Texas Tech basketball: My favorite in-person memories as a Red Raider
Dunk-block-dunk vs. TCU on Big Monday in 2019
Another school that we all despise has to be TCU. And without question, the Horned Frogs’ head coach Jamie Dixon is especially villainous to Red Raider fans.
That’s because for some reason Dixon is lauded by the national media as a coaching savant despite the fact that he’s never accomplished half of what Chris Beard has. In fact, until Beard guided his 2018-19 team to the national title game it was common for Dixon to appear higher than Beard on the various rankings of Big 12 coaches. That fact only served to fuel the hatred Texas Tech basketball fans have towards the Horned Frogs and their massively overrated head coach.
That’s why we love to see our team humble and even humiliate Dixon’s team and never did that happen more thoroughly than on big Monday in 2019. In front of a nationally televised audience the Red Raiders handed TCU an 84-65 beat down and it featured one of the most iconic sequences of the Beard era.
Late in the second half, Tech put together a dunk-block-dunk sequence that put the most resounding of exclamation points on a dominant victory. It also provided a signature moment in a win in which the Red Raiders ended a three-game Big 12 losing streak and seemed to turn the corner on the 2018–19 season.
The series began when Jarrett Culver hit Tariq Ownes for a dunk off of a no-look pass. On the other end of the floor, Owens then came up with a huge block at the rim which started a fast break that ended with Culver finishing an alley-oop from Davide Moretti.
When the sequence took place, the Red Raiders already held a 16 point lead, and being as there was only 3:39 to play the game had long since been decided. But what this sequence of events accomplished was to provide an emphatic stamp on a victory over a team, a university, and a coach that Red Raider fans simply love to put in their place.
My hatred for Jamie Dixon almost rivals my hatred for Bob Huggins. So when the Red Raiders put together this three-possession series of events, I along with the rest of the sellout crowd went berserk in what was almost a primal bloodletting on the South Plains.
In fact, when Culver ended this run with his dunk, I began to let out a series of profanities directed towards Dixon and TCU which served no purpose but to let off some pent-up animosity being as there was no way anyone else could have heard them given how deafening the capacity crowd was that evening.
Granted, TCU basketball is an afterthought in the Big 12 and Jamie Dixon is being proven to be a fraud in Fort Worth. So far, his greatest accomplishment at his alma mater has been to win the NIT. Still, it’s exhilarating to humiliate them.
Thus, the Red Raiders should always play the role of the windshield to the gnat that is TCU basketball. But that doesn’t make beating the Toads any less satisfying and never has more vitriol been unleashed towards Dixon and his team than during this unforgettable three-possession sequence that was broadcast nationwide by ESPN.