Texas Tech football: Red Raiders that must step up vs. Mountaineers
If the Texas Tech football team is going to beat West Virginia today, these Red Raiders are going to have to take their game to a higher level.
Playing in West Texas has been no big deal for West Virginia. In fact, the Mountaineers may actually look forward to making the Big 12’s longest road trip every other year.
Overall, WVU is 3-1 at Jones Stadium as a Big 12 rival. That includes a 3-game winning streak on the South Plains.
We all remember the one loss. It was the most glorious day of the last decade for the Texas Tech football program.
Back in 2012, an unranked Texas Tech team welcomed the No. 5 Mountaineers to town for what was that program’s first all-time trip to Lubbock. To say that the Red Raiders were not good hosts that day would be more than fair. In a 49-14 win on a day when a stiff northerly wind seemed to get into the Mountaineers’ head, Tech QB Seth Doege threw for 499 yards and six TDs while tight end Jace Amaro had his most iconic game as Red Raider with 156 yards and a TD on just five receptions.
But since then, WVU has had far better luck at The Jones. And “luck” is exactly what propelled them to a win in 2014. After trailing by as many as 14 points in the fourth quarter, WVU saw an ugly 55-yard FG wobble its way through the uprights as time expired for a 37-34 win.
That game was maddening because the Red Raiders led almost the entire way until the WVU comeback began in earnest in the final eight minutes. And fans to this day still bemoan Tommy Tuberville’s decision to punt the ball from the WVU 46 on Tech’s final possession instead of trying to convert a 4th-and-3. (That decision and the subsequent outcome is the perfect anecdote for the Tuberville era.)
Luck didn’t need to be on WVU’s side in 2016’s trip to Lubbock. That’s because the Mountaineers thoroughly dominated a Pat Mahomes led Red Raider team 48-17 in a game that saw the two teams scuffle during pregame warmups. Unfortunately, that was about as much fight as the home team would muster that afternoon as Tech fell behind 24-7 at the break and never threatened to make the afternoon interesting.
The 2018 visit from West Virginia was interesting but not for pleasant reasons. Rather, that was the day that Alan Bowman‘s career as a Red Raider took a dramatic turn for the worse when he suffered his first of what would be two collapsed lungs that fall.
At the time we went down, it wasn’t going well for the Red Raiders as they were already down 28-10 on their way to a 35-10 halftime hole. But backup QB Jett Duffey nearly rallied his team to a win. In fact, in the middle of the fourth quarter, he had pulled the Red Raiders to within eight points but a pick-six would end any hopes of a Red Raider stunner as the Mountaineers would prevail 42-34.
We talk quite often about how the Red Raiders must start to regain some semblance of a home-field advantage and the series against WVU illustrates just how poor of a job this program has done at defending its own turf in recent years. That needs to change today and for that to happen, these Red Raiders will need to take their game to a higher level.