
So last Saturday, Texas Tech took down West Virginia in the battle over the right to claim a weak connection to a dead hippie folk singer who had never been to West Virginia and probably never thought twice about Texas Tech or Red Raider football after he left school in 1961. But at least we kept them from signing that stupid song! Take that!
Of course, for head coach Matt Wells and his team, that win was a bit more weighty. Putting an end to a 3-game losing streak, Tech managed to keep its hopes for a bowl birth alive.
That’s something the seniors on this team like Jordyn Brooks, Douglas Coleman, and Broderick Washington deserve. But more importantly, it is something this program needs in regard to perception.
Reaching the postseason in year-one of a new coaching staff is never easy for a mid-level Power 5 program like ours. If Tech is able to play in a 13th game this year, the vibe inside the football building as well as among the fan base will be something that can be built upon for next year.
Had Tech lost the Battle of John Denver, it would have been nearly impossible to fathom this team rattling off three-straight wins to get to postseason play. Asking it to go 2-1 to finish the season also seems a bit of a reach given that it would double the number of conference wins it had managed to bring home in the first two months of the year, but there’s a chance and that’s enough to keep this season interesting.
And all because John Denver looked down from heaven and tuned his magic guitar in a way that favored the school he dropped out of rather than the state he mentioned in a song before ever having stepped foot there. Here’s to you Henry John Deutschendorf Jr.!
Maybe in the following turning points that pushed Tech to the win, he was looking down on his former school…but probably not. It’s more likely that, just as many of the students that attend the schools which were battling for his soul were, he was probably too Rocky Mountain High to really care.