For years, Texas Tech football and offense have gone together like peanut butter and jelly or traffic and weather. But in 2020, it was the Red Raider’s marquee side of the football that did the most to hold the team back.
In fact, last season was the first since 2000 in which Tech did not average at least 30 points per game. What’s more, in four of last fall’s ten games, the Red Raiders failed to top 21 points.
The reasons for the offensive decline were varied. Enough blame fell at the feet of offensive coordinator David Yost to cost him his job and certainly, his unimaginative and predictable scheme did not lead to the type of results at Tech that he had experienced at other stops in his long coaching career.
But Yost wasn’t helped by the play of his quarterbacks. It has to be considered less than ideal whenever a team has to start multiple QBs in a season, especially one that is as short as the 2020 season was.
There’s just no way to sugarcoat it. Tech didn’t receive Big 12 caliber play at the game’s most important position in 2020. Alan Bowman was supposed to flourish in his second season under Yost but instead, the residual trauma of all of his injuries seemed to make him tentative and he devolved into a one-read QB whose main goal was to simply get rid of the football as soon as possible rather than going through his progressions. As a result, he averaged a career-low 6.5 adjusted yards per pass attempt last fall.
Backup Henry Colombi, who started four games after Bowman was benched, showed why he is not a true answer at the Power 5 level. His competitiveness and elusiveness were refreshing but the Utah State transfer’s lack of arm strength handcuffed what the offense was able to do while he was pulling the trigger and he eventually lost the starting job back to Bowman.
Another factor that some may point to as a reason for Tech’s offensive struggles a season ago is the COVID-19 pandemic. That outbreak caused the cancellation of most of the team’s spring practices as well as all of the summer work where players usually hone their timing. What’s more, the team suffered a widespread coronavirus outbreak just prior to the start of the season thus interrupting fall camp and hurting the team’s cohesiveness, which is most important on the offensive side of the football.
But for whatever the reasons may be for last year’s downturn, in 2021, this program has to figure out how to get back to lighting up the scoreboard on a weekly basis. So let’s spend some time examining what the Red Raiders have on that side of the football by ranking the position groups as they stand heading into the season.
No. 5: Tight end
It might be for the best that the Texas Tech tight ends are going to be featured quite a bit less in new OC Sonny Cumbie’s offense. That’s because that group simply doesn’t have a proven star or all-conference caliber player at this point.
In fact, the collection of Red Raider tight ends have just 382 career yards and one TD among them. All but 42 of those yards and that lone TD belong to returning senior Travis Koontz, who has been a bit of a disappointment since being the No. 2 JUCO TE in the nation when he signed with Tech in the class of 2019. The rest of the yards were accumulated last year by true freshman John Holcomb.
Outside of that, Tech does not have another TE with a single reception to his name at the FBS level of the sport. Thus, it might be wise for Cumbie to rely less on the TE than his predecessor, David Yost, did and give more snaps to an inside receiver like Dalton Rigdon or McLane Mannix.
Yost had a TE on the field for virtually every snap of the past two seasons. But that tactic proved to be beneficial only in the running game as it helped give the offense an extra blocker. It didn’t however create mismatches in the passing game as Yost led us to believe it would.
Cumbie will utilize tight ends, especially in the red zone. In fact, under his guidance, TCU tight end Pro Wells earned 2019 second-team All-Big 12 recognition and during his time as a Horned Frog, he caught 32 career passes for 402 yards and 8 TDs before getting a shot in the NFL this year with the Cincinnati Bengals.
There doesn’t appear to be a player of that caliber in Tech’s TE stable at this point though Koontz has drawn praise from Matt Wells for his offseason work and youngsters like Holcomb, and true freshmen Jed Castles and Mason Tharpe could develop into productive components of the offense in time. Still, as it stands in the summer of 2021, the tight end position is the weakest on the Red Raider roster.