Texas Tech football: Unpleasant streaks that need to end in 2020
When the next Texas Tech football season finally rolls around, here’s hoping the following streaks finally come to an end.
The decade of the 2000s still hangs heavy over the Texas Tech football program. As the best run of sustained success in the history of Red Raider football, it is a paradoxical decade.
On the one hand, it was the most fun we’ve ever had as Texas Tech football fans as Mike Leach and his “Air Raid” offense revolutionized the sport across all levels of the game. And that decade gave us some of the greatest stars to ever come through Lubbock including Kliff Kingsbury, Wes Welker, B.J. Symons, Taurean Henderson, Danny Amendola, Michael Crabtree, and Graham Harrell.
But as we look towards a new decade, the golden era of the program continues to fade further into the West Texas sunset. Still, that doesn’t mean it is coming close to being forgotten.
Rather, the success of the 2000s has become a ghost that haunts the current state of the program, a reminder of what is possible but yet so difficult to achieve…becoming consistently relevant on a national scale. With those of us who were in school during that decade now entering the period of adulthood where we provide much of the financial support that the program has come to depend on, there’s still a hunger for that success to return but that comes with an unwillingness to accept the kind of mediocrity that previous generation of Red Raider fans had grown up being accustomed to.
Though it may be unfair, every head coach since Leach has been compared to the crazy pirate and all have come up woefully short. And until another head coach can replicate the success Leach was able to manufacture, those comparisons will continue (at least until those of us who witnessed the 2000s in person either die off or grow so old that we can’t remember those good old days).
Just think about some of the amazing streaks that Tech put together during that decade. Those ten seasons were part of a streak of 18-straight years without a losing season (1993-2010). Inside that streak, Tech went the final 16 years with at least a winning record. What’s more, from 2000-2010, the Red Raiders went to a bowl game eleven straight seasons.
As the “Air Raid” got rolling, Tech went seven seasons in a row (2002-2008) with a 4,000-yard passer. That stretch also produced a 1,000-yard receiver every year.
Those were joyous times on the South Plains. But unfortunately, the last decade gave us nothing but frustration and negative streaks as Texas Tech football fell to its lowest place since the woeful Jerry Moore era of the 1980s.
Thankfully, a new decade has dawned and hopefully, that will bring a change of course for the Red Raiders. So let’s take a look at ten streaks that we hope end in 2020.