Texas Tech football: Matt Wells clinches 5th losing season in 6 years

Thanks to Saturday’s loss to Oklahoma State in Stillwater, Texas Tech football head coach Matt Wells clinched his fifth losing season in the last six years.

In the world of sports, nearly everyone is judged by what he has done lately. Everyone, it seems, but Texas Tech head coach Matt Wells.

If Wells were to be judged by his recent results, then there would be no logical way that he would be a head coach at a Power 5 program making over three million dollars per season. That’s because his team’s 50-44 loss on Saturday to Oklahoma State guaranteed his fifth losing season in his last six years as a head coach.

Since going 10-4 in 2014 at Utah State, Wells has had just one winning season when he put up a 10-2 mark in 2018, a success that he parlayed into his current job with the Red Raiders. And when we look more closely at that lone successful campaign since 2015, we see that it came about as the result of something that Wells has not had at Texas Tech, a first-round NFL quarterback.

That year, Utah State QB Jordan Love accounted for 3,567 passing yards with 32 TDs and only 6 interceptions. But without a player of that ilk running the show since, Wells has managed to win no more than four games in a season.

Now, some will make excuses for Wells’ losing seasons at Utah State. They point out that in two of those years, he went 6-6 in the regular season only to lose in a bowl game.

What’s more, his defenders will also note that every year at Utah State, Wells’ program faced at least one Power 5 program as well as BYU. But neither of those excuses hold much water.

More from Wreck'Em Red

His two bowl losses came not to elite college football powers but rather to Akron and New Mexico State. Certainly, an elite coach would be expected to beat such football lightweights.

As for the fact that his program annually scheduled up in weight class thus handing him a pair of losses most years, keep in mind that those games alone didn’t cause him to have losing seasons. Rather, his failings in those seasons stemmed more from conference losses.

In yet another disturbing trend, Wells has had only one winning conference record since 2016. Over the course of that span, he’s gone 21-28 against teams in his league. That includes losses to the likes of New Mexico, Air Force, and Wyoming while at Utah State and of course, Kansas last season in his Texas Tech football debut.

There’s no way to paint a rosy picture, for Wells. His career is in the midst of a tailspin and were he not the hand-picked head coach of an athletic director so desperate to have one of his football coaching hires pan out that he’s willing to extend Wells enough rope to rappel down the Grand Canyon, he would likely be looking for new employment this offseason.

Even the most optimistic Red Raider fans have to find it nearly impossible to have faith in the direction of this program. Tech has now guaranteed its fifth-straight losing season and its 11th-straight year with a losing conference record.

The problem is that the man tasked with reversing those trends has shown no aptitude for winning since the days when Obama was still in office save for one year when he had a generational QB to lean on.

From 1979-85, Tech suffered seven-straight sub-.500 seasons. That’s one of two such streaks of futility in program history.

Now, Wells (with help from the Kingsbury regime) has this program inching dangerously close to equaling that dubious record. And given how little success the man in charge has had in recent years, it seems all too likely that we might witness the type of history that none of us ever wanted to see.

Related Story. The worst Texas Tech coaches of the Big 12 era. light

Home/Texas Tech Football