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

Henry Colombi will keep Tech in the game but he likely won’t win it himself

Last week, on the Texas Tech radio broadcast of the Texas game, head coach Matt Wells said after the game that his team can win Big 12 games with Henry Colombi at QB.  And technically, that’s true.

Last year, in his first career start as a Red Raider, Colombi helped Tech to a 34-27 win over the Mountaineers in Lubbock.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that he wouldn’t lead Tech to another Big 12 win on his own as he would eventually be replaced by Alan Bowman to end the year.

But in all but one of the games that he has started has Colombi been so good enough to give Tech a shot.  The one exception was last year’s Oklahoma game, a contest that saw Tech dominated in every aspect of the game.  That’s why I say that today, he will give Tech a shot and coming out on top.  And that’s all you can ask from your backup QB.

Colombi is a gamer.  He’s more than confident in his abilities and he’s willing to push the envelop to make plays as we saw last week when he had three long touchdown passes against the Horns.

He’s also mobile and his feet give this offense an extra dimension.  However, we may not see too many designed runs today for fear of him being hurt and Tech having to turn to redshirt freshman Donovan Smith.

What we’ve seen of Colombi so far is that he’s good enough to keep Tech in games.  But is he good enough to put his team over the top?  He hasn’t shown that to be the case just yet.

So expect Colombi to give his team an opportunity to be in the fight all afternoon.  However, it could be the defense, running game, or special teams that will have to make the game-breaking play if Tech wants to come out of Appalachia with a win.