Texas Tech baseball: Locking up Tadlock is the win Hocutt needed

As if he weren’t already enough of a legend in Lubbock, Texas Tech baseball head coach Tim Tadlock became an ever greater Red Raider icon this week when he spurned overtures from Texas A&M and signed a lifetime contract to remain at the helm of the program he’s built into a national power. That means that in his time in charge of the Texas Tech program, Tadlock has now turned down offers from both A&M and Texas thus endearing him to every Red Raider.

But while Tadlock has certainly come out a winner after the Aggies came sniffing around, the greatest winner in all of this is AD Kirby Hocutt. That’s because he was able to keep in scarlet and black the most beloved coach on campus, an accomplishment that was essential after he was unable to prevent Chris Beard from jumping ship to Texas last month.

What’s interesting is that Hocutt used the same strategy to retain Tadlock that he attempted to use to persuade Beard to remain in Lubbock; the offer of a lifetime contract. If at first, you don’t succeed…

Terms of the deal are not yet public but it is being reported by multiple outlets that the deal is a rolling seven-year contract. But what matters more than the details is that Tadlock’s future is with the Red Raiders.

That’s a huge coup for Hocutt who desperately needed a win when it came to his coaching roster. After all, it’s been a rather dubious few years for the coaches that he has personally brought to Lubbock.

Starting with the firing of women’s basketball head coach Candi Whitaker on the first day of 2018, Hocutt has seen almost nothing but turmoil and disappointment from his head coaches. In November of 2018, he had to fire Kliff Kingsbury who he had given a lucrative and ill-advised six-year deal to following Kingsbury’s first year as a head coach (2013).

Then, Hocutt hired an unpopular and uninspiring replacement for the beloved Kingsbury, Matt Wells. Making matters worse, Wells has yet to win more than four games in a season while at Tech and was almost fired this offseason after just two years on the job.

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In August of 2020, Hocutt’s hand-picked replacement for Whitaker, Marlene Stollings, was fired after allegations of player abuse came to light in the national media. What’s more, just over a month later, softball head coach Adrian Gregory resigned from her post after similar allegations came to light within her program.

Then, this April, he lost his most successful and popular coach, Chris Beard, to the Longhorns. It was the second time Beard has been unsuccessful in keeping his men’s basketball coach from leaving for another job after Tubby Smith left Lubbock for the Memphis job following the 2016 season.

When one pulls back and looks at Hocutt’s track record of head coaching hires in Lubbock, there are only three that would have to be considered successes, Beard, Smith, and Tadlock. What’s more, he was unable to keep two of those hires happy enough to remain part of his athletic department.

Thus, Hocutt couldn’t afford to lose Tadlock, especially not to the Aggies. It would have left his athletic department bereft of any star power among the head coaching ranks and it would have further eroded the confidence that this fan base and the board of regents has in Hocutt’s abilities to keep the Texas Tech athletic department on an upward trajectory.

But by keeping Tadlock at home, where he has built Texas Tech baseball into an annual contender to reach the College World Series, Hocutt has managed to preserve the relevance of at least one of his three most popular and important programs. And in doing so, he also bought himself some much-needed goodwill from a fan base that could not have stomached the idea of losing another beloved head coach to a hated in-state rival.

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Texas Tech baseball: Locking up Tim Tadlock is the win Kirby Hocutt desperately needed

By Matthew Conner | May 26, 2021

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