Texas Tech football: Moral victories have to stop before progress can begin

If the Texas Tech football program is ever going to get back to where we all want it to be, moral victories are going to have to stop being what defines Red Raider football.

There will be plenty of time to perform an autopsy on Saturday’s 63-56 overtime loss to the Texas Longhorns. I’m not in the mood for that right now.

But what every Red Raider fan has to agree with is the fact that these moral victories against so-called “elite” teams have to stop being the calling card of Red Raider football. Until that happens, this program is going to continue to languish in obscurity near the bottom of the Big 12’s hierarchy and farther from the national consciousness than Lubbock is from the moon.

Sure, the Red Raiders should be proud of the effort they put forth against the No. 8 team in the nation after two weeks of hearing everyone, even those of us who bleed scarlet and black, say that they were going to get humiliated by the Longhorns. That didn’t happen.

But simply covering a three-touchdown spread doesn’t mean anything to anyone other than those who had money on the game. To the rest of us, simply coming close to knocking off top-10 teams is not enough.

Tech has now lost its last nine games to a top-10 opponent. That streak spans two different head coaching regimes, seven different full-time starting QBs, and hundreds of players. It isn’t a Matt Wells or Kliff Kingsbury or Davis Webb or Pat Mahomes or Alan Bowman problem. It is a Texas Tech football problem and one that fans are sick of having to endure.

In 2014, Kingsbury and Mahomes nearly beat No. 7 Baylor but, unlike Texas on Saturday, they couldn’t come up with a successful 2-point conversion at the end of regulation in a 48-46 loss. In 2015, Mahomes and Tech had No. 3 TCU down to 4th-and-goal in the final minute when the Frogs came up with an improbable TD reception off of a deflected pass to secure a 55-52 victory.

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Tech could have beaten No. 7 Oklahoma in Lubbock in 2018 but couldn’t make enough plays in the second half following an injury to Alan Bowman. In fact, in the 51-46 loss, the Red Raiders were leading at halftime.

What’s more, other chances for upsets of ranked teams have continually slipped through this program’s hands. There was last year’s double-OT loss to Baylor. Though the Big 12 refs screwed Tech out of a win in the 33-30 loss, Tech allowed Baylor to drive 99 yards in the final minute of the game to tie the score at the end of regulation.

On the other hand, the Red Raiders couldn’t make a simple extra-point to potentially force OT in Stillwater in 2016. After taking No. 13 Oklahoma State to the wire, Tech couldn’t execute the simplest of plays in the game of football.

The problem is that “should-have”, ‘nearly”, “almost”, “close”, and “just about” are the rallying cries of the defeated. They are hollow words that losers use to try to insulate themselves from the pain of repeatedly failing to accomplish their goal.

They are also words that must leave the Texas Tech football vernacular. Until they stop being as embedded into this program as “Guns Up” and “Long Live the Matadors”, we are going to continue to have to live in a world where Texas Tech football is relegated to the role of a second or even third-class citizen who only gets invited to sit at the adult table simply to be the punching bag and the laughing stock of the conference elite.

That could have begun to change on Saturday when Tech led 56-41 with under three minutes to play after a 75-yard SaRodorick Thompson TD run. But it didn’t as questionable coaching decisions, a special teams blunder, and horrible secondary play down the stretch caused the Red Raiders to lose a game that could have been program-altering. But it shouldn’t come as a surprise because “could have” is about all that Texas Tech football has given us in the last decade.