Texas Tech football: Injury-plagued players will be key to 2020 success

If the Texas Tech football team is going to have success in 2020, several players with a history of injuries are going to have to stay healthy and play well.

It’s an inevitability in the game of football; injuries are going to take a toll on every team’s season.  The difference between the elite programs and the rest lies in the ability to absorb those injuries.  That’s one area where the Texas Tech football program has come up short far too often in recent seasons.

Years of poor recruiting by the Kingsbury regime have left the ranks depleted of Big 12-caliber depth meaning that the devastation brought on by a single broken bone or pulled muscle often has more drastic consequences that similar injuries would for better programs.  That’s one reason that Matt Wells and Co. are now trying to supplement the roster with a generous helping of grad transfers as those seniors are assumed to be ready to contribute immediately.

It’s also why all roster defections are important, even if the player leaving is not a starter.  Every chip that falls out of the roster’s foundation is only serving to weaken the base of the program making it all the less likely that the Red Raiders will be able to withstand a serious crack in the damn.

For instance, when a player like RB Da’Leon Ward is kicked off the team (as he was prior to last season) it might not seem like an insurmountable development given that he had run for just 341 yards the previous year.  But how nice would it have been to have had a player of his ilk to plug into the two-deep last November when the only running back Tech had that could even suit up was SaRodorick Thompson, who was playing on a sprained ankle himself?

The same goes for big DT Joseph Wallace, who was also dismissed from the team last year.  A first-time starter in 2018, he racked up 37 tackles and would have been a tremendous aide in the defensive line rotation last year, especially as the starters wore down while logging far too many snaps per game.  You could argue that the lack of depth along the defensive front was the program’s greatest weakness in 2019 and that was only exacerbated by the dismissal of one of the few Big 12-caliber tackles in the lockerroom.

While both of those defections were not injury-related, they did play a role in this team’s injury woes because both Ward and Wallace would have had a role in 2019 as injuries decimated their position groups.  Programs like Oklahoma, Alabama, Clemson, or LSU are swimming in four and five-star recruits meaning they can simply plug next year’s All-American into the lineup and continue to chew through the competition when injuries occur.

However, for mid-level programs like Texas Tech, every year feels like a tight rope walk as the next turned ankle, concussion, or blown out knee could be the start of a landslide.  That’s likely to be our reality for a while as Wells and his staff are still a few solid recruiting classes away from replenishing the program’s talent reserves.

So 2020 is going to hinge on whether or not the football gods grant Tech favorable health for the first time in a while.  And it will be imperative that these injury-prone players not only return to their pre-injury health but that they figure out a way to stay on the field for a full season.