Texas Tech football fans are beginning to lose any type of confidence in head coach Matt Wells and the following trends from his career are huge reasons why.
I wanted to like him. And when it comes to the type of human being he is, I still do. He’s earnest in his intentions and he works hard at his craft. But despite his likeability, I’ve already come to a place where I have no faith in Texas Tech head coach Matt Wells as a football coach.
Wells is trending downward. But astute observers know that his career regression started before he arrived on the South Plains late in 2018.
Now, after a 1-3 start to 2020 and with a QB controversy brewing in his locker room, Wells finds himself on the dreaded hot seat. Whether or not he is on the hot seat in the mind of athletic director Kirby Hocutt is unknown but when everyone in the nation can see that Texas Tech football is trending downward, one has to imagine that Hocutt notices as well and thoughts of whether or not a change needs to be made have to have entered his mind already, just 16 games into the Wells era.
So far, the man who was brought in to lead the program just days after Hocutt promised the fan base that Red Raider football would be “elite” again has been anything but. He’s gone just 5-11, a winning percentage of just 31.2%, and only two of those wins have come against Big 12 teams.
That is the third-worst winning percentage of any head coach in program history. He trails only Grady Higginbotham, who was 1-7-2 (20%) in 1929, and Jerry Moore, who had a 30.9% success rate from 1981-85.
Interestingly, the fourth-worst winning percentage in Red Raider history belongs to the man Wells was hired to replace, Kliff Kingsbury. What’s telling though is that Kingsbury was far more successful with a winning percentage of 46.6%.
Now, the talk of the fan base is centering around whether a change already needs to be made. In fact, on the first pages of the two most visited Texas Tech sports message boards, there were a total of 16 threads concerning Wells’ status or something related to it (such as potential replacements, money for his buyout, etc.) when I began composing this article.
What’s more, of those threads, only one is pro-Wells while another is neutral. The rest are all crying for his head.
The problem is that there just aren’t many reasons for those of us who entered 2020 willing to give the Wells staff a fair shot to believe that this ship is going to turn around. After all, it is listing heavily and taking on water and the captain is a man who has never said the treacherous waters of Power 5 football.
Personally, I’m to the point where I no longer believe that Wells is going to have the type of success in Lubbock that we all want to see the program have. Though I’m not calling for his firing in the middle of the season, I am in the camp that has made up our minds about the failure of this hire and which will have to be convinced otherwise by overwhelming evidence, not just a random win or two.
The reason I don’t think Wells is ever going to bring this program back to a place of national relevance is that there are simply too many trends from over the course of his career that suggest otherwise. So as we take a look at those trends, if you are undecided, ask yourself if you think Wells’ history suggests that any marked improvements are imminent.