Texas Tech football: Blame the man truly responsible for program’s demise, not Wells

Fans are furious about the sad state of Texas Tech football but let’s make sure that our anger is direcrted at the right man.

After another loss in another winnable Big 12 game, Matt Wells might be the most unpopular man in Lubbock since disgraced former car dealer Bart Reagor. However, the bulk of our anger over the current state of Texas Tech football should be aimed not at the head coach. Rather, it should be pointed at the man who has truly run the program into the ground, Kirby Hocutt.

Of course, Wells is doing an awful job of trying to rebuild Tech football but he’s doing it earnestly. He isn’t complaining about what Lubbock and Texas Tech don’t have to offer or making excuses like Tommy Tuberville did nor is he mailing it in in key areas such as recruiting and fundraising like Kilff Kingsbury did.

Rather, Wells is putting his all into his current job. The problem is that the job appears to be too big for him.

After all, he has never built a program from the ground up the way he’s being asked to in Lubbock. In his only other head coaching stop, at his alma mater Utah State, he took over a program that had been resurrected by Gary Anderson.

Prior to Wells assuming the reins in Logan in 2013, the Aggies had made it to back-to-back bowl games and had won 11 games in 2012. While Wells was the offensive coordinator for much of that upswing, he wasn’t the architech of that turnaround. Anderson was.

Thus, it was foolish to believe that Wells would simply waltz into West Texas and have success. After all, in his last four years as Utah State head coach, he’d had three losing campaigns.

Honestly, the Wells we are seeing in Lubbock is the guy he was at Utah State. He’s proving to be a mediocre coach who is no more qualified to run a Big 12 program than his predecessor was.

Thus, we shouldn’t be angry at Wells. That’s like being angry at water for being wet. He is what he is (a run of the mill college coach) and he can’t be blamed for that.

However, the man who decided to give him the keys to the castle deserves all the vitriol that Texas Tech football fans decide to throw his way. That’s because the one man most responsible for the downfall of this program is not Craig James, Kent Hance, Tommy Tuberville, Kliff Kingsbury, or Matt Wells. Rather, it is Kirby Hocutt.

We are now in the middle of the eighth year under a head coach of Hocutt’s choosing. During that time, Tech has a record of 40-50. What’s worse is that in that time, the Red Raiders’ Big 12 record is just 21-44.

Along the way, Hocutt has made two colossally poor decisions that have set the program back years.

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First was the contract extension he gave Kliff Kingsbury following the 2013 season. Despite the fact that Kingsbury had just one year as a head coach under his belt, Hocutt rewarded him for an 8-5 season with a six-year extension worth over $24 million dollars.

As the Kingsbury experiment played out and it became painfully obvious that he wasn’t meant to run a college football program, it was that massive extension that deterred Hocutt from moving on from Kingsbury and ultimately motivating Hocutt to give Kingsbury at least two extra years to try to get his act together.

But after Hocutt bit the bullet and canned Kingsbury following the 2018 season, he had an opportunity to right that wrong by making a quality hire to replace him. But 15 games into Wells’ hiring, it appears as if that didn’t happen.

Tech is just 5-10 in Wells’ tenure and there’s little evidence of progress within his program. He’s quickly moving towards becoming the third failed head football coach hiring of Hocutt’s tenure joining Kingsbury and Al Golden, who Hocutt hired to be the head coach at Miami in 2010.

But where Hocutt went so egregiously wrong in the wake of the Kingsbury firing is by conducting the most narrow and egotistical coaching search one could imagine. Shucking convention by refusing to work with a search firm or seriously consider any outside input, he interviewed only two candidates other than Wells (Jim Leavitt and Seth Littrell) and did a disservice to Texas Tech University by not exahusting every option possible before deciding on the most important hire of his career; one that would forever alter the course of Red Raider football.

Along the way, he refused to even speak with the West Virignia heas coach Dana Holgorsen and turned his nose up at candidates like current West Virginia head coach Neal Brown (whose team is currently 2-1 after taking down Baylor on Saturday) and current SMU head coach Sonny Dykes (who has his team at 4-0 after knocking off No. 25 Memphis on Saturday).

Make no mistake, while Hocutt technically interviewed two men other than Wells, he conducted a one-man search and gave serious thought to only one candidate, Wells (after Hocutt’s college roomate Brent Venables declined to interview for the job).

Now, we are stuck with the fruits of that ill-conceived process and those fruits have quicly grown rotten. Therefore, the author of Tech’s current mess isn’t Wells. He’s merely the delivery system of our latestt round of bitterness and despiar.

Rather, the man who deserves the lion’s share of the blame for Tech’s slide into obscurity is the man who doesn’t seem capable of making the right football hire if given the choice between Bear Bryant or Bear Grylls.

Sure, be angry at Wells for continuting Tech’s downward spiral if you want. After all, he is the face of the program and he deserves criticism for sure. But the person who truly deserves the blame for this mess and who should bare the brunt of our anger is the man who has twice had an opportunity to save Texas Tech football and who has twice failed miserably in that endeavor; Kirby Hocutt.