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Texas Tech football: Ranking 2020’s games by importance to Matt Wells (No. 7-12)

By Matthew Conner

LUBBOCK, TEXAS - OCTOBER 05: Head coach Matt Wells of the Texas Tech Red Raiders leaves the field after the college football game against the Oklahoma State Cowboys on October 05, 2019 at Jones AT&T Stadium in Lubbock, Texas. (Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images)
LUBBOCK, TEXAS - OCTOBER 05: Head coach Matt Wells of the Texas Tech Red Raiders leaves the field after the college football game against the Oklahoma State Cowboys on October 05, 2019 at Jones AT&T Stadium in Lubbock, Texas. (Photo by John E. Moore III/Getty Images) /
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Head coach Matt Campbell of the Iowa State Cyclones  (Photo by David K Purdy/Getty Images)
Head coach Matt Campbell of the Iowa State Cyclones  (Photo by David K Purdy/Getty Images) /

No. 8 – Iowa State

The most sobering reality that we must face is the fact that almost all of us as Texas Tech football fans have come to accept losing to Iowa State as a given.  Iowa…freaking…State.

On the one hand, Tech still holds an 11-7 edge in the all-time series.  But just four short years ago, that lead was 11-3.  My how times have changed.

College football’s Adam Sandler doppelganger, Matt Campbell, has turned Iowa State into what Tech was in the 2000s; the program that is closest on a yearly basis to breaking the Oklahoma/Texas stronghold on the conference.  Sure, Baylor jumped up there last year but right now, the Cyclones get more benefit of the doubt than any program in the conference outside of the two Red River Rivalry combatants.

Thus, if Wells’ team leaves Ames with its tail between its legs again in 2020, it won’t move the needle much in Lubbock.  After all, even Pat Mahomes spit the bit at Jack Trice Stadium in 2016’s 66-10 debacle.  Hopefully, the fact that Tech’s trip to Ames this year is in late September, rather than in November as so many of the program’s recent games in the Big 12’s northernmost city have been, will work to neutralize the weather advantage that ISU has so often enjoyed over Tech.

Granted, a win in what has become maybe the toughest road environment in the conference outside of Norman would be cause for much-renewed hope and excitement.  That’s because Iowa State is one of the programs Tech needs to jump past in order to get to where we all want to see it.

But in the world of Red Raider fandom, Iowa State has become a program whose success we simply can’t begrudge.  Thus, a loss in Ames this year isn’t going to be interpreted as a sign of the apocalypse in West Texas.

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