Texas Tech football: The most underrated players of the Tommy Tuberville era

The Tommy Tuberville era is one we would all like to forget but we shouldn’t forget some of the players that gave their all for the Texas Tech football program during that three-year span.

A decade has passed since Tommy Tuberville was hired to replace Mike Leach as Texas Tech football head coach.  Yet, the former Ole Miss, Auburn, and Cincinnati head coach remains one of the most hated men in West Texas.

On one hand, the man who is now running for a United States Senate seat in Alabama was in a no-win situation in 2010 given the turmoil that brought about his hiring.  No one short of Bear Bryant himself would have been good enough to satisfy Red Raider fans after the abrupt and controversial way the Leach era ended.   And to be fair, the results on the field during Tuberville’s three seasons (2010-12) were not atrocious, at least when measured against what we’ve seen lately.

With an overall record of 20-17, Tuberbille took the Red Raiders to bowl games in his first and third seasons on the job.  Along the way, he pulled off two upsets of top 5 teams when he beat No. 3 Oklahoma in Norman in 2011 and No. 5 West Virginia in Lubbock in 2012.

But what Tuberville did to the program away from the field was what began Tech’s descent to the depths of the Big 12.  In a time when the fan base was already bitterly divided over the Leach firing, Tech needed a head coach that could be a unifying presence.  Instead, it got Tuberville.

From almost the moment he took over, Tuberville began to rub people in West Texas the wrong way.  And though he was in town for just three years, the list of his missteps was lengthy.

In 2010, he blamed his team’s poor offensive showing in a 34-17 home loss to Oklahoma State on the wind.  Somehow, the Cowboys didn’t seem all that bothered by Mother Nature and when Tuberville began to use one of West Texas’ most famous trademarks for a loss, it did not play well with his constituency.

Of course, that wasn’t the first time he had complained about the Lubbock weather.  In February of his first year in charge, he bemoaned a chilly spell in Lubbock that made spring practice uncomfortable.  It was a far cry from the days when Leach used to make his players practice in the snow and it should have given us an early look into what Tuberville was all about.

In November of 2011, Tuberville’s wife was accused of leaving the scene of an accident after she struck a pedestrian with her vehicle.  Four months later, her victim later passed away as a result of his injuries further casting the Tuberville name in a negative light in the Hub City.

Accused of fraud in February of 2012 for his role in a hedge fund gone wrong, Tuberville had his own legal issues that brought Texas Tech into a negative situation for no reason.  Then, ten months later, he slapped a member of his coaching staff on the sidelines during a game against Kansas.  He later attempted to pass the situation off as a “miscommunication” and was not disciplined by the school or the Big 12.

In other words, rarely did more than a few months go by from 2010-13 without a new Tommy Tuberville controversy.  Coaches like Leach can overcome such actions by winning big but when a coach goes 9-17 in conference play as Tuberville did, the fans are going to be quick to turn on him and that certainly proved to be the case with Red Raider fans.

Perhaps one of the most unfortunate aspects of the Tuberville controversies is that they make us want to pretend like those years didn’t happen.  That’s a shame for the players that gave their all for the program during that time, many of whom are destined to be mere footnotes in one of the ugliest periods in program history.

So let’s give some of them their due by looking back at the most underrated players of the Tuberville era.  Because though their coach remains persona non grata on the South Plains, they should be remembered for what they brought to Texas Tech football.