Texas Tech football: Huge opportunity awaits Matt Wells on Saturday

With Oklahoma in Lubbock to face the Texas Tech football team tonight, head coach Matt Wells has a huge opportunity to win over the Red Raider fan base and show tangible progress in his attempts at rebuilding his program.

If you subscribe to the broken clock or blind squirrel theory, you know that often times, random occurrences can be explained. What’s more, you probably still aren’t sold on Matt Wells as the man who is going to turn around the Texas Tech football program, even after last weekend’s victory over West Virginia.

After all, it isn’t as if the Mountaineers are destined for glory in 2020. In fact, they will likely finish somewhere in the jumbled middle of the conference race.

However, we all will view the current coaching staff and their rebuilding efforts rather optimistically if they can author a victory tonight over No. 24 Oklahoma. It’s an opportunity for Wells the likes of which he may not have again this year and one that he would be well-advised to seize.

In the world of Big 12 football, no name carries more weight than Oklahoma. And even though the Sooners enter this game ranked just No. 24 in the nation, they are still the biggest trophy any team in this league can put on the wall. Thus, they represent Wells’ best chance at turning some serious heads around the nation and, more importantly, among his Red Raider constituency.

Beating West Virginia was a nice step in the right direction. In fact, prior to that game, I laid out why I thought that was the most important game on the 2020 schedule. But while that game was critically important, it was never going to carry the cache that beating OU would.

After all, wins over the Sooners have been hard to come by for the Red Raiders. In 27 all-time meetings between the two programs, Tech has just six wins, the most recent of which came all the way back in 2011.

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What’s more, wins against ranked teams have also been rare in the recent history of Tech football. Since the first year of the Kliff Kingsbury era (2013), Tech has won only four games against top-25 teams.

In other words, Wells has an opportunity to begin to reverse a couple of frustrating trends. And if he can, he will secure the type of victory that Texas Tech football fans have been waiting to see him put on his ledger as head coach.

Wells also needs to start stringing wins together. Thus far, his longest win-streak with the Red Raiders has been just two games and of course, those two wins came against FCS foe Montana State and lowly UTEP in his first two games with the Red Raiders.

Stacking wins on top of one another in Big 12 play has also been tough for Tech football in the last several seasons. Since Kingsbury began his first season with four-straight Big 12 wins, Tech has won back-to-back conference games on just three occasions. Unfortunately, it’s been since 2018 that we last saw that happen and not since 2013 have the Red Raiders won more than two conference tilts in a row.

Taking that idea a step forward, in none of those three occasions did the consecutive wins come over two teams with winning records. But beating OU would give the Red Raiders the second-straight quality win over a team that sits above .500 on the season. It would also give Wells a signature win to point to in his second year on the job.

ESPN.com’s Matchup Predictor isn’t high on Tech’s chances tonight. It has Wells’ team with only a 16.2% chance at winning this game.

But should Tech pull off the upset and take down the Sooners, it will be the first true sign that the Red Raiders’ current rebuild is finally picking up legitimate momentum. And that’s the type of progress that the overwhelmingly cynical majority of the fan base needs to see before fully buying into Matt Wells as the leader of this program.