Texas Tech football: 2019 report card for Matt Wells
With the first year of Texas Tech football coach Matt Wells’ tenure in the books, let’s give him some grades for his work in a number of important areas.
One thing is for certain after the 2019 Texas Tech football season, this fan base is rather divided on the issue of whether or not we believe Matt Wells will be the man to fix the Red Raiders. Thus, Red Raider fans are looking back at his debut campaign and trying to grade his performance, at least mentally if not in such a prestigious and important fashion as a friendly neighborhood blog.
One of the benefits of adulthood is that the dread of report card day is no longer part of our lives. Though we all have to be subjected to performance evaluations through work or even in our personal relationships, the fact that we no longer have to sheepishly present out report cards to our parents and anxiously await their reactions is something we all can be thankful for.
But in the world of college athletics, it isn’t the approval or opinion of parents that matters but rather, the judgment of the fan base is what carries more weight than anything. That’s a tough task because college football fans are as fickle as any group of people in society.
We’ve seen throughout the years that even successful coaches have been fired, not because they didn’t win but because they didn’t win to the level that satisfied their constituency. In that regard, college football fans are often like the overbearing parents of an honors student.
In a former life, I was a high school English teacher and one year, I taught several advanced placement (A.P.) classes. I once had a student come to me after progress reports went home asking what he could do to raise his grade by completing extra credit.
Not wanting to have to grade extra work, I reminded him that he currently had a 93 average in my class. He looked me dead in the eyes and said without jest, “Sir, my parents call that a ‘slacker’s A'”.
Sometimes, college football fans are like that. Often believing that their program is better than it really is, that it sits higher in the pecking order of the sport than it does, they begin to turn their nose up at results that would make most fan bases giddy.
Take Kevin Sumlin at Texas A&M. Sure, he was just 25-23 in conference games but in his six seasons, he managed to put together a record of 51-26. How many programs would kill for a winning percentage of .662?
Not to ever be outdone by the Aggies, Texas fans ran Mack Brown out of town after he brought them a National Title, 158 wins, and a winning percentage of .767. In his 16 seasons in Austin, he averaged just short of 10 wins per year. Yet, he could not keep the wolves at bay.
Even the legendary Bobby Bowden was fired by Florida State. Despite being second all-time among FCS coaches with 377 wins and capturing two National Titles and 12 conference crowns, Bowden got the ax in Tallahassee.
Texas Tech football fans aren’t quite like the fans at the universities listed above in that we would be displeased with the type of success that Smilin, Brown, and Bowden had at the schools that fired them. Rather, after the disaster that was the 2010s when Tommy Tuberville and Kliff Kingsbury essentially ran this program into the ground, we are more like the parents of a creative but underperforming kid who we simply want to see earn passing grades with a few Bs mixed into the equation in the elective courses.
Whether or not it will be Matt Wells who turns into our pride and joy is something that we will not know for likely another two seasons at the soonest. But it is worth looking back on what he did in the 2019 season so let’s give him some grades in key areas of his job.