The 2010s: The decade when Texas Tech sports were flipped upside down

As we close out the 2010s, it is fascinating to think about the way the Texas Tech football and basketball programs had mirror opposite paths through the decade.

The year is 2010. Apple has just released the first-generation iPad, the Angry Birds app was taking the nation by storm, and Texas Tech football is the hottest game in West Texas. Fast forward ten years and we are now on the third generation of the iPad, there have been two Angry Birds movies, and Texas Tech basketball is now the obsession of Red Raiders everywhere.

In the Superman comics, the character “Bizarro” was introduced in 1958 to be the exact opposite of Superman in every way. Thus, the term “Bizarro World”, where the villain lived, has become part of our lexicon. And certainly, this decade has felt a bit like Bizarro World in Lubbock.

That’s because the two most high-profile programs in Lubbock (with all apologies to the Red Raider baseball program, which itself had a fantastic decade) have had decades that were mirror opposites to the point where most people wearing the Double-T will now claim that ours is a basketball school first. That would have been unfathomable to consider ten years ago.

Let’s start with the football program. In 2010, there was nothing in the Big 12 more discussed than the Red Raiders who 10 years ago this week fired Mike Leach, the winningest head coach in program history.

It wasn’t just that Leach was fired that made the story so engrosing, it was the tabloid-worthy back-and-forth between Leach, ESPN’s Craig James, and Texas Tech Chancellor Kent Hance in the wake of the allegations that Leach had James’ son Adam confined to a storage shed during practice as he was recovering from a concussion that made the reality in Lubbock play out just like a storyline from the Friday Night Lights television show.

Meanwhile, almost no one was paying a lick of attention to Red Raider basketball. Even after football season was over, the Pat Knight led Red Raiders just couldn’t hold the fan base’s attention much less, win its affection.

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My how things have changed out on the Caprock. Now, Chris Beard and his basketball program are the kings of Lubbock and the envy of the nation while Matt Wells and the football program are struggling to draw crowds of over 35,000 at home.

Making this situation all the more strange is the fact that the architect of the basketball program’s success, AD Kirby Hocutt, is also the architect of the football program’s demise. And in this Bizzaro World scenario, it only makes sense to remember that Hocutt is a former All-Big 8 linebacker at Kansas State. If there is a sport that he knows better than any other, it would be football yet that’s the one he can’t seem to figure out as an administrator.

But in the last decade, he’s made four defining hires, two for each program. (Remember that it was Hocutt’s predecessor, Gerald Myers, who hired Tommy Tuberville to replace Leach in his last meaningful act before retirement. Also, it is tough to put all of the responsibility for the failed Billy Gillespie hire upon Hocutt’s shoulders given that he’d been on the job for two months when that decision was made. Make no decision, Gillespie was brought to Lubbock more by the actions and decisions of other people in the athletic department and the university than Hocutt.)

So the four hires that we can say truly belong on the ledger of Kirby Hocutt this decade are Tubby Smith and Chris Beard in basketball and Kliff Kingsbury and Matt Wells in football. The two basketball coaches he’s brought to town have a combined record since 2013 of 122-81, a winning percentage of 0.600. The two football coaches he’s hired have, in that same span, gone just 39-48 (0.4448).

Amazingly, as the football program fell from glory and the basketball program rose to prominence, they had trajectories that were almost exactly inverted.

In Kingsbury’s first season, 2013, he managed to go 8-5, (0.615). Meanwhile, in his first season, 2013-14, Tubby Smith went 14-18 (0.437).

But over the next two years, the programs found themselves in almost the exact same place as the football team sank and the basketball team was revitalized. Like two ships passing in opposite directions on the sea, they essentially came face-to-face in those two years as the football team went a combined 11-14 (0.440) and the basketball team was an even .500 at 32-32.

Interestingly, in the middle of this decade, both programs had a brief taste of postseason play on their way to the polar opposite ends of the spectrum. In the fall of 2015, Kingsbury took his football team to the Texas Bowl after a 7-5 regular season while just months later, Smith’s team got to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in nine years.

Of course, after that year, Smith would bolt for the job at Memphis in the greatest blessing in disguise in the history of the university. Enter Chris Beard. Commence winning.

From 2016 until the end of the decade, the former Bob Knight assistant has taken this program to the Elite Eight and the National Title Game in consecutive years while going 85-34 (.714). Meanwhile, the football program’s free-fall has hit warp speed with four straight losing seasons and an overall combined record of 20-29 (0.481).

Keeping with our Bizzaro theme, think about how in 2016-17, Beard had his only “unsuccessful” season by going 18-14 but missing out on the postseason while later that fall, Kingsbury would have the last crumb of “success” he would experience at Tech as he managed to cobble together a 6-6 regular season to get his team to the Birmingham Bowl, where Tech lost to Southern Florida.

Now, we’ve come full circle by ending the decade the way it began, with a new head football coach. But unlike Tuberville in 2010, Matt Wells arrived to find a football program on life support and desperately trying to remind fans that there’s a reason to emotionally invest in what happens at Jones Stadium.

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Maybe he should contact Pat Knight for advice, after all, that’s how he began the decade at the United Supermarkets Arena. Coming on the heels of a decade when both programs were nationally relevant and led by beloved and nationally recognized coaches, Leach and Knight, the 2010s have been the decade when everything we thought we knew about Texas Tech athletics and Red Raider fans got flipped upside down. Maybe in the 2020s, we can have both programs experience legitimate success.

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