Texas Tech football: 3 predictions as Tech readies to face West Virginia

For the Texas Tech football program, today’s game against West Virginia likely feels as if it were a year in arriving.  That’s because, for a week, the Red Raiders have had to sit and stew over their listless performance in Austin.  So, finally, this team has an opportunity to rinse last Saturday from its mouth and start anew.  But getting back on the positive momentum train won’t be easy.

The West Virginia Mountaineers are a good, but not great, team.  After all, they are just 2-2 on the year.  However, their two losses have come against a Maryland team that is undefeated on the season to this point and Oklahoma.  And both of those games took place away from Morgantown.

The WVU offense is not all that daunting.  In fact, outside of hanging 66 points on lowly Long Island University in week two, WVU has failed to crack the 30-point mark in a game this year.  What’s more, they rank just 7th in the Big 12 in yards per game at 364.7.

But it is the defense that head coach Neal Brown’s team lives and dies by.  Giving up just 16.8 points per game thus far, WVU is third in the conference in scoring defense and allowing only 308.2 yards per game, they rank fourth in total defense.

What that adds up to is the fact that this game isn’t likely to be a blowout.  Unless Tech is simply a no-show for the second week in a row, WVU doesn’t play a style of football that lends itself to massive margins of victory or defeat.

Rather, they play a deliberately slow style that limits the number of possessions in a game.  In fact, in last week’s 16-13 loss to Oklahoma, there were only six total possessions in the second half, three for each team.

WVU wants to play an old-school brand of football.  They are going to ask their defense and their running game to do the lion’s share of the work and hope that they can out-physical Texas Tech.  And after what the Red Raiders showed last Saturday, that sounds like a solid plan.

But this is a new week and in college football, we never really know what is going to transpire on any particular Saturday.  But we can speculate all we want.  So here are three predictions for today’s game.