Texas Tech basketball: Underrated players from the dark ages of the program
Though the time between the Bob Knight and the Chris Beard era of Texas Tech basketball was one that we would like to forget, we shouldn’t discard the work of these underrated players.
When we go through tough times, well-intentioned people like to tell us that the valleys in life are more important than the peaks because it is in the valleys where life grows. But for Texas Tech basketball fans, nothing grew in the valley that was the eight-season run of futility between the Bob Knight and Chris Beard eras of the program. Nothing but frustration that is.
No one will ever look back fondly on those years. Overall, Tech went just 111-147 from 2008-09 through 2015-16. That included a record in Big 12 play of just 34-104.
The absolute rock bottom for the program was the 2011-12 season when Tech was just 8-23 overall and 1-17 in Big 12 play. It was the lone season of Billy Gillespie’s time in Lubbock and it was that one-year disaster that perfectly summed up how the Red Raiders fell to being one of the worst high-major programs in the nation.
Constant turnover will kill a program faster than anything and when Gillespie arrived, Tech basketball was already in a tailspin after the three-year Pat Knight era, which featured two losing seasons and no NCAA Tournament appearances. Thus, the program needed a stabilizing presence to right the ship. Instead, they hired one of the most unstable and volatile names in the game.
Already having flammed out at one of the most coveted jobs in the basketball world, Kentucky, Gillespie was chosen to shepherd the future of Texas Tech basketball despite being just two years removed from a DUI arrest in Kentucky, his third DUI since 1999. He was also just two years from settling a lawsuit against Kentucky stemming from his termination in March of 2009.
Though he was not charged with any DUIs in Lubbock, he was only on the job for a year and a half when he resigned citing medical reasons. That felt rather convenient given that he was in the midst of a controversy for allegedly violating NCAA limits on practice time and for mistreating players.
As a result, assistant coach Chris Walker had to take over as interim head coach just weeks before the 2012-13 season was set to begin. The results were about as ugly as one could have predicted.
Walker did the best he could with the talent on his roster and given the circumstances he inherited but that still yielded just an 11-20 record which included a mark of 3-15 in league play. Thus, his stay in town ended that offseason when he was not permanently promoted to head coach as Tech hired Tubby Smith.
While Smith was the right hire and the steadying hand this program needed, his arrival came too late to save Texas Tech basketball from falling to its lowest point in decades. Having four head coaches in the span of just four years was even more damaging to Red Raider basketball than the run of seven different defensive coordinators in seven years was to the football program from 2009-2015.
The five year run of losing seasons from 2010-11 to 2015-16 was the longest such run of futility in the history of the program. It truly was the dark ages of Tech hoops.
Because those years were so awful, fans turned away from the program in droves. That meant that the U.S.A. was lucky to see 5,000 fans for most games during that time and it also meant that the players who represented the program during that era were largely unnoticed and underappreciated.
So let’s give some of them their due. Here are the most underrated Texas Tech basketball players from 2008-2016.