Texas Tech football: Why the Red Raiders lost to TCU

Keith Patterson’s defense couldn’t get off the field on third down

After two weeks of the season, Texas Tech was among the national leaders in third-down defense.  Now, Tech is one of the worst in that category sitting at No. 88.

Saturday, TCU feasted on third down going 15-24 (62.5%).  That’s atrocious for the Red Raider defense.

As a result, the Frogs held the ball for an unheard-of 43:26 of the 60 minutes of the game.  That meant that Tech’s beleaguered and paper-thin defense had to play 95 plays.  In fact, TCU’s rushing attempts (53) outnumbered Tech’s total plays by two.

This was a direct result of the loss of Jordyn Brooks in the first quarter.  Tech’s leading tackler and one of the best linebackers in the nation, the senior could not play through a shoulder injury which had kept him from practicing most of the week.

"“We’ve just got to go to our next and figure out a way to stop them.” LB Riko Jeffers said. “I mean, they did convert a lot of 3rd downs early in the game. We finally figured out a way to get some stops, but we’ve just got to execute better.  Can’t have as many mental errors, as I said, and just got to figure out a way to get them off the field so we can get the ball back in the offense’s hands so we can put more points on the board.”"

In Big 12 games, the Red Raiders are 9th in the league in third-down defense by allowing a 44.7% success rate to opponents.  Only Kansas is worse.

In our pre-game analysis, we said that Tech needed to make TCU sustain long drives because I didn’t think the Frogs could execute well enough to make long drives pay off.  I was wrong.

The Frogs had scoring drives of 10, 9, 14, 10, and 13 plays.  Much of that was due to the success of their running game but it was an unexpected display of offensive productivity from a team coming off a game in which it scored only 9 points in regulation against Baylor.