Texas Tech basketball: Five swing games on the 2020-21 schedule

The full Texas Tech basketball schedule was finally released last week so let’s take a look at five swing games that could tip the balance of this season.

It took until about three weeks prior to the start of the season but we finally have a complete Texas Texas basketball schedule.  Now, the season truly feels as if it is about to start and we can begin to turn our focus to Red Raider hoops after another dismal Texas Tech football season.

This year, Tech’s regular-season schedule has been cut down to 27 games, down from the usual 31 games.  That’s due to the late start as the sport scrambled to make plans on how to proceed in the face of the current pandemic.

Typically, the season begins in early November but this year, Thanksgiving week is the starting point.  What’s more, the Big 12 portion of the schedule will begin in mid-December meaning that there will be less than a month between the start of the season and the start of conference action.  That’s not necessarily ideal for a team with seven newcomers like Texas Tech.

Also, the Red Raiders will not play a game on another team’s campus until the second game of league play when Chris Beard takes his team to Norman, Oklahoma to face the Sooners.  With two neutral-site games as the only contests outside of Lubbock in the pre-Big 12 portion of the season, it is fair to wonder just how much more difficult the season’s first true road game will be.

Of course, road games, in general, may not be that big of an issue this year given that arenas around the nation will be operating at a limited capacity.  But unfortunately, that fact will also neutralize the fantastic home-court advantage that Texas Tech has built over the past five years.

Another interesting tidbit is that nine opponents on this year’s schedule open the year in the top-25.  That’s exactly a third of the games Tech is slated to play.  Naturally, that number could change as the season progresses as teams will move into and out of the rankings.  But regardless of how many ranked teams the Red Raiders wind up facing, they have to do better than last season when Tech faced eight ranked teams going just 2-6 in those contests.

As is the case every year, a handful of swing games will likely decide how this season plays out.  So let’s break down five contests that appear at this time as if they could go either way.  And we will begin with one of the earliest games on the schedule.