Texas Tech basketball: Other seasons that didn’t live up to the hype

Now that the 2019-20 Texas Tech basketball season has come to a disappointing end, let’s look back at other seasons that also failed to live up to the preseason hype.

With the NCAA’s decision to cancel all winter and spring sports, the 2019-20 Texas Tech basketball season has come to a rather abrupt end.  It’s a disappointing way for the most anticipated season in program history to play out given that the program will not have an opportunity to add to its March resume following historic runs in each of the last two NCAA Tournaments.

This year’s team will go down as a big of an enigma as we’ve seen in program history.  Though we got to see 31 games, we will be unable to define this year’s Red Raiders because of the lack of a postseason.  It’s like going through a class for an entire semester only to have your shot at earning an “A” taken away because the professor cancels the final exam.

Thus, all we have to go on is the regular season and quite frankly, it was a disappointing year.  But it was also memorable.

No one will soon forget the ride that we just completed.  The highs of hanging the program’s first Final Four banner on opening night and beating No. 1 Louisville in Madison Square Garden, as well as the lows such as losing OT games to Kentucky, Baylor, DePaul, and Creighton, will be the ultimate memories from a season that began with more hype than any we’ve ever seen in Lubbock.

Unfortunately, the losses will be more telling than the victories.  Overall, Tech finished 18-13 on the year but, against teams from a major conference, Chris Beard and his team managed to go just 10-13.

Back in November, we didn’t know what to expect from this year’s team, which was built around nine newcomers and seven freshmen but we expected better than a 9-9 conference record and we certainly did not anticipate spending the final two weeks of the season on the NCAA Tournament bubble.

Of course, this could also be a season that lays the foundation for more success in the near future.  Tech was able to give invaluable experience to more freshmen than ever before as Jahmi’us Ramsey, Terrence Shannon Jr., Kevin McCullar all spent time in the starting lineup.

Between them, that trio averaged 73.3 minutes per game and that’s time that will pay off in the future.  (Though whether or not Ramsey heads to the NBA this offseason will be one of the summer’s biggest stories.)

However, the laying of a future foundation is not usually enough to satisfy most fans and that was the case for Red Raider fans this year.  While we all know that the future of this program is as bright as it could possibly be, the lack of wins that mattered on a national scale and the failure to compete for a conference title left us wanting after the last two years of unprecedented success.

But this isn’t the first season of Texas Tech basketball that has come up short of matching the preseason hype.  And at a time when the college sports year came to the most abrupt and disappointing end imaginable, it only feels fitting to fully wrap ourselves in a blanket of misery and look back at other seasons when the Red Raiders weren’t able to match the preseason hype once they hit the court.