Texas Tech football classics: Red Raiders score emotional win in 2010 Alamo Bowl
In January of 2010. the Texas Tech football program picked up one of the most emotional wins in program history by winning the Alamo Bowl over Michigan State.
Sometimes sports have the power to divide us while at other times the can heal us. That’s what the 2010 Alamo Bowl and the week leading up to it did for Texas Tech football fans.
On the surface, a game between two unranked teams should have been just another run of the mill college bowl game in an oversaturated landscape. But in reality, this was one of the most important games in Tech history.
It wasn’t that the outcome had the potential to vault Tech football to new heights. There was nothing on the line from a national perspective. But what was up for grabs was a chance to mend the heart of Red Raider football fans.
Just five days prior, Tech had fired the winningest head coach in program history, Mike Leach, in the wake of allegations that he locked receiver Adam James in an electrical shed during practice when James had a concussion. We won’t rehash that entire episode but should you care to do so, you can take a look at this piece we ran last year.
In the final week of 2009, for the first time that almost any of us could recall, what happened in the office of Chancellor Kent Hance took president over what was to happen on the football field. And when Leach and Hance could not salvage a working relationship, the course of Texas Tech football was forever altered.
Still, there was a game to play less than a week later. Defensive coordinator Ruffin McNeil was given the interim head coach title and asked to do what only he could have, bring his shell-shocked team of young men together well enough to play a football game.
But also lost in the shuffle that week was the fact that Tech’s opponent in the Alamo Bowl, Michigan State, was dealing with its own massive controversy. By the time the game rolled around, 14 Spartan players were suspended from the team, including a number of starters, leaving head coach Mark Dantonio quite a daunting task in his own right.
Still, this game meant so much more for Texas Tech than it did for Michigan State. Not only was it a pseudo job interview for McNeil, but it was also the chance for an angry and still somewhat confused fan base to come together and for one evening, forget all about electrical sheds, celebrity fathers, school administrators, and difficult to deal with former head coaches. It was a chance to get back to football.
Sometimes sports divide us. Sometimes they can also unite us.
In the weeks and years after this game, the Red Raider populace would be divided like never before as fans took sides in the Leach vs. Hance showdown. That chasm only grew thanks to the ill-fitting replacement for Leach, Tommy Tuberville, who proved to be the most divisive head coach in program history.
But let’s look back at the actual game, a 41-31 Red Raider victory, that was played on January 2, 2010, because even without the controversial backdrop, it was a highly-entertaining contest. And it is one we should appreciate because for one moment, it was an example of how sports give us unification when we need it the most.