Texas Tech football: Unpleasant streaks that need to end in 2020

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Defensive end Eli Howard #53 of the Texas Tech Red Raiders battles past right tackle Nick Kaltmayer #77 of the Kansas State Wildcats (Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images) /

4 game losing streaks to both Kansas State and Iowa State

In 2018, the Red Raiders put to bed a 9-game losing streak to Oklahoma State by thumping the Cowboys 41-17 in Stillwater. But the other two teams in the Big 12 with the word “state” in their name each own 4-game winning streaks over Tech heading into 2020.

The fact that Tech can no longer manage to beat Iowa State or Kansas State is a sobering reality for Red Raider fans. No offense to those programs but they are not exactly dominant football machines….except for when they play the Red Raiders.

With OU clearly sitting atop the conference ladder and UT always being the conference champion in revenue, they are perennially the two top dogs in the league. That means the rest of the conference is an annual struggle to crash the Longhorns’ and Sooners’ party and Tech needs to start beating teams like the Cyclones and Wildcats in order to be the program capable of threatening OU’s and Texas’ stranglehold on the league.

The last time the Red Raiders beat either KSU or ISU was in 2015. That year, Pat Mahomes and his team throttled the Cyclones 66-31 and outlasted KSU 59-44 with both wins coming in Lubbock.

This season, Tech has to face both of those teams on the road in what are two of the most tricky road environments in the conference. But Tech needs to figure out a way to end at least one of these streaks in 2020 because until wins against the Wildcats and Cyclones become more commonplace again, it seems unlikely that this program’s fortunes will begin to improve.

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