Texas Tech football: Hidden moments from Red Raiders’ win over Mountaineers

Henry Colombi finds Loic Fouonji for a huge play

After an awful third quarter that saw Tech lose all of its 17-point halftime lead, the momentum in this game was up for grabs as the fourth quarter began.  Fortunately, that’s when QB Henry Colombi made one of his biggest plays of the day.

Facing a 3rd-and-3 from his own 33, Colombi dropped a dime to a streaking Loic Fouonji who hauled it in and raced down to the Mountaineer 21 before being tackled.  It was a daring throw in the most critical of moments and Colombi came up huge.

At this point in the game, Tech was in desperate need of points to stem the swelling WVU tide.  In fact, Tech hadn’t even picked up a single first down in the second half of the game.

And what guts it took for Colombi to make the deep throw against man coverage rather than trying to find a safer, easier pass to hit.  It’s a play that we would all likely have been cussing about had Colombi’s pass been off the mark but true to his confident nature, he went for a kill shot and came up huge.

Colombi has a reputation for being fearless and this was a fearless throw.  But more importantly than showing he’s got plenty of moxie, he’s proving that he can hit the deep ball with consistency.

Not blessed with the strongest arm in the world, Colombi has struggled at times in his career when trying to push the ball deep.  That’s why opposing defenses were able to crowd the line of scrimmage and clutter up the middle of the field on him last season.

But this year, he’s pushing the ball further downfield.  In fact, he’s averaging 10.6 yards per pass attempt this year, over four yards more than he averaged a season ago.

Six plays after this deep strike, Tech would regain the lead on a 29-yard Jonathan Garibay field goal and that would help to get the Red Raiders back on their feet after a rough third quarter.  And it was all because Colombi was able to step up and hit a big play to kick off the final quarter of play.