Texas Tech football: Nothing is improving under Matt Wells’ leadership

After another frustrating loss, this time to Kansas State, it is apparent that nothing is changing thus far into the Matt Wells era.

You’ll have to excuse Texas Tech football fans for feeling as if we have a sense of deja vu after Saturday’s 31-21 loss to Kansas State.  That’s because the latest Red Raider defeat followed an all-too-familiar script of defensive ineptitude, untimely penalties, special teams’ blunders, and a fourth-quarter collapse.  It’s what this program has shown us for the last decade and proof that nothing is getting better under Matt Wells’ guidance.  In fact, the state of the program is arguably worse than it was when he took over.

At least when Kliff Kingsbury was head coach, the Red Raider fan base was all pulling in one direction.  We all supported and genuinely liked the man who was the face of the program.

That helped us cope together during all of the tough losses and frustrating missteps of his six years on the job.  But now, there is a bitterness boiling up towards the new leader of Texas Tech football and it is threatening to torpedo what’s left of the already leaky state of the program.

The problem is that we had to go through the painful divorce with Kingsbury, one of the most beloved figures in the history of the university, only to find ourselves almost two calendar years later in a worse place than we were in 2018 and having to turn to a man few of us wanted to run our program as our only option for salvation.

When Wells was hired, a common refrain uttered by Red Raider fans was “We fired Kliff for this guy?”  Now, 15 games into the Wells experiment, that sentiment is as valid as it ever was.

In fairness, Kingsbury needed to go.  As we’ve seen from him in the years since his axing, he is better suited for the NFL than the college game.

But it is now starting to feel like the last season-plus of the Wells era has been nothing but a waste of time.  There are no signs of progress on the field as Tech has gone now just 5-10 in his tenure with only two Big 12 wins.  There’s no progress on the recruiting trail as Tech currently has the No. 9 class in the Big 12 and the No. 82 class in the nation.  There’s also no improvement in the play of the team as mistake after mistake continues to cost the Red Raiders winnable games.

What aspect of this program is any better because of Matt Wells’ touch?  I’ll let you think on that for a while because any potential answer is far from obvious.

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This offense still can’t come up with game-winning scores in the fourth quarter.  After scoring to take a 21-17 lead early in the 4th quarter against K-State, Tech went interception-punt-turnover on downs on its final three possessions of the game.

The defense continues to be picked apart by offenses when the game is on the line.   After taking the afore-mentioned lead, Keith Patterson’s defense let a KSU offense led by a true freshman QB to score on two TDs of its next three possessions to put the game away.

Special teams are constantly an embarrassing series of blunders.  Saturday, Tech kicker Trey Wolff missed two more field goals and the Red Raiders allowed KSU to block their first punt of the game to set up the Wildcat’s first TD.

These are the same fatal flaws that Tech made during the Kingsbury era and they are what Wells was brought in to correct.  But’s he’s not correcting them.  Rather, he’s simply fumbling his way through this multi-million dollar job with the same amount of incompetence as his predecessor and that’s not the bill of goods we were sold by AD Kirby Hocutt when Wells was hired.

In fact, in the fall of 2018, when he fired Kingsbury, Hocutt was throwing around the term “elite” when describing what the Texas Tech football program would be once again.   What’ we’ve seen since is as far from elite as Lubbock is from Mars.

Matt Wells is trying hard.  That’s not the issue.  I believe he’s doing the best he knows how.  But he’s in over his head.

This is a hard job that appears to be more than he is able to handle.  It requires coaches that can take average talent and coach it to be better than other Big 12 teams.

What player has become appreciably better while playing under Wells?  The list begins with SaRodorick Thomspon and then trails off rather quickly.  Perhaps Douglas Coleman is the only other Wells success story and he’s graduated.

The point is that Wells had an opportunity to make a statement on Saturday.  A win would have shown to the fan base that his program had become mature enough to bounce back after such a gut-wrenching come-from-ahead loss as it suffered last week against Texas.

But that didn’t happen.  Instead, we got another repeat of the same old story that has been Texas Tech football over the last decade.  We were shown that this program is not even able to keep up with the Kansas States of the world.  While KSU is coming off of an 8-win season and is on its way to another successful campaign under its second-year head coach, Tech is starting down the barled of its fifth-straight losing season.

Now just 1-2 on the season, Wells looks to be on the verge of being swept up in avalanche of losses with Iowa State, West Virginia, and Oklahoma the next three teams on the schedule.  With Alan Bowman potentially out for those games after leaving Saturday’s contest with an apparent ankle injury, it seems unlikely that this season is going to turn around and even if he plays, we’ve seen no reason to believe Tech can pull out of its current tailspin even in those rare instances when they have their QB 1 on the field.

What’s more, Tech is one two-point win over an FCS team from being 0-3 to start Wells’ second year…you know…the one in which most expect a coach’s system to make a huge difference.

Red Raider fans have seen from this program what we saw in Manhattan far too often in recent memory and it’s killed the spirit of what was once a rabid football fan base.  We were promised improvement.  We were promised hope.  We were promised “elite”.  But all Wells is giving us is the same brand of awful football that we’ve had for the last ten years.  So why exactly should we give any more of our emotional equity to a coach and to a program that simply doesn’t deserve it?