Texas Tech football: Lessons Red Raiders can learn from Super Bowl LIV
Elite offenses give teams a huge margin for error
The days of defenses simply shutting down the game’s top offenses could be over. One has to wonder if even iconic defenses like the 1985 Chicago Bears or the 2000 Baltimore Ravens would be able to clamp down on an offense like the Mahomes-led Chiefs for an entire game.
The advantage of an elite and explosive offense is that it gives a team so much more of a margin for error than even an elite defense does. Consider that in Super Bowl LIV, S.F. was the better team for 53 minutes of the game as the league’s best defense dictated play.
But being hot for only seven minutes of the game was all Mahomes and the K.C. offense needed. In that span, they scored 21 points, which would have been enough to win the game without the other ten points they scored in the first half. On the other hand, for the 49ers to win the game, their defense had to be almost flawless for 60 full minutes and when it couldn’t, they were in trouble.
Last year, the Texas Tech football team had a decent offense but not an elite or explosive one. Tech finished the year No. 11 in total offense but the 2019 version of the “Air Raid” (or whatever you want to call this program’s offensive scheme these days) lacked explosiveness.
Thus, Tech had nearly zero margin for error. Think about games like the Baylor, Arizona, or Kansas State games when the defense played very well for most of the night but faltered late (Tech had a strong first half against Kansas as well) because of a lack of depth across the board.
Had Tech been able to compliment that defense with an explosive and high-scoring offense, it is possible that each of those games would have been victories. But because the 2019 offense was merely decent, it gave the Red Raiders almost no wiggle room the way the K.C. offense gave the Chiefs on Sunday night.
In years past, Tech has won games like the 2006 Insight Bowl, the 2002 game at Texas A&M, or the 2008 Gator Bowl not because it was the better team for the entire game but because the offense caught fire for a particular length of time and carried the team to a win. In the 2020 playoffs, Kansas City trailed every game by at least 10 points and won all three by double-digits also because of an elite offense.
In 2020, the Red Raiders have to figure out how to field an explosive offense once again. You could argue that the Red Raiders haven’t had one since the 2016 season when Mahomes was in his last year in Lubbock. In the end, we all want next year’s defense to be better but it’s more imperative and likely that the offense be the type that can get hot and lead the team to wins in which the opposition seems to control the game or when the defense gives you at least two quarters of solid football.