Texas Tech basketball: What we learned in 2019-20

Though the Texas Tech basketball season came to an abrupt ending thanks to the coronavirus, yet we still learned some important lessons in 2019-20.

Thanks to the coronavirus outbreak and the subsequent cancellation of the Big 12 and NCAA Tournaments, the 2019-20 Texas Tech basketball season is going to leave all Red Raiders craving a closure that will never come.  It’s one rare instance in which the world of sports doesn’t reward us with definitive answers.

That’s what we love about sports.  There’s always a resolution and eventually, we find out who was victorious.  In other aspects of life, such as politics, the outcomes are far more difficult to discern and the winners and losers are often left up to interpretation.

But now, because of a never before seen global crisis, we are left with nothing but speculation about how the fourth year of the Chris Beard era would have ended up.  In fact, we don’t even know if the Red Raiders would have made it into the NCAA Tournament in the first place.

Some college basketball prognosticators have decided to publish their final brackets and the Red Raiders made the cut in almost all of them.  SB Nation had the Red Raiders as a No. 10 seed in their final bracket and taking on No. 7 LSU for the right to possibly face No. 2 seed San Diego State in the second round.  In that bracket, Tech could have had an Elite Eight rematch with Gonzaga, which was the No. 1 seed in Tech’s region just as was the case last year.

ESPN’s Joe Lunardi also put Tech as a No. 10 seed in his final bracket.  He had the Red Raiders set to face No. 7 seed Arizona for a shot to tangle with San Diego State.  And just like in the SB Nation bracket, Tech was in the same bracket as No. 1 seed Gonzaga.

Interestingly, Jerry Palm at CBS Sports did not have Tech in his final field of 68.  He had both Tech and Texas, the two teams that were set to meet in the Big 12 Tournament, in his last four teams out of the tournament.

Most Texas Tech fans will forever believe that had our team been able to get into the Big Dance, they could have made some noise.  Of course, we will never know for sure what would have happened and that’s hard for sports fans to swallow.

But that doesn’t mean we didn’t learn anything over the course of this season.  So let’s take a look at some of the lessons we learned in 2019-20 because though it was an incomplete year, it was none the less valuable in the continued development of Beard’s program.