Texas Tech football: What Alan Bowman has to prove in 2020

He has a full grasp of the offense

One of the disappointments of the 2019 season was that we didn’t get to see the full David Yost offense on display.  Without Bowman, the Red Raider offensive coordinator changed a major component of his offensive philosophy and scrapped his breakneck tempo.

Ideally, Yost wants to run a play within the first 12 seconds of the play clock.  Doing so theoretically puts the offense as an advantage because it gives defenses far less time to align and substitute (provided that the offense doesn’t swap out players).

But neither Yost nor head coach Matt Wells seemed to trust backup QB Jett Duffey to run the offense that quickly and as a result, the way the team played looked vastly different after Bowman went down.  Never known as a student of the game or one who spent the requisite amount of time watching game video, Duffey simply didn’t know the offense well enough to make the right calls on his own at the line of scrimmage so the offense had to slow down to allow him to get his reads from the sideline.

Bowman has to prove that he is ready to make those calls so that Tech can play at the tempo Yost prefers.  The good news is that Bowman does have a reputation for being a cerebral player.  That was evident in 2018 when he became Tech’s starting QB less than one quarter into his true freshman season.

However, the last time we saw him in action, the offense looked as out of sync as we’ve seen in nearly any Texas Tech football game of the past decade.  Against Arizona in week three, he completed just 30 of 55 passes.  His 54.5% completion percentage was the second-lowest of any game he’s played as a Red Raider.

What’s more, the week prior he was underwhelming against an awful UTEP team.  That night he was just 31-46 for 277 yards.

One also has to wonder how much practice time he will have prior to the start of the 2020 season and given that he was unable to practice for most of last fall and had his spring practices shut down by this year’s coronavirus pandemic, he could be further behind in his development than he should be at this point in his career.  Therefore, it’s fair to wonder how much of the offense he will have mastered by the time he returns to action and that’s certainly something he must prove for his team to have success.