Texas Tech football: 4 games Red Raiders must win in 2021

vs. Stephen F. Austin

Texas Tech has never lost to an FCS opponent.  But we learned last year that the Red Raiders are not invincible when playing a team from the lower level of the sport.  This, we can’t take this year’s game against FCS foe Stephen F. Austin for granted.

After all, SFA is a more established program than Houston Baptist, which nearly upset the Red Raiders in Lubbock in last year’s opener.  While the Huskies of HBU have been playing football for fewer than 10 years, the Lumberjacks of SFA were competitive in the Southland Conference for quite some time before joining the Western Athletic Conference for the upcoming season. (The WAC is playing football at the FCS level this year after historically playing at the FBS level until 2012 when the conference dropped football altogether.)

Of course, last year, HBU nearly stunned Tech.  Thanks to an indefensible decision by Matt Wells to pass up a chip-shot field goal that would have pushed the Red Raider’s lead to 11 points late in the fourth quarter, the Huskies had a chance to tie the game with just minutes to play but their two-point conversion was unsuccessful allowing the Red Raiders to escape with the win.

Tech can’t have a similar performance against an FCS opponent again this year.  If that happens, a real upset could be in store and it would start the countdown clock ticking on Matt Wells’ firing.

It would also put an end to any optimism that this already cynical and jaded fanbase may have about the 2021 Red Raiders and their head coach.  So this is a game in which Tech has to take care of business.  After all, guaranteed wins are tough for this program to come by these days and that’s why Tech can’t let the closest thing they will have to a guarantee slip through their hands this fall.