If former Red Raider head coach Kliff Kingsbury would have been able to land the following 2020 NFL draftees, he might still be the head coach of the Texas Tech football program.
With the 2020 NFL Draft now in the rearview, we can essentially put to bed the 2016 college football recruiting class while getting a clearer picture of how the 2017 class turned out as a number of the stars from that class also heard their names called over the weekend. And when you look back at those two classes, we can see that they were the beginning of the end of the Kliff Kingsbury era at Texas Tech.
That’s because the former Texas Tech head coach struggled in his attempted to fortify his program in what were his fourth and fifth recruiting classes at his alma mater. Thus, by the time 2018 rolled around, his job was on the line and he didn’t have the talent needed to pull himself out of the fire.
In 2016, Kingsbury landed just the No. 44 class in the nation and No. 6 class in the Big 12 according to 247Sports. That class made up the majority of this weekend’s NFL Draft but it was one that didn’t come through for the Red Raiders.
The two top players and the only four-star signees in that class were wide receivers Derrick Willies and T.J. Vasher. While Willies did go on to a stint in the NFL with the Cleveland Browns after his two-year run with Tech, the JUCO product never had more than 304 yards in a season for Kingsbury.
Meanwhile, Vasher has yet to put up over 687 yards in a season. He’s set to head into his senior campaign this year after redshirting as a true freshman but had he realized his magnificent potential already, he could have been in this year’s draft as an underclassman. Though that might not have been in his favor given how historically deep this year’s crop of receivers was.
What’s more, the following players from that class left the program (and not for the NFL) prior to exhausting their eligibility: RB Da’Leon Ward, QB Jett Duffey, DE Houston Miller, LB Kevin Moore, LB Brayden Stringer (who just this week entered the transfer portal), DT Ivory Jackson, LB Jonathan Picone, OL Gio Pancotti, OL Clarence Henderson, and DT Joseph Wallace. That means that 10 of the 21 high school players the program signed that year were destined to either transfer or be kicked off the team.
Thus, the 2017 class needed to be a homerun for Kingsbury. It wasn’t.
Rated just No. 49 nationally and again coming in sixth in the conference, it was another class that proved to be long on disappointments. Of the 19 players in that class, only nine were high school players as Kingsbury doubled-down on the JUCO ranks to try to provide him some immediate help.
Thus, that class was never destined to be the backbone of the roster in 2019 or 2020 as over half the players in it exhausted their eligibility by the end of the 2018 season. Of those nine high school signees, only Jack Anderson, Dawson Deaton, Riko Jeffers, and Adrian Frye have become full-time starters thus far in their careers.
On one hand, it feels a bit hyperbolic to suggest that one or two recruits added to those classes could have made a huge difference in the way the Kingsbury era played out. But when you consider how close Kingsbury was to putting up winning seasons in each of his last three years, it’s not crazy to believe that the slightest increase in talent at some key positions might have made the difference in a handful of games.
In 2017, Tech was 6-7 because of a 38-34 loss to South Florida in the Birmingham Bowl in which the Bulls scored in the final minute to win the game. Also that season, Tech lost in overtime to Kansas State and by just seven points to Oklahoma State in a game that was also decided in the final two minutes.
In 2018, the Red Raiders came up one game shy of a bowl birth by going 5-7 despite having to start three different quarterbacks for at least two games each. That season, one-possession losses to West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Texas all kept Kingsbury from saving his job.
The reality is that Kirby Hocutt desperately wanted Kingsbury to succeed and there’s no reason to believe that he would have canned the beloved alum if Kingsbury could have put up a winning season in 2017 and followed that up with a bowl game in 2018. Thus, one or two more players would have potentially changed the course of the program’s history.
As we watched this past weekend’s NFL Draft, we saw a number of players taken who were once prime targets of the Red Raiders. Thus, it was hard not to consider how history would have unfolded in Lubbock had Kingsbury been able to land the following players.