Texas Tech football: Matt Wells gives interesting 2020 insights in radio interview

How the program is handling the return of the players this summer

If any program needed all the offseason work it could get this year, it would be Texas Tech.  After a disappointing 4-8 season, this football team not only needed to find new contributors, it needed to better its grasp of the schemes on both sides of the ball and, it needed to start to work key players back into the fold after they missed much of last year.

But for the last three months, the Red Raiders have been unable to workout together and any player development has had to come at home and not under the watchful eye of the coaching staff.  So you have to assume Wells and Co. are chomping at the bit to get their players together again.

"“Certainly, I think there’s a lot to be said for taking your time with [bringing players back] even though humanly you want them here I mean right, I want to be at right now,” Wells said.  “I’ve been missing them since March 12.  But as you’ve seen things, some teams that are ahead of us [in this process], I’m talking to some of those head coaches ‘What’d you do good what would you’ve done different?’ and etc. “But yeah Matt, we’re preparing here at Texas Tech our guys are getting back really…this weekend. A decent amount of them, Matt, have been here in Lubbock the duration of the pandemic.  So our guys are getting back and we’ll do a self-imposed quarantine.  We’ll test late next week and then certainly like you mentioned the 15th [when team workouts can begin] and you do you only got them just a little bit of time in that voluntary time to lift and run and yet they do need to be socially responsible and we got to maintain some of those social distancing practices.”"

We’ve always overlooked the importance of a program’s strength and conditioning staff because what they do is seen only by those inside the football facility.  But their work is as important to what happens on Saturdays in the fall as anyone in the programs.

This year, that will be even more so the case because their ability to get their players back in shape and then to the point where they can make significant gains from a physical standpoint could be the determining factor between wins and losses.  This shortened offseason will separate the elite strength coaches from the rest and here’s hoping that head strength and conditioning coach Dave Scholz and his staff prove to be among the best in the Big 12.