Texas Tech football: Reasons to fire Matt Wells now are plentiful
Win back the fan base
In sports, it is always wise for an organization to take the temperature of the fan base. After all, it is the fans that pump the all-important dollar into the veins.
Right now, Texas Tech football is as unpopular in West Texas as boll weevils and that is going to lead to sparse crowds at the remaining home games as well as a complete lack of interest for the duration of the schedule. And when there’s cancer inside of a body, sometimes the best thing to do is to surgically remove it.
That’s what Hocutt should do. Remove Matt Wells from Texas Tech. It would do wonders for this university and for the morale of the fan base.
In fairness, Wells seems like a decent human being. And he’s put forth the best effort he’s been capable of. We haven’t been able to say that about the last two head coaches. Tuberville wanted out almost as soon as he got a taste of how hard this job is and Kingsbury admitted that he didn’t put forth full effort in areas, specifically on the recruiting trail.
But regardless of Wells’ character and earnestness, the results haven’t been there and because of that, this fan base has never embraced the current head coach. In fact, since the moment his hiring was met with a “Who is that?” tilt of the head, Wells has been fighting an uphill battle when it comes to the Red Raider populace. And the only way he was going to change the perception was to win and win big.
Well, here we are almost three calendar years later and he not only hasn’t won big, but he’s also hardly won at all and that’s not how to win back a fan base that was already against him, to begin with.
What’s more, the fan base is quickly turning against his boss, Hocutt. But Hocutt’s path to popularity is much shorter and simpler than Wells’. All he needs to do is oust Wells now and show that he’s just as displeased with the state of the “progrum” as the fans are.
Of course, it seems highly unlikely that he will do so but were he to, it would completely change the way the fans see Hocutt and it would lift spirits around Raiderland to know that a new hope was on the horizon.
Hocutt has fired a coach in mid-season not all that long ago. On January 1, 2018 he axed Lady Raider basketball head coach Candi Whitaker just 13 games into (or essentially halfway through) the schedule.
This year, there’s reason to do the same with Matt Wells, and were he to pull the trigger, it would be the most popular move of his career. However, if Hocutt were concerned with what the fan base thought, he’d have never hired Wells in the first place.